‘Ritual’ has been studied in so many fields that it can mean different things to different people, as Julian House stated in the foreword to this book. Kádár’s definition and proposed approach to studying ritual, while anchored in pragmatics, shows promise as an approach that can reap far-reaching insights into interactional norms and thus would intrigue scholars working at the intersections of anthropology, sociology, and linguistics.
Kádár advocates examining interactions through a ritual lens instead of the politeness perspective. He argues that the politeness perspective might not be as effective as the ritual perspective in analyzing speech events and interactions that supersede the individual or the interpersonal. He begins by discussing how Goffman’s conceptualization of the ‘interaction ritual’ is particularly relevant for describing different types of ritual from the pragmatician’s point of view (chapter 2).
Kádár proceeded to provide careful analysis of data from a wide range of contexts to show how the ritual perspective can be applied. His data ranges from modern-day comments on social media in response to two Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters’ conflict during and after a match (chapter 3), to ancient Chinese scholars’ letters (chapter 6). He also shows how seemingly monologic official Chinese public announcements, or gong gao, convey social protocols through an underlying ritual moral order governing this sort of discourse (chapter 4). He examines mimesis in Chinese university military trainings, in which student ‘officers’ evoke Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs) ‘borrowed’ from army language to re-enact military training (chapter 5). In chapter 7, he developed the concept of liminality as an interactional setting out of the ordinary in his study of how readers seemed to expect an underlying moral order in dismissals. When dismissals were perceived as inappropriately executed (such as through emails), readers’ evaluations showed that there seemed to be a ‘breach’ in how such interactional events ought to be revealing deeper moral norms or values than merely politeness.
The book is organised in three parts, first by laying the foundation for understanding the ritual perspective, then developing the interactional features of ritual as mimesis, self-display, and liminality, and finally explaining how ritual relates with expressions, speech acts, and rituals that are rich in embedded cultural and pragmatic conventions (e.g. Chinese market bargaining). The range of material analysed was impressively wide though one wonders if a systematic breakdown of rituals associated with a certain institutional discourse, such as healthcare practitioner-patient encounters, may make a clearer argument for how the ritual approach could reap illuminating insights into normative practices deeply embedded in social structures.
Kádár makes a strong argument for how ritual is prevalent in almost all language use and how adopting the ritual approach will produce deeper insights into how certain normative structures and social norms are reinforced and replicated than what a politeness view could offer. Hence, this is a worthy read for all who are interested in how language ‘works’ when we use it to present ourselves or position others, or to interact, establish, and maintain relationships.
