Menu Close

The Rituals of Middletown

What is a ritual?  

Everyday Life in Middletown writers use the term to describe a wide variety of habitual practices, from morning coffee to watching baseball to sitting outside to wait for the kids to come home from school.  

Acts like these do not fit a standard dictionary definition of ritual: a “religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.”  

And they fall considerably shorter of ritual as conceived by anthropologists and sociologists. The nature and function of ritual has been a matter of some debate in these fields, but there is wide consensus that something does not become ritual merely because it is repeated habitually. Rituals may involve routine actions but elevate them to a higher level of significance, linking the individual performing them to a larger social or cultural order. 

“Rituals transform ordinary, mundane actions like eating, talking, watching television, and so forth into actions that transcend the particularities of the situation,” write Bent Steeg Larsen and Thomas Tufte, who argue that media usage can take on ritualistic properties in modern, secular society. 

Other scholars have pushed back against the tendency to label as a ritual any habitually repeated action that plays a role in socializing people into a group. James R. Macleod, for instance, faults studies of corporate culture for describing social habits at corporations—such as the hierarchical opening of doors for higher-ranking executives—as rituals. 

Such practices may be habitual, and may act out and reinforce the local, social order, Macleod wrote. But they do not have the elements of the mythic and supernatural, the reference to registers of meaning beyond the local, physical world, that define the rituals in an anthropological sense.  

This thinking is informed by the history of anthropology, which is rooted in the work of early twentieth-century scholars who catalogued the practices of traditional, pre-modern societies. Junior executives might be affirming their place in a corporate hierarchy by opening the door for the boss; but they don’t believe that they’re mollifying the gods or guaranteeing a good harvest this year.  

At the core of this debate is the difference between traditional and religious societies and modern, more diverse, more secular ones. While some rituals in the strictest sense—weddings, church services, etc.—remain, modern people grant significance to the necessities of life in many different ways. Sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that the “sacred object” had disappeared from rituals in secular societies, replaced by the individual. Rituals therefore became the means through which individuals place themselves in the social order, without reference to a metaphysical plane or an explicit myth. 

The word “ritual” in the more strict, traditional sense appears in the EDLM diaries as a humorous way of comparing contemporary life with life in pre-modern societies, often at the expense of contemporary life. One diarist chafes his own bourgeois ways, calling the grinding of coffee beans “the sacred ritual”; another, faced with the vexing work of ridding the house of fleas, describes applying an “arsenal” of “essential oils” and “diatomaceous earth” to surfaces in the house, “like it’s some sort of pagan ritual.” 

Most often, though, diarists invoke the word “ritual” to flag moments in which everyday routines seem important or meaningful. Eating dessert might just be a matter of routine. But when it is connected to bonding with your college-aged daughter during the pandemic, it becomes, for Diarist A02, a ritual: “…S. and I split a batch of raspberries, which has been a ritual for us whenever she is home and the raspberries are in season.”  

Food likewise becomes ritualized for Diarist A16 when she makes what she calls “Nostalgia Burgers.” They’re just plain hamburgers, but for this diarist and her sister, they call back to the years after her parents split up, when her father would pick the girls up on Friday nights and take them to their grandmother’s house. There he would make burgers. “We had VERY regimented rituals for activities and food during those visits,” she writes.  

What our diarists call “rituals” are typically more than just habits, even when they are not ceremonial and do not gesture towards the sacred. Indeed, by calling them rituals, our writers identify them as having a significance beyond their immediate physical function.  

These include repeated practices that people choose for themselves—for instance prayer and meditation, which retain their traditional, sacred content to greater or lesser degrees. “Yes, I start each day with a prayer before anything else,” writes Diarist A32. “Prayer centers me and guides my day.” Diarist G58’s diary from Sept. 14 is replete with religious practice: prayer, devotions, recitation of the books of the Bible, meditation. 

But such everyday “rituals” also include non-religious but nonetheless conscious, deliberate daily acts, voluntary ways of structuring the day or the week, which the writers perceive as significant, as enabling life to proceed or fomenting success and health. 

 “Every Sunday has a sort of ritual about it,” writes Diarist B36. “Wake. Check phone. Waterwaterwater. Stretch. Bathroom. Make coffee. Get a bagel. Put on light music. Sort and start laundry. AM writing. Then and only then is there room for the rest of life.” 

As the late media studies scholar Roger Silverstone argued, rituals take place in the everyday but elevate it, turning ordinary activities into occasions for reflection. Rituals “suspend the ordinariness” of daily life even as they are “about this ordinariness.”  

Perhaps rituals in this everyday sense are ways that we exert control over small parts of our lives: something that feels especially important given the increased uncertainty we have all been living with lately. Such seems to be the case in Diarist A07’s recounting of a new “ritual” that she and her husband have embraced since the pandemic started: 

“M. makes coffee and we head back to bed. This ritual of coffee in bed for the first hour of the day is by far the best thing to come out of COVID. We used to do this on the weekends, but for some reason started doing it every day once COVID started, and we’re lucky enough to have the flexibility in our schedules to keep it going. We talk about plans for the day…play with the boys, and just generally ease into the day.”