MARIAL | Faculty, Fellows and Staff

BRADD SHORE
Professor, Department of Anthropology
Emory University

Project title: "Ritual and Cycles of Life in Middle-Class Working Family Life"

Rituals, both personal and social, have a key role in shaping lives by the day, the week, the month, the year and the lifetime. This research will involve ethnographic studies of selected families in urban, suburban and small-town settings focusing on the orchestration of different kinds of rituals that shape the various cycles in the lives of family members. Three distinctive sites of ritual will be studied: the home, the workplace, and community institutions (clubs, sport's teams, schools, entertainment sites etc.). The issues that will shape this research include:

A. Time coordination, family schedules, and the influence of activity schedules in enabling or discouraging collective activities among family members.

B. The distribution of family members' rituals among a. personal, b. familial, c. community-based (friends, neighbors, school, church, voluntary associations) and d. workplace rituals.

C. The complex relations between the isolating and integrating functions of ritual in modern family life.

Ritual can provide personal meaning and structure for an individual at the same time as it isolates that individual from the rest of the family, or from colleagues or from wider ties within the community. Family rituals can provide for a distinctive family culture while at the same time separating families from one another and from larger community associations. We will study the role of ritual in enabling people to confront and deal with important life-transitions and life-crises (like birth, death, aging, career changes, illness, and divorce).

This research will study how (and whether) middle class working family members are coordinating their activities and experiences to produce and reproduce "family cultures" through ritual. The research is especially interested in how the effects of modern working life and the proliferation of new technologies of communication have affected family members' ritual lives. The initial research in Newton County, Georgia, will focus on 15 families, 10 of which have two working parents and 5 of which have one parent who stays home. The comparative dimension of the research is important in assessing the specific effects of both parents working on family ritual life.

The research will begin by collecting detailed family schedules over a period of a month to see how family-members' time is scheduled and its effect on family life. Then, through taped interviews, family discussions and participant observation in family rituals, I will study:

1. What members of families understand to be important rituals in their lives structuring the day, week, month, year and life-course.

2. How patterns of activity-scheduling affect the distribution and quality of ritual.

3. How family members' rituals are socially distributed among personal, family, friends, work/school and civic life.

4. The relative importance of community, church, and home in structuring family members' ritual life.

5. The place of ritual events in shaping people's life-history narratives and their sense of self.

6. The role of ritual in dealing with major life-stressors.

7. How do couples with markedly different religious/cultural backgrounds negotiate compromises for family cultures?

"Salem Camp Meeting: A Theater of Family Memory"
(Working Paper 011-02) April 2002
Bradd Shore and Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor

"The Power of Ritual" Bradd Shore (September 25, 2001)

"The Millenial Imagination" Bradd Shore (January 3, 2000)