6 - (Self-)Display

Summary

Chapter 6 investigates the ritual phenomenon of (self-)display. Any instance of ritual language use implies a sense of displaying: the participants of a ritual tend to display their awareness of the rights and obligations and related conventions holding for the context which necessitates the given ritual. In certain ritual scenarios, especially if a ritual is competitive, display transforms into self-display, i.e., through following – and often excessively over-doing – the pragmatic conventions of the ritual one may as much display one’s awareness of these conventions. Chapter 6 considers how different degrees of self-displaying behaviour can be distinguished from one another. As a case study, I investigate a corpus of historical Chinese letters written by an epistolary expert Gong Weizhai to various recipients, including both ‘ordinary’ recipients such as patrons, family members, lovers, and so on, and fellow epistolary expert friends representing ‘professional’ recipients. With this latter audience, Gong engaged in a playful self-displaying competition as to who can be ‘more’ intricately deferential and humorous to the other.