Research and Publications
PROPOSAL
Bradd Shore
Department of Anthropology
Emory University
I. INTRODUCTION
II. MIDDLE-CLASS WORKING
FAMILIES
We propose to establish at Emory University a Sloan Center on Working
Families that will focus its research and training on the study
of the functions and significance of ritual and myth in dual wager-earner
middle class families in the contemporary American South. The proposed
Emory/Sloan center will complement, both geographically and topically,
research on American middle class life being carried out by the
other Sloan Centers on Working
Families currently at Cornell University, the University of
California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University
of Michigan.
The proposed Center will have four basic purposes:
1. To promote scholarly studies of myth and ritual among working families in
the Southeastern United States.
2. To train the next generation of scholars to focus attention on American
middle class families.
3. To publicize our findings through traditional scholarly channels and more
broadly through the media.
4. To find ways to use the insights gained from our research to encourage and
foster positive social change.
OVERVIEW: MIDDLE-CLASS WORKING FAMILIES
Ritual in Middle Class Life
Ritual and myth have traditionally been central foci in classic
anthropological ac-ounts of so-called "traditional societies." The
association of myth and ritual with "tradi-tional" communities stems
from the view that they are important sources of social soli-darity
and cultural continuity (e.g.Barth 1975; Bateson 1936; Turner 1967;
Ortner 1978; Levi-Strauss 1963, 1966, 1979;Warner 1958;Weiner 1978).
There are a number of well-known studies of ritual in the American
middle class (Grimes 1976;Warner & Lunt 1941;Warner 1953
/1962;Warner, Low, Lunt & Srole 1963;Goffman 1967). But
surprisingly little attention has been paid to the distinctive forms
and functions of myth and ritual in contemporary middle-class life.
This is in part because myth and ritual have been assumed to be the
exclusive intellectual property of anthropology and religious
studies, and that the proper focus of anthropology was small-scale
and non-Western societies, or else non-mainstream groups within the
United States. Myth and ritual somehow seemed too "exotic" to be of
interest to scholars of American middle-class life.
Yet, despite the apparent exoticism of myth and ritual as research areas, they
are in fact very important issues for understanding the complex
and changing lives of modern working families. Looking at ritual
and myth in the context of the American working family engages important
issues such as:
1. The shaping of individual cycles of life.
2. Conceptions of and responses to time-pressure.
3. The coordination of family schedules.
4. The presence or absence of common mealtimes.
5. The degree of social integration or isolation of families in
relation to the wider community.
6. The role of the workplace in providing ritual structure in
people's lives.
7. The management of stress and feelings of vulnerability brought
on by conflicting demands on time and attention and by a sense of
insecurity fueled by relentless media reports of violence,
drug-abuse, and various forms of child abuse.
8. The impact of media representations (especially on television
and in movies) of family life on people's understandings of their own
lives.
9. The creation and continual updating of "family cultures" through family
narrative and celebrations.
Ritual and myth mediate fundamental life-transitions. They help
scaffold how people and groups shape their lives, from the day to the
week, to the year to the very idea of what constitutes a lifetime
(Myerhoff 1984; Grimes 1995; Turner 1969; Ray 1988). Ritual and myth
have always been fundamental to the creation and maintenance of
meaningful social relations. In all societies they help coordinate
group activities and identity. Furthermore, a society's rituals and
myths provide a basic framework for the meaningful reproduction and
transformation of cultural and social forms.
Modern American families appear to be under stress from the
multiple and in-creasing demands upon the time and energies of their
members (Hochschild & Machung 1989; Hochschild 1997; Schor 1991;
Perlow 1997; Schembari 1999; but see Coontz 1992). In this context,
it becomes especially important to investigate the status of ritual
and myth in the contemporary middle class American family.
By 1988 nearly half of all American families with children had
both parents working (Coontz 1992, p.18). This transformation of
American family structure has had profound implications for many
areas of American life, not the least of which are the functioning
and roles of ritual and myth in the lives of middle class families.
At first glance these might appear to be issues far removed from the
immediate practical problems faced by middle-class working families.
In fact, however, the complex roles of ritual and narrative forms are
important issues in the lives of working families. Let us turn to
explore a number of specific ways in which the study of ritual and
myth is important in understanding the lives of working middle class
families.
RITUAL AND TIME MANAGEMENT
Studies indicate the extent to which working families are
increasingly experiencing "time famine" (Hochschild 1997; Schor 1991;
Coontz 1992, p. 18). Adults and children both find themselves
overscheduled and juggling too many obligations. For working mothers
especially, this time-squeeze involves managing both professional and
domestic obligations (Whitehead 1990, p. 2; Schembari 1999; Perlow
1997). In regard to the individual, one of the solutions sometimes
adopted to alleviate the time-squeeze is promoting "flextime" at
work. However, while flextime provides some relief to working
parents, it also represents a kind of "modularization" of time
tailored to promote the indi-vidualization of schedules. Flextime
does not always provide for the kind of "group time" that permits
socially coordinated activities within and especially beyond the
family (Shore 1996, Chaps. 5 and 6; Dacko 1999).
This "modularization" and individualization of scheduling seems to
have had a significant impact on family routines. Flextime has helped
working parents to juggle complex schedules and balance child-care
obligations with other responsibilities. Yet it has also made it more
difficult to coordinate "communal time." Whereas a generation ago
there were clearly delineated blocks of "sacred time" for families
("dinnertime," "Sundays"), today individual family-members' schedules
for work, school, sports prac-tice, music lessons and other
activities appear to have eroded common family time. This is in part
because workplace, school and other extra-family institutions treat
time as in-herently flexible and negotiable. Consequently standard
family time is no longer viewed as "off-limits" for scheduling of
non-familial activities.
These changing patterns of time management have been particularly
noticeable in relation to mealtime routines. With family members'
schedules being mutually uncoordi-nated, common mealtimes appear to
have become a scarce commodity in many house-holds. Whereas family
breakfast or lunch have long been relegated to weekends or holi-days
in many middle class households, claims about the increasing rarity
of common din-nertime have more recently emerged as a contested
social and political issue (Bowman 1999).
The apparent increase in the atomization of meal scheduling is
related both as cause and effect to the proliferation of
"convenience-food" options: fast-food restaurants, ready-made foods,
microwave ovens, and individualized "heat-and eat" portions. Food
companies have targeted "individualized portions" and "heat-and-eat"
meals as a growth area for company profits, giving them a strong
financial incentive to promote the modular approach to meals over the
traditional communal one (Sidney Mintz, personal communi-cation).
These changes in food marketing and consumption patterns have made
possible not only atomized meals, but have also reduced the ritual
significance of the family meal. Where every individual can have an
individualized choice of foods for dinner, as well as his or her own
dinnertime, ritual "commensality," universally an important mechanism
for group solidarity, is significantly reduced for the family
unit.
The erosion of family commensality has important pragmatic
implications for the creation and maintenance of "family culture."
Common mealtimes are probably the most significant chances for common
talk among family members, and especially between generations.
Through mealtime conversation individual lives and experiences can be
shared and to some extent the various interests and perspectives
among family members can be coordinated or at least exchanged and
mutually acknowledged. Memories, traditions, and group identities all
crystallize around family cultures of food, and few areas of life are
more charged with significance than mealtime traditions.
It is important to recognize that not all mealtime experiences are pleasant
or har-monious. Often, mealtimes are a site where interpersonal
differences and hostility are expressed as well. Yet even family
fights are an important way that relationships are maintained and
perspectives are shared. Family stories are created and repeated
around the table, and become part of the family "mythology" that
provides a basis of common and distinctive identification among
family members. Any reduction in quality and frequency of eating
rituals thus has very important implications for family life.
WORKPLACE, HOME AND COMMUNITY AS RITUAL SITES
Working Americans spend a significant part of their waking lives
at work. During a forty-hour workweek, individuals will normally
spend almost as much waking time in the company of co-workers as they
will spend with either their spouses of children. For adult working
Americans, the workplace is also a very significant social space.
Workplaces produce their own cycle of rituals that become an
important component of "office culture." Just as with the lives of
families, the lives of coworkers are shaped by ritual cycles that
order the day, the week, the month and the year.
Workplace ritual ranges from the small everyday routines like
lunch and gatherings at the water-cooler, to celebrations of
significant events in individuals' lives, to the annual Christmas
party or the Company picnic. As with so many everyday rituals, many
of these events are taken for granted by workers, but in fact
contribute in an important way to the shaping of people's lives.
An important area for investigation is the distribution of ritual events in
the lives of working adults among home, workplace and the wider
community (including religious, sports, civic and political organizations,
clubs and community events). In response to increasing demands on
their time from family and work (Schor 1991; Putnam 1995; Hochschild
1997), middle-class American workers may be increasingly dividing
their ritual time between home and the workplace and; depending
on their workplaces for a significant amount of the ritual structuring
of their lives. The workplace as a site of ritu-als, from everyday
routines to major celebrations will be an important area of research
for the Emory/Sloan Center.
RITUAL AND STRESS MANAGEMENT
Ritual has been suggested as a powerful regulator of nervous
system functioning (Lex 1982). It is likely that certain forms of
ritual work to remediate the effects of stres-sors on individuals
through what Lex terms "nervous system tuning." Members of working
families are particularly subject to various forms of stress stemming
from con-flicting demands of home, school and work. These conditions
tend to produce stress for individuals and lead to sometimes-serious
conflicts among family members.
With no parent home during the day, and with working parents
subject to being called away from home for business travel or other
obligations, working parents are espe-cially prone to feeling anxious
over the well-being of their children. The Columbine High School
shootings along with numerous other widely reported incidents of
school violence have conveyed to parents and children alike a sense
that no place is safe from the dangers of random violence. For many
middle-class families the suburbs or other "protected" residential
arrangements no longer guarantee them freedom from fear, particular
in regard to dependents at home such as elderly parents and
school-age children.
Parents' fears of violent assault, kidnapping, child molestation,
drug and alcohol abuse, and teen suicide have been fueled by the
incessant flow of disturbing news reports and graphic media images
that enter the home on a daily basis (Coontz 1992, p. 19). These
vivid images of danger, whose memorable images and riveting
eye-witness accounts along with periodic local incidents reinforcing
parents' worst fears, have generated an increased sense of
vulnerability and guilt for middle class working parents. Working
mothers, who may worry that their children may be left unprotected
for too many hours of the day, are especially vulnerable to this kind
of anxiety about the safety of her chil-dren.
For the middle class, these fears are often exaggerated in relation to the
actual in-cidence or probability of such threats to security in
people's lives. Cognitive psycholo-gists like Amos Tversky have
shown that both memory of shocking events and the per-ception of
vulnerability are not normally shaped by realistic appraisals of
actual events and realistic probabilities of danger (Tversky 1977).
Appraisals are likely to be shaped by distortions of memory and
judgment created by particularly salient (rather than typi-cal)
instances. In the face of a media- and event-driven intensification
of parental fear, it is likely that middle-class Americans, particularly
in the South, are turning to religious and secular ritual and narrative
(media representations, local gossip, family stories, Bible study)
as ways of coping with this heightened sense of vulnerability.
THE DOMESTICATION OF RITUAL
One of the reasons that ritual is so important is that it has both
social and personal functions in people' lives. Social ritual
scaffolds interactions, providing a predictable transpersonal
framework for collective activity and intersubjective experience. At
the opposite end of the spectrum, personal ritual in the form of
everyday personal routines can have important psychological benefits
for individuals, providing a basis in their everyday activities for a
familiar "shape" to their lives. Personal routine has an important
but often overlooked role in ritually-mediated cycles of life, cycles
that stretch over the day, the week, the month, the year and the
lifetime. The grounding function of personal routines is often
overlooked precisely because it is so embedded in everyday life and
remains a form of tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966). Only when they are
disrupted by crises or by travel do the normalizing functions of such
routine become evident.
This spectrum of ritual, spanning public, familial, and private
acts, and political, social and psychological functions, allows us to
examine the distribution of different forms and loci of ritual in
people's lives. The common notion that the conditions of mod-ern life
have produced a marked loss of ritual in peoples' lives may be less
accurate than the claim that there has been a significant
redistribution of the dominant forms and arenas of ritual.
In anthropology ritual is normally assumed to be an inherently
social phenome-non, practiced by and on behalf of groups rather than
individuals. For Durkheim, ritual was a key form of socialization,
mediating the individual consciousness and what he termed "collective
representations" (Durkheim 1915). These associations between ritual
and collective identity underlie the common assumption that the study
of ritual naturally "belongs" to anthropology and its "simple
societies" rather than to those social sciences that are associated
with the study of complex, industrialized societies.
Moreover, when ritual is studied in industrialized societies, it
is often associated with the structured dimensions of individual
interactions rather than with the explicitly sacred rites of groups
(Goffman 1970 1967). Or else ritual is invoked ironically to
sur-prise the reader with the revelation that "we" too have rituals
even where we do not think we do (Miner 1956; Shore 1990). Underlying
these ironic or individualistic senses of ritual in the context of
modern, urban societies is the problematic relation between such
"collective" cultural forms as ritual and myth and societies like the
United States which have strongly individualist ideologies (Gorer
1948; Dumont 1965; Gans 1966, 1988; Bellah et. al.1985; Varenne 1987;
Shain 1994).
Despite the persistent characterization of Americans as highly
individualistic in orientation, the relation between individualistic
and communitarian values for Americans is in fact very complex and
not captured by simplistic generalizations about American
individualism (Gans 1967, 1988; Shore 1996, Chap. 3; Varenne 1987).
This complexity is reflected in studies of American ritual life.
Community studies of the American middle class carried out in the
decades before World War II suggest that much of the significant
ritual in people's lives was civic ritual that occurred in the public
arena (Warner & Lunt 1941;Warner et al. 1963; Lynd & Lynd
1929, Lynd & Lynd 1937; Coontz 1992, p. 17). These highly public
social rituals included holiday celebrations like Fourth of July
celebrations, Memorial Day Parades and Halloween eve
"trick-or-treating" rituals, church-related ritual occasions such as
religious worship, Christmas celebrations, Easter pageants and church
dinners, and ritual occasions linked to the numerous voluntary
associations like clubs and sport's teams.
Observers of American community life since de Tocqueville have
reported that participating in voluntary associations has been a
central and distinctive preoccupation for Americans (de Tocqueville
1945; Warner 1941). Participation in voluntary associa-tions appears
to have waned over the past few decades for middle-class Americans
(Putnam 1995; Varenne 1977). And ritual appears to have become
increasingly privatized and domesticated, focusing more on family
celebrations and personal routines and less on civic or other public
rites.
Though a strong individualistic and anti-institutional streak has
been a part of American political and social ideology since the times
of the early Puritan settlements (Gorer 1948; Coontz 1992, p. 126),
civic duty and community participation were also as-sume to be
important American virtues (Coontz 1992, pp. 96 ff.). The association
of in-dividualism with privacy and the sanctity of the nuclear family
are comparatively recent developments in Amercan life (Gillis 1996a,
1996b; Coontz 1992, pp. 125-6; Laslett 1973, p. 973). Historical
records of divorce litigation suggest that well into the 19th Century
activities neighbors very much minded one another's affairs. In the
middle class home, family relations were not considered off-limits to
the eyes and ears and tolerated interventions of neighbors,
especially when moral issues were involved (Cott 1979; Ryan
1983).
The modern tendency to presume the sanctity of domestic privacy
has been strongly reinforced by the flight of the middle class to the
suburbs, where, despite the close proximity of neighbors, community
relations could be subordinated to the private interests of
individual families (Perin 1988). Paralleling the inward turn of
Americans into the imagined secure nest of nuclear family life was
the transformation of American ceremonial life. What appears to have
declined in American life is not ritual per se but specifically
public and civic ritual. Though these patterns remain to be
investigated in detail, it seems likely that new forms of ritual have
taken their place.
The domestication of American ritual is vividly illustrated by the
ironic fate of Mother's Day. The modern celebration of mothers as
domestic saints actually originated in 1858 when Anna Reeves Jarvis
proposed Mother's Work Days, a time set aside for public service work
to improve public sanitation in Appalachia. After Jarvis's death her
daughter began a letter-writing campaign to have a special day set
aside each year to celebrate motherhood. By the time Congress
officially created the current national holi-day in 1914, Mother's
Day had been transformed into a celebration of maternal domestic
roles and the devotion of mothers to their own children. A civic
commemoration had be-come an essentially private celebration of the
family (Coontz 1992, pp. 151-153).
If Mother's Day orchestrates children's celebration of their
mothers' nurturing roles, mothers have come to spend a good part of
the rest of the year earning the praise through their own ritual
work. Child-centered family rituals orchestrated largely by mothers
in the interest of creating a memorable and distinctive family
culture (Boll & Bossard 1950; Berg 1992; Driver 1993; Fiese,
Hooker & Kotary 1993; Fulghum 1995; Gander, Lang & Pett 1992;
Imber-Black & Roberts 1992; Nelson 1986; Roberto 1992). These
sorts of rituals involve the self-conscious and idiosyncratic
elaboration of tradi-tional forms of celebration.
Ritual celebrations of holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah,
Thanksgiving or Mother's Day are, among other things, rites
celebrating and promoting family solidarity. They tend to focus on
events and celebrations whose details distinguish one family cul-ture
from another, symbolizing the solidarity and identity of local
domestic units. Both scholarly and popular treatises on contemporary
American ritual tend to stress the idio-syncratic tailoring of even
traditional rites like weddings to personal style of family and
individuals (Fulghum 1995; Grimes 1995; Cox 1998).
What such holiday rituals do not appear to do is to promote the
linkage of indi-viduals or families to encompassing social or
political units. It is reasonable to speculate that families have
responded to the forces of fragmentation in their family lives by
fo-cusing key holiday rituals inward on what anthropologists call
"rites of reaggregation" for their families, rather than using ritual
to reintegrate the family into the wider polity and community.
The "privatization" of ritual within the family and the
corresponding decline in civic ritual are aspects of a larger
American trend over the past three decades for the mid-dle class to
retreat from larger political and social concerns into a concern with
domestic-ity and "family values." As family historian Stephanie
Coontz puts it:
"The triumph of private family values discourages us from meeting our emotional
needs through mutual aid associations, political and social action
groups, or other forms of public life that used to be as important
in people's identity as love or family." (Coontz 1992, p. 120).
REINVENTING RITUALS FOR NEW SITUATIONS
In some important ways, ritual and myth are intrinsically
conservative institutions. In many contexts myth and ritual are a
form of collective memory for families and communities (Connerton
1989), and are an important basis of a shared sense of stability,
continuity, and meaning in people's lives. But if they are to
continue to serve these functions, myth and ritual must also be a
dynamic site of invention and creativity, providing paradoxically for
both a degree of stability and a dimension of adaptive change to new
circumstances.
Roughly speaking, the dynamism of ritual and myth takes two
different forms: gradual, evolutionary change and deliberate
invention. Though people may experience ritual and myth as unchanging
social forms, both are always in the process of gradual
transformation even as they are enacted. This is why historians are
constantly reminding us that our sense the durability and continuity
of the traditional forms in our lives is often a kind of false
consciousness, at odds with the historical facts of social and
cultural change (Bowden 1992; Coontz 1992; Kammen 1992; Gillis 1996a
1996b).
In addition to these evolutionary changes in communal myth and ritual, there
is ample documentation of more self-conscious and deliberate changes
in myth and ritual. These include inventions of new forms, the modification
of old ones and the sudden abandonment of forms which are no longer
adaptive (Lawrence 1964; Myerhoff 1984; Berg 1992; Imber-Black and
Roberts 1992; Fulghum 1995; Cox 1998). So the study of ritual and
myth in contemporary middle class life is not only the study of
maintaining traditions, but is also a study of inventiveness and
adaptation, of evolving new rituals and stories to fit new circumstances.
This is particularly the case where there is no clear tra-ditional
"roadmap" for families, as in the case of non-traditional families
(like gay couples and their children) and families that are the
products of intermarriage between spouses coming from different
cultural and ethnic backgrounds (Barron 1972; Sung 1990; Weston
1991; King 1993; Bregner and Hill 1998).
ELECTRONICALLY MEDIATED MYTH AND RITUAL
The rapid proliferation into middle-class life of electronic media
like television, video games, cellular telephones and computers has
produced novel forms of ritual. Scholars of the media have pointed to
the intrinsic links between television's attraction to standardized
and repetitive forms and the structure of ritual (Becker 1995). The
media have been a powerful source of new rituals both for the family
and for the entire nation. The broadcasting and re-broadcasting of
unique events like the assassination of President Kennedy, the first
step on the moon, the Simpson Trial, or the death of Princess Diana
are transformed into historical artifacts by the constant replay of
media images which be-come frozen into memory icons.
Regularly repeated events such as the Superbowl, the Miss America
Pageant, election-eve returns or quiz shows like Jeopardy are
transformed by the media into ritual events that provide a common
framework of orientation for widely scattered viewers, and which help
give a regular shape to the week or the year for many viewers (Becker
1995). This is why the airing of a final broadcast of a long-running
beloved show like Johnny Carson's Tonight Show or Mash can provoke an
extraordinary amount of interest and emotion in viewers. The
Nickelodeon network has benefited from the powerful nostalgia created
by airing reruns of old shows that trigger for people significant
memories of their earlier years.
The electronic media have also created new forms of ritual
community. What has emerged in recent years as a significant social
phenomenon is a kind of "virtual" social ritual that challenges the
very distinction between private and social ritual. Electronically
mediated ritual blurs the boundary between being alone and being with
others.
Traditionally, social ritual implied face-to-face relationships,
while a ritual activity carried out alone (like solitary prayer) was
personal ritual. But electronic communication has created the
conditions for forms of virtual community, and these have spawned
ritual practices that "bring together" individuals who may be widely
separated geographically, and who may never have met "in the flesh"
or even have seen one another's face.
Electronically mediated rituals vary in terms of how they
articulate human relationships. At the relatively direct end of the
spectrum are regular movie or television viewing get-togethers where
participants the screen becomes the object and agent of joint
attention. Joint activity of this kind verges on parallel play rather
than face-to-face mutu-ality. Multiple-player control systems have
allowed many teenagers to use video-games to create a framework for
relating to one another through more interactive parallel play.
One degree more removed from physical co-presence are telephone or
chat-room communications, or video games played by multiple players
over the Internet. While these interactions may seem to strain the
concept of ritual, some of them satisfy most of the functional
conditions of rituals, being highly formalized and regular
interactions. My personal observations of teenagers playing jointly
controlled video games suggests that these are functioning as
orientational rituals, just as all simple games scaffold
relationships through an shared interaction framework. The joystick
replaces language producing an iconic and highly kinesthetic
conversational frame.
A more attenuated kind of electronically mediated ritual emerges
from people's experience of lone viewers watching common television
sit-coms, sporting events or films. These shows bring groups of
people together in places where people congregate and talk, like the
workplace, school, a barber shop etc. "Did you see . . . last night"
is a kind of ritual invocation for a collective recounting ritual,
and a co-construction of interpretation.
Shared recountings of last night's sit-com episodes or sporting
events are a sig-nificant kind of social ritual, reinforcing group
solidarity though a shared-in (though not directly shared) experience
based on topics of conversation that are merely "play" while still
being highly engaging and evocative. Sports, films and television
shows usually provide a "safe" (i.e., not politically or religiously
charged) basis of community building. It is interesting that many
recent TV sit-coms (e.g., Seinfeld, Friends, and Living Single )
mimic this ritual function in their very format, which consists of a
group of friends sitting around together in an shared living room
creating a quasi-family through shared interests, problems and
stories.
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