Rituals and Meaningful Action

American society is fraught with secular rituals, as are most. We greet each other with different phrases, gestures, and even forms of contact all based on our familiarity and circumstances. Almost every action one takes in a given day is a ritual of sorts, the sociologist Erving Goffman describes this in his dramaturgy. He postulated that people do things not because of any inherent value to them, but because we are expected to do so by the definition of the situation they are in. This illustrates why most people do things like shake hands or make small talk, it fits the rituals society expects us to undergo to have a normal interaction. If someone violated these norms, refused to participate in the ritual, they would be shunned, not really for refusing to do so, but because it communicates negative traits. No one really cares if you brush by them without saying hello, they care that you are ignoring them. We’re exploring similar things right now in my sociology class, I’m interested to see how they continue to intersect.