Excerpt: Family Rituals and the Construction of Reality

Coltrane, Scott. [1997] 2005. "Family Rituals and the Construction of Reality". Pp. 245-252 in Understanding Society, 2nd ed., edited by Margaret L. Andersen, Kim Logio, and Howard Taylor. Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, Inc.

Social life is characterized by ritual. When we apply for a job, there is a protocol dictating the proper order for various actions, including the submission of a résumé, interview, follow-up, and either rejection or offer/acceptance. When we go out to a restaurant, there's an etiquette to how we sit, how we order, how much we order, how we eat, how we pay, and how we stand and leave. In anthropology, ritual is used to describe cultures by examining the foibles of particular societies. In sociology, ritual is largely ignored (to the detriment of the discipline, I would argue).

Coltrane discusses the ritual of Thanksgiving Dinner. He begins with a portrayal of this American ritual from the comedy film Home for the Holidays (1995), and examines the functions that family-centered holidays play in today's America. "Prior to the 1900s", he says, "civic festivals and Fourth of July parades in America were much more important occasions for celebration and strong emotion than family holidays".

One function of family-centered rituals is to reaffirm and redefine the family experience:

Although our culture provides us with an overarching sense of what a family should be, we need to learn what it means to be in a particular family through direct experience and learning, and we need to re-create a sense of belonging over and over again.

Part of this re-creation is defining where and how we fit in: what our role in the family is. Traditional roles are played out (father and son, mother and daughter, etc.) to reaffirm our membership in the family. Rituals like Thanksgiving Dinner allow us to "construct group identity and create a shared sense of reality", which means defining the qualities and relationships for our individual family.

Roles are often gendered; women orchestrate the events and prepare the meal while men sit around and watch football (exceptions being carving the turkey, grilling/barbecuing in summer months, etc.). Coltrane shifts the discussion to what we culturally define as "women's work" and "men's work", and how these definitions often lead to young boys learning to accept the privilege of their gender while their sisters work in the kitchen.

This article deals with an important concept: identity construction. In understanding social behavior, we must understand how people understand themselves. Since self-concepts affect the nature of our interactions, shared structures and values that influence them directly contribute to the nature of our collective actions. The meanings that people derive from their culture about what a family should be, for example, shape their definitions of "mother" or "father" and the relationship between them, which carry on into daily life and different settings.

Relevance: 4/5 (relevant)
Salience: 5/5 (salient)

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