Introduction

Abstract

This book offers a discursive relational framework of rituals. It examines ritual as a relational action constructed in interaction through preexisting patterns (cf. Chapter 2), and it captures the features of ritual phenomena by analysing the interactants’ behaviour in culturally and socially diverse contexts, hence avoiding a priori predictions (cf. later in the present section; for a detailed introduction to discursive approaches see Haugh et al. 2013). Stereotypically, English and other Western languages are thought of as languages which have dispensed with rituals, and the present volume will be challenging this concept.