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Research and PublicationsResearch Nodes
Rituals, both personal and social, have a key role in shaping lives by the day, the week,the month, the year and the lifetime. This research will involve ethnographic studies of selected families in urban, suburban and small town settings focusing on the orchestration of different kinds of rituals that shape the various cycles in the lives of family members. Three distinctive sites of ritual will be studied: the home, the workplace and community institutions (clubs, sports teams, schools, entertainment sites, etc.). The issues that will shape this research include:
Food consumption and marketing Few areas of life have as much ritual "lode" as food and eating. Food ritual ranges from planting and harvest rites, to religious communion to family meals, to the role of food in holidays, to personal eating routines like dieting, and personal pathologies of eating. The ritual uses of food require an understanding of the cultural and personal meanings of food, and of eating and of the symbolic associations of food in advertising. Ritual uses of food in our society are linked with technological and marketing innovations. The microwave oven has produced a whole new genre of 'microwaveable' ready-to-heat foods, which have allowed for highly individualized meals. Ready-to-eat foods and individual portions have had important consequences for family mealtimes. They have been a time- and labor-saving convenience for time-starved working women, but have also transformed family meals and eating patterns in ways that are crying out to be documented and analyzed.
Social and physical stress as mediated by ritual Ritual appears to have important functions in response to stress.
For example, it has been hypothesized that ritual promotes a kind
of nervous system "tuning" by effecting the rapid alternation of
stimulation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
On a more observable level, ritualized behavior is a common response
to crisis and disrupted routines. We propose to study the relationship
between ritual and stress in two ways. Since it is now possible
to measure with some accuracy physiological markers of social and
biological stress, it becomes possible to study the physiological
effects of social ritual. This requires developing measures to distinguish
between individuals and families in their elaboration of social
ritual, and correlating these patterns with physiological markers
of stress. At a more behavioral level, middle-class families experience
stress in their perception of increasing danger to their security
from various forms of violence and social pathology (including drugs,
suicide, school violence, 'kidnapping' and the like). Responses
to these perceived dangers include ritual and narrative, especially
ritual and narrative associated with organized religion.
Mass media and representations of the family The American family is not just a social reality, but a mythic one as well. Mass media--especially advertising, television sitcoms, and soap operas, films and plays--both reflects Americans' changing images of family life and contributes to how families are perceived. Films, television, and advertising are very powerful generators of modern myths in American life. The Emory/Sloan Center will study the complex relations between the actual experiences and structures of contemporary middle-class family life and significant representations of the family in the media. Mass media as a source of new and emerging forms of ritual and myth This broad definition of media includes television, radio, print media, pop music, computer games, cellular phones, and the internet.
Jerome Bruner has proposed that human beings use story-telling to continually make meaning in their lives and especially to make sense of "trouble." He has documented the power of family narrative as a privileged way in which families make meaning out of their lives and deal with the endless conflicts to which families are prone. Families have their own myths about themselves in the form of family stories that are generated within families through talk and then updated, transformed, and reproduced so that they become mini-narrative traditions constituting a basis for family culture. It is important to find out:
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