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Real Ritual Changes Things: Exploring Collaboration & Social Change
December 8, 2011 @ 2:00 PM EST – Completed
w/ Dr. Jack Santino
Professor, Department of Popular Culture, BGSU
2010/11 Alexis de Tocqueville Distinguished Professor
Fulbright Chair, University of Paris IV-Sorbonne
When you think of real ritual changing things, what do you think? Ritual, among other things, is a social process for effecting change. By ritual Dr. Santino means sacred ceremony. Ritual, festival, and celebration are central to the human experience. It involves… it requires collaboration in order to support the creation of community. Here are some provocative propositions Dr. Santino will cover:
- The study of ritual and festival is central to what is most important in human life. It’s not secondary or a luxury.
- What people care most about in life, is what is ritualized – such as the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, what people run back into a burning building to save… recipes, photos, etc.
- What is most important in peoples’ lives is not about a price tag.
- Some people would argue that ritual is what makes people human.
- The center of human life is sociability – the center of social life is tradition – the center of tradition is ritual.
Dr. Santino has served as Director of the Bowling Green Center for Popular Culture Studies, was a Fulbright Scholar to Northern Ireland, and an Emmy Award winner for his documentary film on Pullman Porters. Dr. Santino’s current research centers on celebrations and holidays and their cultural meaning, with a particular focus on Northern Ireland and the use of commemorative murals and other forms of expressive behavior as reflective of political, social, and cultural identity.
Recent Graduate Courses: Northern Irish Folk Customs; Popular Music of the 1950s; Popular Music of the 1960s; Holidays and Celebrations. Undergraduate Courses: same courses as graduate and also “Introduction to Popular Music.”
Representative publications include the books New Old-Fashioned Ways: Holidays and Popular Culture (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters, AllAround the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life , and Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and such articles as “Yellow Ribbons and Seasonal Flags: The Folk Assemblage of War,” “The Outlaw Emotions: Narrative Expressions on the Rules and Roles of Occupational Identity,” and “Not An Unimportant Failure: Spontaneous Shrines and Festivals of Death and Politics in Northern Ireland.”