Media Ritual And Identity

Media, Ritual and Identity examines the role of the media in society; its complex influence on democratic processes and its participation in the construction and affirmation of different social identities. It draws extensively upon cultural anthropology and combines a commanding overview of contemporary media debates with a series of fascinating case studies ranging from political ritual on television to broadcasting in the third world.

Recasting Ritual explores how ritualized action diversifies in response to varying cultural, political and physical contexts. The contributors look at how issues such as globalisation and technology affect ritual performance and how minorities often utilise performances to affirm their own identites while also speaking to outsiders. The contributors examine the relationship between ritual meaning and social identity through case-studies drawn from the Pacific, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, Latin America, Indonesia, and East and West Africa. Study of the theoretical underpinnings of social action affirms the independence of anthropology as a discipline from cultural, media and performance studies, according it a distinctive role in elucidating contemporary and emergent human conditions.

Media is a big part of our lives. We see and hear it everywhere. In this book Miller demonstrates how media has taken the place of ritual(s). Our everyday lives are constantly facilitated by media rituals. This media ritual process exists regardless of its content and is a phenomenon that overcomes our subjective experience with a constant flux of representations and seduction. Memory and mind are in a perpetual process of re-imaging, distortion, and violence. Human relationships can be comprised of sheer information sharing from any distance around the globe. The objective world around us is experienced and interpreted through the virtual worlds we are forced to participate in. The dialectic is barred and the flood of media images captures us in the univocal. Persons then understand that truth comes from their singular, isolated, and violated self. Therefore, the body in the real world feels foreign and we feel dissociated and anxious, reaching in a vain attempt for more media to fill and restore our bodily and spiritual needs. Our personhood and everything that we are lie under the influence of this media ritual process.

This book explores the importance of ritual and ritual theory to discourses of authenticity and originality, thereby deepening our insight into concepts of cultural heritage, identity and nation in a globalised world. The volume is the first interdisciplinary attempt to understand the significance of rituals and related performative traditions in the creation of grounded cultural identities, ‘home’ and heritage as geographically experienceable locations. It assembles perspectives from social and cultural anthropology, performance studies, education and arts that can deal with the politics of revitalisation and preservation of ritualised traditions. While some chapters in this book emphasise on the ritualisation of cultural heritage by concentrating on power relations and politics, as well as actual processes of identification, especially for marginalised ethnic groups or migrant communities, others explore how rituals as intangible heritage are strategically employed by different groups all over the world to make their claims public and to improve and negotiate their position on a local, national or global platform. This book recognises ritualised performances as transnational and cross-cultural phenomena, which are not only tied to and defined via national territories and identities but which also demand new theoretical and methodological approaches towards the discussion of rituals and heritage.

Located between Mexico City and Veracruz, Puebla has been a political hub since its founding as Puebla de los Ángeles in 1531. Frances L. Ramos’s dynamic and meticulously researched study exposes and explains the many (and often surprising) ways that politics and political culture were forged, tested, and demonstrated through public ceremonies in eighteenth-century Puebla, colonial Mexico’s “second city.” With Ramos as a guide, we are not only dazzled by the trappings of power—the silk canopies, brocaded robes, and exploding fireworks—but are also witnesses to the public spectacles through which municipal councilmen consolidated local and imperial rule. By sponsoring a wide variety of carefully choreographed rituals, the municipal council made locals into audience, participants, and judges of the city’s tumultuous political life. Public rituals encouraged residents to identify with the Roman Catholic Church, their respective corporations, the Spanish Empire, and their city, but also provided arenas where individuals and groups could vie for power. As Ramos portrays the royal oath ceremonies, funerary rites, feast-day celebrations, viceregal entrance ceremonies, and Holy Week processions, we have to wonder who paid for these elaborate rituals—and why. Ramos discovers and decodes the intense debates over expenditures for public rituals and finds them to be a central part of ongoing efforts of councilmen to negotiate political relationships. Even with the Spanish Crown’s increasing disapproval of costly public ritual and a worsening economy, Puebla’s councilmen consistently defied all attempts to diminish their importance. Ramos innovatively employs a wealth of source materials, including council minutes, judicial cases, official correspondence, and printed sermons, to illustrate how public rituals became pivotal in the shaping of Puebla’s complex political culture.

The media are an inescapable part of our everyday life. Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of ritual, Nick Couldry applies the work of theorists to a number of important media arenas.

Media Anthropology represents a convergence of issues and interests on anthropological approaches to the study of media. The purpose of this reader is to promote the identity of the field of study; identify its major concepts, methods, and bibliography; comment on the state of the art; and provide examples of current research. Based on original articles by leading scholars from several countries and academic disciplines, Media Anthropology provides essays introducing the issues, reviewing the field, forging new conceptual syntheses.

This volume, using intercultural weddings as its focus, examines what occurs when the signs & codes of different cultures come into contact & influence one another. For scholars & advanced level students of interpersonal, nonverbal, & intercultural comm.