Conclusion

Abstract

The present book has proposed a discursive and relational framework of ritual, by focusing on in-group ritual and its relationship with other types of rituality. I have elaborated a relational interpretation of ritual, which approaches interpersonal relating from a discursive perspective, and thus captures ritual by focusing on different interactional practices and expectations. This approach aims to depart from describing ritual from the analyst’s specific first-order outsider (etic) perspective as much as possible by proposing a broad second-order concept of rituality (cf. Chapter 1), and to evidence relational practices and expectations by analysing interactional data and interviews. Thus, the present analytic framework incorporates the interactants’ understandings of rituality in a specific way: whilst it disregards popular understandings and normative definitions of rituality per se when describing relational rituals (nevertheless, such definitions are made use of to describe normative values associated with rituality, cf. Chapter 4), it examines the interactants’ discursive behaviour and retrospective views on interaction. While supposedly no framework can capture all aspects of rituality, and the present one is no exception, this model has proved to be apt to describe the relationship-forming interactional effect of ritual behaviour.