Ritual Communication And Collective Action: Communicative Contract In Religious Ritual

Since James Carey proposed the ritual view of communication(RVC), the existing scholarships have focused more on its obscured dichotomy between concepts of ritual and transmission. They are too centered on the path of reason to resolve Carey’s theoretic contradiction, lacking of the support of empirical evidence. Carey defines the human communication action in the scope of symbolic representation, shared beliefs and maintained order, which indicates that ritual is irrational. Although the RVC that has deep religious root attempts to explained human communication action, it does not defined the limits of religious ritual and the meaning of ritual with social transition and even blurs the mechanism that how to create the social reality by the implementing ritual symbols among the participants.This thesis employs the ethnographic method to research folk religion “Nianli”(Yearly Worships) in China for four months within two years, which is based upon three reasons: 1)Carey’s binarism is rooted in primitive religion and it is useful to clarify the theoretic contradiction of Carey’s dichotomy; 2) “Nianli” folk is a kind of diachronic religion that is a natural laboratory suitable for the analysis of the social process including “produced”,“maintained”, “repaired” and “transformed” phases which are the crucial points of RVC; 3)Carey’s standpoint is original from the western religion in American culture and studying on Chinese folk religion is to examines the applicable scope of ritual view in different religious settings. This study, which is based upon the explanation of social mechanism of collective action, aims to figure out how the communicative aspects of ritual “produce”, “maintain”,“repair” and “transform” the social reality. There are four findings in the self-interested and secularized religion: 1) vanishing beliefs;2)production of identity; 3) transformed meanings4)contract construction. Ritual collective action is not necessarily via shared beliefs but the constructed communicative contract(include profaned space and sacred space). It can be seen that the rationalized process of religion ritual through the power performance, values negotiation and contract construction. Therefore, RVC is also applicable to analyse the effects of communication on human attitude and action.