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Mark Auslander (Oxford College)

Designer Rituals: Simulating Home Across the Work-Family Frontier

Modern North American business and familial rituals that have been self-consciously invented by efficiency experts, marketers, social psychologists, and Human Relations specialists (who are at times conversant with Victor Turner’s work in symbolic anthropology) pose an intriguing theoretical challenge for theorists of ritual. The authority of ritual action usually depends on the persuasive assertion that the rite was not invented by proximate human agency, but was derived from an external source (such as the gods, the spirits, prophetic dream-visions, timeless tradition, or ancient texts). At the very least, for a ritual to “work” participants usually need to forget its arbitrary, human-made qualities and enter into a state of induced ritual consciousness, in which self-conscious volition is subordinated to the complex structure of the ritual script. Yet modern “designer rituals” are manifestly neither ancient nor the products of revelation. Workers often know the precise identities of the manager or consultant who developed the rite; at times, family members assert that holidays such as Mother’s Day were designed by marketers. Clearly, some such ceremonies are regarded by employees as coercive and intrusive, or by family members as "artificial" and "inauthentic." Yet in many cases these ritual practices do appear to bring about profound shifts in affective and experiential states, along the lines usually reported for events more classically considered "ritual." Why should this be the case? This paper considers these problems with attention to ritual forms that produce tangible images of "home" within the workplace and domestic realms, while dramatizing or evoking fraught, unstable relations between work and family.

Biographical Statement: Mark Auslander, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Oxford College of Emory University, is a core faculty member at the MARIAL Center.