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RITUALS AND POPULAR CULTURE 14-1, 1992
Peter NARVÁEZ, Peter NARVÁEZ Kirsti SALMI-NIKLANDER Francine SAILLANT Simonne DUBOIS Marie-France SAINT-LAURENT John ASHTON Gérard BOUCHARD Michael TAFT
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Introduction Peter NARVÁEZ Anne-Marie DESDOUITS Rituals are the repetitive symbolic behaviours with which we punctuate our individual and social lives. They expressively affirm and reify our concerns, values and ideals. Because our attitudes toward them (respect, reverence, awe) signify a high degree of social importance, some of these stylized practices, such as baptism and singing a national anthem, may be considered "sacred". Many others, such as "rituals of deference,"1 appear conventionalized for practical, "profane" reasons. From dawn to dusk (rituals of everyday life), spring to winter (calendar rituals), infancy to old age (rites of passage, occupational rituals), a host of private practices and public activities exhibit rituals and ritualistic behaviours. Initiations, verbal contests, bargaining, card playing, birthday parties, weddings, Memorial Day, all involve symbolic cultural performances that validate our personal and group identities and generate rhythms that are regulated and lived, consciously or not, with a profound respect for that dynamic process of creative reenactment we call "tradition." But such reenactment is not simply rooted in the past, today it takes place in the midst of a culture of advanced consumer capitalism, a culture characterized by commodity fetishism, an erosion of cultural hierarchy, and the seeming predominance of culture industries that attempt to standardize cultural production and mold the aesthetics of publics into "massified" uniformity.2 The forces of "massification, however, are often offset, countered or resisted through traditional expressive behaviours (folklore) and regional popular culture, "culture actually made by people for themselves."3 People continue to practice distinctive traditional forms of regional culture in informal family, friendship, occupational, neighbourhood, and community contexts, but increasingly these traditional activities merge with or are complemented by a selective appropriation of mass produced items which members of these groups use in resourceful and innovative ways for a multitude of purposes. This latter phenomenon, the selective artistic manipulation, alteration, and transformation of standardized mass culture in informal group settings, is a primary locus of popular culture— folklore imbrication. The postmodern, eclectic, syncretistic union of established tradition-based regional cultural forms with new cultural elements is exemplified by many popular rituals.4 Recent studies of "Tooth Fairy" rites by Rosemary Wells and Tad Tuleja illustrate such conflation. Wells examines traditional links and historical analogs to Tooth Fairy activities, observing that many cultures have "felt strongly enough about the loss of a tooth to do something."5 While the impulse for such rites of passage might have ancient roots, she further perceives that contemporary imagery of the Tooth Fairy is inextricably enmeshed with mass cultural depictions. Bolstering this view with archival evidence, Tuleja maintains that in the United States films and television have "nationalized" the Tooth Fairy, for "beginning in the l950s, informants confuse and in some cases consciously identify, the Tooth Fairy with the "blue fairy, " "the fairy godmother, " a small Tinkerbell, a "Peter Pan" with wings, and the good witch from the "Wizard of Oz’."6 Similarly, in a recent treatment of Halloween, Lesley Pratt Bannatyne argues that like its ancient traditional antecedents (the Celtic festival Samhain, the Roman harvest celebration of Pomona) Halloween today continues to be primarily a fantastic celebratory rite of inversion, "the one night of the year when all is overturned, when the natural order reverses itself. " This occurs "despite its commercial trappings" of purchased, mass produced costumes and candies.7 In regard to costumes, Jack Santino has noted that "figures from mass culture are frequently drawn upon: E.T., Ms. Piggy, Superman."8 In keeping with the socialization demands of advanced consumer capitalism, Gregory P. Stone has advanced a somewhat controversial interpretation of children’s Halloween "trick or treating" as a ritualistic rehearsal for consumership without a rationale in which parents play the role of dupes, encouraging their children to savor the gracious and benign acceptance of their beggary by an obliging adult world."9 Consumption also plays a part in community festivals—widespread, selfreferential rituals in which tradition and "heritage" are invented and validated through the availability of purchasable signs. Thus in a recent and influential study, folklorist John D. Dorst has examined such a community festival in Pennsylvania, "Chadds Ford Days," and discerned that while the fair’s artisans produce objects with maximum profits in mind, fairgoers compare and select goods that exhibit a hierarchical code; what they really consume, therefore, is social status and a "system of authenticity."10 In this issue of the journal a variety of articles exemplify the dynamics and diversity of popular rituals. The initial essay provides a theoretical point of reference through a comparative examination of folkloristic and cultural studies approaches to popular culture. Citing fundamental areas of convergence, Narváez supports "some cross-fertilization of theory and method." Especially relevant here is that both academic endeavors share a humanistic interest in contemporary culture, artistic communication and "active audiences." Based on extensive fieldwork in two communities, Kirsti Salmi-Niklander provides an insightful analysis of contemporary Finnish public festivals. Some of the rituals she describes at new local festivals derive from traditional sources while others "take their models from mass culture" and "express the adoption of mass culture at a local level." Which of these festivals will become "established new traditions" appears to be a matter of "natural selection." Francine Saillant, anthropologist and professor of anthropology of health at the School of Nursing of l’Université Laval has analyzed the transfer of women’s ethnological knowledge concerning the body, sickness and healing practices in Québécois families at the beginning of the 20th century. She highlights the important role played by women in the oral transmission of medical receipts, in their preparation as well as in their application. Saillant analyzes the relationship between women’s activities and their ethnomedical knowledge and goes on to flesh out the connections between the culinary and the therapeutic realms of activity. Even though women have often been regarded as the primary nurturers and guardians of the body, traditionally "professionals" have been available at critical occasions. Simonne Dubois, folklorist and researcher for the urban ethnology project — a joint enterprise created by the Université Laval and the City of Québec — tackles the issue of therapeutic rituals amongst healers from Québec and surrounding areas. She meticulously describes their practices and offers an explanation of their role in the healing process.11 Many social events contain rituals that highlight individual and collective identities, both of which are essential ingredients of social integration. Marie-France Saint-Laurent, a student writing her doctoral dissertation in folklore at l’Université Laval, has scrutinized the collective performance of harmony in popular music in order to demonstrate this thesis. In the article presented here, she focuses on socialization and intensity of experience in portraying a fanfare as a model for collective identity. A study of occupational folklife, John Ashton’s analysis of the verbal art of "pitchers", traveling salespersons who offer bargains at English markets, provides contextual ethnographic portrayals of persuasive interactive rituals. Employing traditional verbal formulas and work techniques that have been circulating in commercial cultural scenes since at least the nineteenth century, the pitcher skillfully convinces shoppers of the high quality and low prices of a variety of "mass-manufactured goods such as cutlery, pottery, glassware, and linens."12 For a number of years Gérard Bouchard from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, director of the Centre de recherches interuniversitaires, has been studying the movement of populations towards newly settled areas. Using a comparative approach, he has investigated various customs, including those related to rites of passage. Part of a larger research agenda aimed at fleshing out "continuity and change in population shifts from mother regions to regions of colonization," Bouchard’s article is a reconstruction of the development of the mortuary ritual from 1860 to 1930 in the Saguenay region. To complete the issue Michael Taft has provided a bibliography of recent studies on rites of passage in Canada. Not only is Taft’s bibliography a good introduction to rituals, it also bears testimony to the growing scholarly interest in this field.
1. See Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior, Chicago, Aldine, 1967, p. 47-95; Victor W. Turner, Le phénomène rituel, Paris, PUF, 1990; Terrain, no. 8, Paris, Ministère de la culture et de la communication, Direction du patrimoine, avril 1987. 2. On "uniform culture" see Chapter 4 of Hermann Bausinger’s Folk Culture in a World of Technology, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 88-115. Fora recent work which considers the uniformity thesis from a political perspective see Herbert I. Schiller, Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989. 3. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London, Fontana Flamingo, 1976, p. 237. 4. For a positive assessment of postmodern eclecticism see Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism, New York, Routledge, 1989. 5. Rosemary Wells, "The Making of an Icon: The Tood Fairy in North American Folklore and Popular Culture, " Peter Narváez (ed.), The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, New York, Garland, 1991, p. 426-453. 6. Tad Tuleja, "The Tooth Fairy: Perspectives on Money and Magic," Peter Narváez (ed), The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, New York, Garland, 1991, p. 406-425. 7. Lesley Pratt Bannatyne, Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History, New York, Facts On File, 1990, p. 158. 8. Jack Santino, "Halloween in America: Contemporary Customs and Performanœs," Western Folklore 42:1 (1983), p. 1-20. 9. Gregory P. Stone, "Halloween and the Mass Child, "American Quarter 11:3 (1959), p. 372-379. 10. John D. Dorst, "The Written Suburb: An American Site, " An Ethnographic Dilemma, Philadelphia, University Pennsylvania Press, 1989, p. 168. For an examination of a comparable Canadian community festival see Carole Farber, "High, Healthy, and Happy: Ontario Mythology on Parade," Frank E. Manning (ed.), The Celebration of Society: Perspectives on Contemporary Cultural Performance, Bowling Green, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983, p. 33-50. "The commercial fabrication of heritage" in Britain is treated by Roben Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline, London, Methuen, 1987. 11. Other contemporary patterns are discussed in James Kirkland, Holly F. Mathows, et al. (eds.), Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1992. 12. Fora related study of contemporary selling and shopping activities at British "ragmarkets," see Angela McRobbie, "Second Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket" in Angela McRobbie (ed.), Zoot Suitsand Second-Dresses: An Anttology of Fashion and Music, Boston, Unwin, 1988, p. 23-49.
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