Ritual within folk customs such as dragon boat racing during the Dragon Boat Festival helps form stronger cultural identity among participants. Photo: FILE

Rituals are a special cultural phenomenon. They are symbols carrying cultural meaning and transmitting cultural behaviors that communicate and maintain social group activities. Studying communication activities from the perspective of rituals can inspire further research.

When considering the communication of Chinese folk customs and festival celebrations, rituals in the form of cultural symbols have reconstructed the “imaginary community” of culture. This process integrates modern elements into traditional Chinese culture and brings new vigor to its development, said Shao Peiren, a professor from the College of Media and International Culture at Zhejiang University.
 

Shao added that as global and local representative cultural rituals have been passed down, new cultural rituals have also been constantly created and improved. This process enriches festival culture, promotes commodity consumption and strengthens self-identity and cultural identity. Contemporary ritual communication is a process of sacred covenants and oaths and also a process of open entertainment and consumption. As meaningful ritual symbols are passed down or created, understood, fully used, shared and spread, the production, promotion, maintenance and consumption of the social system enters a healthy and beneficial cycle. In this way, the communication system and the social system form a hidden cultural ecology that features positive interaction and mutual promotion.
 

Although the concept of ritual communication has existed in China for long, there are few original empirical research findings on the subject. This is because excessive emphasis has been placed on the analysis of effects and functions in the study of communication. In addition, the study of ritual communication lacks stable and normative methodologies. The current research on ritual communication in China consists of three major areas, commentary on the history of thought regarding ritual communication, research on contemporary mass communication in China, and the interdisciplinary study of contemporary culture and communication, said Wu Yumin, a professor from the School of Media and Communication at Shenzhen University.

Scholars need to pay special attention to two fields of research. The first are large-scale media events and their relationship with national and social identity. The second are the rituals of intangible cultural heritage and how participants achieve the sharing of meaning and sentiment from these rituals, said Hu Yiqing, a professor from the School of Journalism and Communication at Nanjing University.

Hu continued that the two fields reflect methods of current research on ritual communication. Large-scale media events, through the construction of sacred and solemn ritual scenes, realize the function of strengthening cohesiveness and conveying meaning, which is closer to the functional method of anthropology. In addition, various folk customs can effectively realize the co-existence, co-ownership and sharing of sentiments, significance and culture through the immersive cultural experience of participants, thus shaping cultural identity. This process is more in line with interpretive anthropology. Both of these studies have gone beyond traditional studies on the effects of communication and have provided new perspectives for communication studies.
 

Recent years still see many misinterpretations and misuses of concepts such as “media events,” “rituals” and “a ritual view of communication.” Guo Jianbin, a professor from the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Yunnan University, said that the effects of rituals should not be the priority of ritual communication studies. Rather, we should focus on interpreting the significance of specific communication phenomena. In the future, we need to identify the basic connotations of ritual communication concepts and combine more effective theoretical resources to broaden the research field. Meanwhile, we can adopt the anthropological method of field investigations to analyze communication phenomena and to explore the social and cultural significances of these phenomena.

Ritual communication plays a significant role in the self-definition of Chinese civilization, the identity of the Chinese nation and individual identity. Wu suggested that scholars broaden their cultural horizons and pay attention to both empirical and document-based research. Empirical research focuses on the contemporary creative form of ritual communication, while document-based research refers to ritual communication methodologies with Chinese characteristics, which are summarized based on ritual communication traditions in China.

edited by YANG LANLAN