11 - Methodological Take-2B: Describing Ritual Contexts

Summary

Chapters 10 and 11 provide a solution for the study of interactionally complex ritual phenomena, by systematically breaking them down into replicable pragmatic units of analysis. The complexity of a ritual phenomenon can either mean that a phenomenon is too broad to be discussed as a single ritual, i.e., it represents a form of ritual behaviour which spans across many different ritual contexts, or it represents a particular context and related ritual frame which triggers ritual behaviour but cannot be subsumed under a single ritual heading from the pragmatician’s point of view. Chapter 11 focuses on the second type of difficulty: it proposes a discourse-analytic approach through which seemingly ad hoc and erratic interactional ritual behaviour in a single complex ritual frame can be studied in a replicable way. As a case study, the chapter will examine ritual bargaining in Chinese markets. While bargaining is a ritual in the popular sense of the word, it is problematic from the pragmatician’s point of view to refer to bargaining as a ritual, without considering whether and how it manifests itself in recurrent patterns of ritual language use.