Rituals Among School Children: Performativity, Mimesis, and Interculturality

Abstract

Rituals and ritualization play a central role in the pedagogy, education and socialization of children at primary school age. They structure children’s lives and support their integration into a social order. Rituals shape transitions between fields of socialization and institutions, and facilitate social learning, which is important both in during lessons and in the school’s broader context. Due to their performativity, pedagogic processes function like rituals and ritualization in other fields of social action. How children perform their behavior, whether alone or together with adults, can be seen as the performativity of their actions. Important aspects of cultural learning at primary school age occur by way of mimetic processes. In this, images, schemes, the expectations of others, social situations, occurrences and actions are incorporated into an individual’s world of mental images. This practical knowledge enables children to learn and act together, to live and to be. In the face of globalization and Europeanization, pedagogy and education have become intercultural tasks, for which rituals, ritualization, pedagogic and social gestures, the performativity of social practices, and mimetic forms of learning play an important role. Ethnography and qualitative research methods are appropriate instruments for investigating rituals and ritualization as well as the performativity of pedagogic practices, of mimetic processes and of intercultural education processes. Participant observation, video-supported observation, video performance as well as the analysis of photographs, interviews and group discussions have proven to be the most viable methods; they should be combined wherever possible and are key for obtaining complex and methodologically transparent research results.