Products and services
In late 2019 an outbreak of COVID-19 was detected in the city of Wuhan, China. Within weeks, the virus had spread across the country, becoming an epidemic. The disease spread rapidly across the globe and in March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. This is the first time […]
Read More
Before venturing into a fully-fledged linguistic analysis of ritual behaviour during this time of social distancing, one issue worth discussing is the typological concept of ‘rites of aggression’. The previous ‘Interactional Rituals’ blog entries might have given the reader the impression that interactional rituals are primarily about maintaining social harmony, and it is the violation […]
Read More
One reason why Covidiotism attracts so much attention and strong feeling is that social distancing and its violations are strongly related to what the renowned sociologist Erving Goffman has described as the phenomenon of ‘civil inattention’. In modern public spaces, particularly in urban settings, a key interactional ritual is to keep interaction to a minimum. […]
Read More
Before we venture into a detailed analysis of interactional rituals and distance keeping, an interesting phenomenon worth considering is ‘covidiotism’ and its relationship with interactional rituals. People react in different ways to social distancing, with some even creating their own interactional rituals to substitute those removed by social distancing. Many of these people have been […]
Read More
When we examine the relationship between interactional rituals and social distancing, we need to ask ourselves what type of ritual we are dealing with. Dániel Kádár (2013) distinguished 4 types of ritual in his book Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups, namely: Social rituals In-group rituals Personal rituals Clinical (covert) rituals Obviously, many […]
Read More
Why are interactional rituals such an integral part of our daily lives? This is a particularly interesting question and one which is worth investigating. Rituals have existed since the dawn of humanity and, according to many historians, human societies have undergone a major ‘deritualisation’ process. ‘Deritualisation’ refers to how, following the industrialisation of many societies, […]
Read More
On the afternoon of 23 May, the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, tweeted that ‘Dom Cummings followed the guidelines and looked after his family. End of story.’ Despite Dowden’s emphatic assertion, this wasn’t the end of things by any means. The ‘story’ – centring around Cummings’s flouting of the lockdown regulations with his cross-country trip to […]
Read More
Why do societies and groups of people develop rituals? The answer is to ‘encode’ rights and obligations in particular social relationships, and also to acquire interactional patterns through which our relationships are reinforced or altered. Take greeting as an example. In certain relationships we are supposed to ritually greet one another, and in some relationships […]
Read MoreKeep up with the latest from Cambridge University Press on our social media accounts.
