Media and Ritual

Death, Community and Everyday Life

Johanna Sumiala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136209987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This wide-ranging and accessible book offers a stimulating introduction to the field of media anthropology and the study of religious ritual. Johanna Sumiala explores the interweaving of rituals, communication and community. She uses the tools of anthropological enquiry to examine a variety of media events, including the death of Michael Jackson, a royal wedding and the transgressive actions which took place in Abu Ghraib, and to understand the inner significance of the media coverage of such events. The book deals with theories of ritual, media as ritual including reception, production and representation, and rituals of death in the media. It will be invaluable to students and scholars alike across media, religion and anthropology.

Part I
Anthropology of media

Chapter 1
Theory and clues

Finally, I hold that rituals reveal values at the deepest level. … Men express in ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression is conventionalized and obligatory, it is the values of the group which are revealed. I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies.

(Wilson 1954, 240)

Even among those who have specialized in this field there is still the widest possible disagreement as to how the word ritual should be used and how the performance of ritual should be understood.

(Leach 1968, 526)

On the edge of the everyday

I’m out at our summer place doing the dishes when the radio breaks the news of the death of Michael Jackson. I drop what I’m doing to listen in. It’s thought that the 50-year-old King of Pop has died of heart failure. I notice that, in some strange way, I’m touched by this news, even though I’ve never really been a fan of either Jackson or his music. During recent years I’d heard about the various lurid scandals surrounding Michael Jackson: Michael Jackson’s latest plastic surgeries, Michael Jackson dangling his child over the balcony railing, Michael Jackson arrested under suspicion of paedophilia, Michael Jackson in financial distress. I realized that my relationship to celebrity was rather ambivalent; yet here I was sitting, washing-up brush in hand, listening attentively to this death news. What exactly was it about this news that touched me and stopped me in my tracks?

I lived my youth in the 1980s when Jackson and his moonwalk and white sequined gloves were the elite of American popular culture. In those days, everything American and popular culture, in particular, was very much in vogue among my age peers. In this sense, my feelings about the King of Pop were intertwined with my own youth. I easily recalled Jackson’s best-known songs and his distinctive style of dance and dress. There was also a curious appeal about Jackson’s personality, a mixture of adored hero and freakish monster. In the media, Jackson appeared as a character who was above everyone else, in every possible way: extravagant and neurotic, hero and crook, father and abuser – the King of Popular Culture. Another reason why the news touched me was that Jackson’s death involved an element of personal tragedy. I had read in the papers that Jackson was preparing for a series of comeback concerts in London when death struck him down. The cause of death itself gave rise to many questions. Did he die of natural causes or was foul play, perhaps, involved?

As these questions ran through my head, I realized with startling clarity that my relationship to this personality was entirely mediatized by and dependent upon the media. That further added to my sense of confusion. Here I was grieving for a person who never before had had any real significance to me. On returning home I found myself browsing through the newspapers and surfing the net in search of stories and images of Jackson’s death and funeral.

And there were plenty. The media were full of stories about Jackson’s death for days on end. The same stories and same images were circulated from one media to another. There were reports about his earlier life, speculation about the star’s cause of death and about the fate of his children. The spectacle of death was created not just in the tabloid press, but in broadsheets, as well as in online media.

The media brought the reality of death rather too close for comfort. The last shot of Jackson, from the ambulance, was widely circulated in the media. The electronic media were full of music from the King of Pop. Considerable coverage was given to how Jackson’s death had attracted the attentions of the media itself. It was reported that the news was covered even in China. Soon, the media began to prepare for the star’s funeral. One of the hottest topics of speculation was the question of when and where the funeral would be held. The grief of mourners received extensive coverage, too. Fans of all ages were interviewed all over the world. Many seemed deeply upset about what had happened and wanted to attend the various events arranged to celebrate the star’s life. His death had mobilized the masses. The procession of fans to Jackson’s Neverland ranch was keenly followed.

The funeral was on 7 July 2009. Images of Jackson’s golden coffin adorned with red flowers began to appear in the media. Jackson’s family also received huge attention, particularly the tearful speech by Michael’s daughter Paris: her grief was laid bare for all the world to see. The star’s famous friends flocked to the media, singing and remembering the star on camera. In the US the memorial service was screened live at 88 cinemas, and it featured prominently in online versions of mainstream media around the world. A lot of fresh video material from the memorial service was also posted on YouTube. In other social media, too, people gathered to share their memories of Jackson. Some websites spread the persistent rumour that the star’s death had been staged. Suspicion was also rife among YouTube users that the King of Pop had converted to Islam. Many had made their own compilation videos of the King of Pop.

I was quite confused by all I was seeing and experiencing. My mind flashed back to Diana’s funeral in London in 1997. This, evidently, was not a unique phenomenon. But what explained all this frenetic interest, why were such vast numbers of people from all corners of the globe being mobilized in and through the media? Surely this event revealed something very fundamental about how we are connected to one another in today’s world.

The red thread running through this book is an exploration of the relationship between ritual, media and community. I am interested in how we connect with one another and in how we work individually and together to build a shared reality in today’s media world. I start from the premise that the principal building blocks for community are emotions, media, symbols and communication. Jackson’s death is an example par excellence. It throws us into the middle of everyday life and a sudden sense of being touched by the sacred. We are confronted with the limitedness of life. Jackson’s death reminds us about the uncertainties of life. This is a very transient experience, scarcely transcending the boundaries of everyday life (cf. Lynch 2012).

Not all deaths, of course, end up in the public realm or are written about for weeks on end; they’re just not interesting enough to stir up public emotion. The death of a celebrity excites emotional states because the star’s life touched so many people. In the words of French sociologist Michel Maffesoli (1996, viii), these shared states are essentially an indication of ‘empathy, of communitarian desire, of shared emotion or vibration’. Looking at the media today, it is impossible not to conclude that those shared emotions and vibrations are brought about by popular culture and its symbols. Why is this?

Jackson’s death was a media event, in a generic sense of the word (cf. Dayan and Katz 1992). It follows that the experience of community was also mediatized (see e.g. Hjarvard 2008; Krotz 2009; Livingstone 2009; Lundby 2009a; Lövheim and Lynch 2011). Mediatized community centres around the media, in all their old and new versions and variations. The media both mediate the event and provide the framework for the community experience. They are the symbolic locus and space for events. And that space is in constant movement. When news about death begins spreading around the world, that space breaks down into numerous different public and virtual sites, such as online chat rooms, Facebook, the websites of mainstream media, news broadcasts and the front pages of newspapers. Out of an imagined presence, through a flow of bytes, is created a shared common space (see e.g. Rheingold 1993). We cannot see, but we can imagine how ‘everyone’ is watching the news about Michael Jackson, or how they are all surfing the net at the same time as we sit glued in front of the television or computer screen in our opposite corners of the globe.

Indeed, the nature of mediatized community is to a very great extent imagined (see e.g. Anderson 1983; Appadurai 1997; Taylor 2004). The media also condense the experience on the time dimension: something important is happening right now, at this very moment, simultaneously, either in one place or in many different places. The case we have been discussing here, Michael Jackson’s death, involved a great deal of symbolic communication that is important to the development of community (i.e. conscious efforts to create a certain type of shared social reality through the use of certain shared or at least commonly recognized images, gestures, signs and practices). We recognize the gloves, the moonwalk, images from Jackson’s childhood, Jackson’s bleached features, Neverland, Jackson’s family members, former girlfriends, friends and, of course, his most famous hits, ‘Thriller’, ‘Billy Jean’ and ‘Bad’.

Communication connects!

The notion of symbolic communication as a glue that connects people is by no means new. It’s good for media researchers to remind themselves that the roots of this idea can be traced back to the history of the concept itself. Communication comes from the Latin communicare, meaning to make common, to share or to partake. Communio, accordingly, means association, togetherness, mutual partnership. In his book Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Peters (2000) maintains that the ultimate purpose of communication is to search for community and to organize a common life, to bridge the gulf between self and other, private and public, inner thought and outer word (Peters 2000, 1–31: cf. also Carey 1989).

Historically, in communications research, the study of the relationship between communication and community (especially in modern society) is associated with American pragmatism and the Chicago School, and John Dewey (1859–1952), in particular. Dewey (1927) believed that people exist in relation to the world and one another. These relationships are constituted in communication among people. Communication, Dewey thought, is also the precondition for all public life in society, for it is the only way that society can learn about itself. Thus, communication is an integral part of the construction of democratic society, or what Dewey called ‘the great community’. He writes:

Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained. But the winged words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech. Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public. But it and its results are but tools after all. Their final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face relationships by means of direct give and take. Logic in its fulfilment recurs to the primitive sense of the word: dialogue. Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.

(Dewey 1927, 218)

Dewey was not the only, or even the first, social scientist to explore the relationship between communication, community and the public sphere. Earlier in my review of the history of anthropological media research I mentioned a number of anthropologists who were interested in the relationship between the media and community in modernizing society, in much the same way as the Chicago School researchers. The most prominent names include Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Rhoda Métraux, William Lloyd Warner, Milton Singer and Hortense Powdermaker. Robert Ezra Park, another leading Chicago School representative, was also interested in communication and various public mass formations. Park took a slightly different view on communication than Dewey. Whereas Dewey stressed the connecting role of communication in people’s life, Park maintained that communication also had a disruptive and separating effect (Frazier and Gaziano 1979; 5–51; Pietilä 2005).

Both Dewey and Park had drawn influences from European sociology and particularly Georg Simmel, whose social theory was built around human interaction. Simmel (1917) believed that society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction. Since Dewey, Park and the Chicago School, research into the relationship between communication and community has been driven forward by the dramaturgical approach, as represented by Kenneth Burke (1897–1993), Hugh P. Duncan and Erving Goffman (1922–1982); but important work has also been conducted in the field of symbolic interactionism (Pietilä 2005). Both these approaches – dramaturgical communication and symbolic interactionism – share the same interest of exploring the construction of a shared world at the micro-level of communication – for instance, in social interaction. Erving Goffman’s (1982) theory of everyday rituals, for instance, is a well-known sociological study of how social interaction consists of a large number of conscious or unconscious rituals of communication, such as recurring gestures and facial expressions. Indeed, Goffman’s ‘sociology of occasions’ can be regarded as an exploration of micro-rituals of communication (see also Rothenbuhler 1998, 113, 126).

Symbolic interactionism works from the assumption that the shared world is constituted primarily in and through human communication, which is based on meanings and symbols representing those meanings. One of the founders of symbolic interactionism, Herbert Blumer (1986, 10), describes this interaction as follows:

Such interaction in human society is characteristically and predominantly on the symbolic level; as individuals acting individually, collectively, or as agents of some organization encounter one another they are necessarily required to take account of the actions of one another as they form their own action. They do this by a dual process of indicating to others how to act and of interpreting the indications made by others. Human group life is a vast process of such defining to others what to do and of interpreting their definitions; through this process people come to fit their activities to one another and to form their own individual conduct.

All the theoretical approaches to communication outlined above share in common the premise that communication can be studied as an occasion that connects people. Communication gives material shape to an idea, whether this is a meaning, emotion, gesture or inner experience. This idea can be expressed verbally, in writing or by any other method.

Communication by means of symbols

Since human minds cannot make direct contact with one another, communication requires symbolic forms. Swedish culture theorist Johan Fornäs (1995, 134) describes symbolic communication, somewhat poetically, as ‘the dialogic flows and textures of meaningful forms’. These ‘meaningful forms’ consist of external marks, tokens or signs. When a film audience clap their hands after the screening, they are engaging in symbolic communication. This is called giving an applause, which means that the audience want to express their appreciation of the occasion, the film and/or its director. Another example of symbolic communication is lighting a candle, at a certain time and in a certain place, in memory of a deceased person.

Symbolic communication always requires that agents follow, to some degree at least, shared rules and practices with regard to signs, language, text and representation (see Rothenbuhler 1998, xii). Communication that cannot be interpreted is not communication at all. Symbolic communication is a process of formulating shared meanings and creating new meanings through shared forms of behaviour. Anthropologist David Kertzer (1988, 4) crystallizes the communicative role of symbols as follows:

Symbol systems provide a ‘shield against terror’. They are a means, indeed the primary means, by which we give meaning to the world around us; they allow us to interpret what we see, and, indeed, what we are. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this symbolic process is its taken-for-granted quality.

And, yet, symbols do not have infinite power over people, cultures or societies. Kertzer (1988, 4–5) continues:

That people perceive the world through symbolic lenses does not meant that people or cultures are free to create any symbolic system imaginable, or that all such constructs are equally tenable in the material world. There is a continuous interaction between the ways people have of dealing with the physical and social universe and the actual contours of the universe. … Moreover, symbols do not simply arise spontaneously, nor is the continuing process of redefinition of the symbolic universe a matter of chance. Both are heavily influenced by the distribution of resources found in the society and the relationships that exist with other societies. Though symbols give people a way of understanding the world, it is people who produce new symbols and transform the old.

My particular interest here is with recurring forms of symbolic communication. These forms of behaviour may be called ritual communication: a ritual is communication that finds expression in symbolic behaviour (see Wuthnow 1989, 109). In the words of cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander (2006, 29–30), rituals are episodes of repeated and simplified cultural communication that shapes the social interaction of the partners involved. Rituals thus invest its participants with social energy, connect them to one another by creating a shared social reality of ‘as if’ or ‘could be’, and strengthen their identification with the symbolic objects in that communication (cf. Seligman et al 2008). Last, but not least, ritual communication helps us to deal with the chaos and ambiguity of human experience and puts it into a performative framework (Kertzer 1988, 8). The larger the catastrophe, the more ritual communication is needed for the repair work (Rothenbuhler 2010).

Modern critique

To suggest that the death of a celebrity such as Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, Donna Summer or Whitney Houston is about ritual communication might, at first impression, seem rather strange. Ordinarily, we tend to associate rituals with primitive cultures, tribal or, in more contemporary settings, religious rituals. I recognize a ritual when I see on television a group of semi-naked natives, dancing and chanting in trance-like unison around a fire in the dark of night, or when I attend a friend’s wedding or a family member’s funeral. It’s much more difficult to identify rituals that are related to everyday or even exceptionally ‘profane’ life in our media-saturated environment.

The difficulties that people living in Western, post-Protestant cultures have in recognizing ritual behaviour outside of life’s major turning points can be traced far back in history. Seligman and his colleagues (2008, 179...