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Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups

This book offers a ground-breaking and complex framework of rituals, which draws on multiple disciplines. By examining extensive data from different languages, it explores the way in which groups of people work out their interpersonal relationships by performing rituals, and compares such in-group practices with other forms of rituality. The cutting-edge theory proposed captures ritual as a relational action constructed in interaction through pre-existing patterns. The book challenges the stereotypical view of various disciplines that English and other Western languages are dispensed with rituals, by showing that ritual manifests itself in both constructive and destructive behaviour forms in these languages.