Mediatized rituals: beyond manufacturing consent

Abstract

The study of mediatized rituals challenges entrenched theoretical views about media power, its locations and determinations and the role of media in processes of manufacturing consent. Contrary to both Durkheimian and neo-Marxian traditions (historically the dominant frameworks in the field of ritual study), some mediatized rituals appear to open up productive spaces for social reflexivity and critique, and can be politically disruptive or even transformative in their reverberations within civil and wider societies. This article identifies and critically discusses six subclasses of mediatized ritual and produces an overarching schema of use in their empirical analysis and comparative theorization. It argues against the deep theoretical suspicions within current academic media discourse toward ritual, and illustrates how mediatized rituals are in fact complexly variegated, exceptional and performative phenomena that periodically summon solidarities and moral ideas of the ‘social good’ and variously serve to exert agency within late modern societies.