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Introduction to Insertuction
Ritual & Ceremonial Sense.m4a00:0018:12
The leapfrog development of material civilization in modern society and the high-intensity, utilitarian lifestyle have prompted people to constantly seek value reconstruction and profound spiritual experience. Ritual, as a symbolic human activity, acts as a tool for people to pursue spiritual comfort, and the appeal of ritual and ritual sense is awakened again: a variety of individual celebration ceremonies, consumption ceremonies, and service rituals gradually appear in daily life. For example, Oreo's "twist, lick, bubble" consumption ceremony; before eating hot pot, the service staff and customers together "unseal, open the source" service ceremony....Similarly, in the field of tourism, tourists are also increasingly pursuing a sense of ceremony in the tourism process, hoping to express the ritualization of life through tourism, such as honeymoon tourism, graduation tourism and other types of tourism full of rituals have been favored by the public. The growing trend of ritual and ritual consumption has led to a range of possibilities for new discoveries and new research.
Focusing on "Ritual and Ritual", 5 articles from Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Tourism Science, tourism science and other journals have been selected to explore the two sub-topics of "ritual in consumption" and "tourism ceremony and tourism ritual sense", hoping to bring useful thinking to future ritual research.
Editor of this issue: Lv Xingyang Luo Jingjing
1 // From religious to secular: rituals in consumption
Throughout the study of rituals by scholars, rituals first appeared in the field of religion, referring to religious statements, sacrifices, and worship activities. As history evolved and time passed, the original meaning and form of rituals became separated, and repetitive rituals evolved into fixed customs and habits, sociologists began to examine the place, role, and status of rituals in social life. Durkheim's research, on the other hand, bridges the gap between religion and "secular life." He argues that the world is divided into two main realms: the realm of all "divine (religious life)" things, and the realm of all "secular (secular life)" things, i.e., the "divine-secular" dualism, which is extremely influential in the study of rituals. He believes that the two are clearly demarcated and separated from each other, and that to communicate between the two worlds, it is necessary to resort to rituals.
The French sociologist Gennep more closely linked rituals to secular life, proposing the theory of "passing rituals" (also known as "transitional rituals" and "life rituals"). He believes that rituals are everywhere, whether it is a full moon, a year of age, an adulthood or a marriage, which brings about a change in social identity and life state, symbolizing the transition of life from one stage to another, and obtaining new social norms and behavioral requirements. Tunner closely followed Up OnGernip's research and proposed threshold theory, innovatively explaining Geinep's "transition phase". He believed that people in the threshold period could achieve the goal of fighting against secular norms through ritual behavior that contained subversive and rebellious nature. For this reason, rituals have so-called "anti-structural" characteristics. Further, Colins' research has greatly increased the scope of ritual expression, and his theory of "interactive ritual chains" argues that both instantaneous and in-situ interactions can be seen as a ritual, and that this interactive ritual is a process with a causal cycle.
From the "sacred-secular" dualism to the interactive ritual chain, with the gradual enrichment of ritual research, the scope and application field of ritual in social life have been expanding. Today, rituals have completely detached themselves from the semantic environment of religion and become secular: a special, symbolic event or moment in life that may not have the elements to constitute a complete ritual, but is still called a ritual, such as an individual's birthday ceremony, a gift exchange ceremony, and so on. This expresses the individual's desire for meaning in life and for deep experience. In order to meet the needs of the market and achieve business objectives, the consumer sector has also begun to pay attention to the application of rituals in services and products. Based on this, scholars have proposed concepts such as consumption ceremonies and service ceremonies to explore their impact on consumer psychology or behavior. Tourism as a special kind of consumption, understanding the research progress of rituals in the field of consumption is conducive to the deepening of tourism consumption research, therefore, we have selected two articles from many studies that introduce consumption ceremonies and service ceremonies respectively, in order to lead everyone to initially perceive the unique charm of rituals in the field of consumption, and at the same time bring some inspiration and thinking to the study of rituals in tourism consumption.
1.1 Consumption Ceremony
WANG X, SUN Y, KRAMER T. RITUALISTIC. Ritualistic consumption decreases loneliness by increasing meaning[J]. Journal of Marketing Research, 2021, 58(2): 282-298.
Individuals who lack adequate social connections may feel lonely, a situation that has been more common in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Excessive, persistent loneliness often leads to many negative outcomes, such as depression, suicide, etc. In view of the great harm caused by loneliness, this article focuses on how to reduce consumer loneliness through consumption rituals. The findings show that lonely people often lack the perception of the meaning of life, and that product-related consumption rituals can reduce loneliness by increasing the perception of the meaning of life.
A total of 5 studies were conducted in the article. Study 1 used survey methods to preliminarily prove that the frequency of consumer participation in a certain familiar consumption ceremony was significantly negatively correlated with their own loneliness and significantly positively correlated with the perception of the meaning of life. The perception of the meaning of life mediates between the first two. In Studies 2, 3, and 4, the authors demonstrated through three experiments that whether it was explicitly indicating to participants that "it is a ritual" behavior (such as Oreo Cookie's "twist, lick, bubble" three steps) or tacit ritual (i.e., not told that the subject is a ritual but has a fixed behavioral framework, which is set by the author), it can reduce loneliness in lonely people; for participants who have not been initiated loneliness or feel calm (Calm, Participants who voluntarily reduced their feelings of peace and tranquility resulting from social ties did not differ significantly in their sense of loneliness. The perceived meaning of the product and the meaning of life perceived by the consumer play a continuous mediating role in this influence. In addition, Study 3 excluded the possibility of control, pleasure, pleasure, and effort when drinking milk tea as alternative intermediaries; Study 4 excluded Mindfulness and Narrative transportation as alternative intermediaries. Study 5 further explored the boundary conditions of the role of consumption rituals and found that when meaningful experiences can be obtained by chance, consumption rituals will no longer function.
Figure 1 Conceptual framework of consumption ceremonies
1.2 Service Ceremony
WEI Haiying, WANG Ying, RAN Yaxuan, ZHANG Yishi, SHU Lifang. Small Things, Big Happiness: The Impact of Service Rituals on Brand Well-being from the Perspective of Interactive Ritual Chain Theory[J]. Advances in Psychological Science, 2018, 26(07): 1141-1151.
Service ceremony is the application of ritual in service scenarios, which refers to a series of formal, repeatable, non-direct behaviors or activities initiated by the service provider to achieve marketing goals. For example, when consumers eat hot pot, they personally "unseal and open their luck", at which time the service staff will say blessings loudly together, indicating that the year is booming. What kind of experience will a similar service ceremony bring to consumers, and will it enhance the brand well-being (that is, the happiness and long-term benefits of consumers through the brand)? This issue became the focus of this study.
Based on the Interaction ritual chain (IRC), the paper proposes six propositions. It mainly includes: the construction of the concept and dimension of brand well-being, the influence effect and mechanism of service ceremony type on brand well-being, and the boundary conditions of service ceremony affecting brand well-being. The article argues that the content structure of brand well-being includes four aspects: subjective well-being, social meaning, virtue enhancement and future value; the interaction of ritual behavior and emotional energy has an impact on brand well-being, and this influence is generated through two paths of consumer emotional response and cognitive response; and corporate co-creation orientation and self-consistency will adjust the impact of service ritual behavior on brand well-being.
Figure 2 Theoretical framework of service ceremonies
2 // Tourism as a ritual: a sense of tourism ceremony and tourism ceremony
Whether it is the ritual of consumption or the ritual of service, it shows that in a complex modern society, ritual is no longer a patent of religion, but spreads throughout our lives. In the field of tourism, Graburn introduced the three-stage structure of "passing rituals" into the analysis of tourism, and proposed the "tourism ritual theory": it is best to regard tourism as a ritual, a special ceremony that contrasts strongly with daily home life and work, and integrates leisure and travel, a "reversal ceremony". This view has become one of three classic perspectives in the study of tourism anthropology. The proposal of "Tourism Ritual Theory" for the first time combined ritual theory with the study of tourism, opening up the research of ritual in the field of tourism. After that, scholars discussed the process and essence of tourism, the general characteristics and functions of tourism ceremonies, and tried to construct the basic theoretical framework of tourism ceremonies.
On the other hand, in tourism practice, destination marketers also pay attention to the importance of tourism ceremonies, and try to create ritualized scenes or events in the tourism process to achieve the purpose of satisfying the emotional experience of tourists and influencing the behavior of tourists. However, whether the tourism ceremony will have an impact on tourists as an external stimulus depends on whether the tourists respond to this stimulus. The sense of tourism ceremony, as the subjective experience and feeling of tourists on tourism ceremonies, is the sum of this inner reaction. Therefore, when tourists participate in tourism ceremonies and produce a sense of tourism ceremony, the symbolic meaning of tourism ceremonies can be transformed into a driving force to promote changes in tourist behavior. As a result, a small number of studies have explored the application of tourism rituals in the field of marketing from the perspective of tourists.
At present, the research of tourism ceremony is in the stage of theoretical construction, so we have selected three representative articles to introduce the theory of tourism ceremony, the interactive ceremony in the tourism field, and the sense of tourism ceremony in destination marketing, in order to more clearly sort out the development process of ritual theory in tourism and its current application in practice.
2.1 Theory of tourism rituals
ZHAO Hongmei. On the Application of Ritual Theory in Tourism Research: A Review of Professor Nalsh Greben's "Tourism Ritual Theory"[J].Journal of Tourism Studies, 2007(09): 70-74.
Rituals originate from religion, while tourism comes from the secular, how did Graburn associate the two, and how is ritual theory applied in tourism? The article discusses these issues.
The article is divided into three parts. In the first part, the author reviews the development of rituals, pointing out that rituals that originated in religion have gradually moved towards secular life with the development of history. Among them, the ideas of "transitional etiquette", "strengthening etiquette", and "threshold theory" of rituals confirm that the long journey of life, rituals are everywhere all the time. In the second part, based on Graburn's theory of tourism rituals, the author compares tourism with rituals in terms of structure, function, and motivation, and analyzes their similarities. At the structural level, tourism, like rituals, has three stages from "secular" to "sacred" and back to "secular". Tourists at each stage are in different time air, and tourists at each stage are undergoing more or less new changes, which is the ritual structure of tourism. Among them, the sacredness of tourism is reflected in the fact that individuals also have the same "threshold" experience as rituals in tourism. At the functional level, the author points out that tourism also has the function of strengthening etiquette and transitional etiquette, that is, strengthening the meaning of life and completing the transition of identity or status. At the level of tourism motivation, tourists often achieve the need to reverse their lives through tourism, such as the usual frugal people inevitably try luxury and waste in the tourism process, the conservatives prefer to take risks or indulge, etc., this reversal feature is similar to the "anti-structural" nature of the ceremony, that is, the ritual reversal of tourism is invisibly internalized into the tourism motivation.
Tourism ritual theory provides an important perspective for insight into tourism experience, and this article lays a solid foundation for the in-depth study of subsequent tourism experience through a thorough analysis of tourism ritual theory.
2.2 Interactive ritual chains in tourist venues
XIE Yanjun, XU Ying. Interactive Rituals in Tourism Fields: A Dynamic Analysis of Emotional Energy in Tourism Experience[J]. Tourism Science, 2016, 30(01): 1-15.
Graburn's theory of tourism rituals determines that in the process of the tourist's contextualized experience, the social process of interaction is sometimes presented in the form of some kind of ritual and becomes an important factor in gathering and releasing emotional energy. Therefore, the author tries to establish a logical relationship between the tourist field, the interactive ritual and the emotional energy, and explains the fundamental driving force that triggers the social phenomenon of tourism from the perspective of emotional energy.
Combining the revision of the application of Collins' interaction ritual chain (IRC) in the tourist field, and the fusion of the Graburn sacred tour model, the author summarizes the dynamic mechanism of the emotional energy of tourism experience (below): Emotional energy I. is the driving factor for people in the daily life world to generate tourism needs, and under its impetus, the tourist experiences the alternation and transformation of the tourist field in the tourism world. As well as various interactive rituals with the tourism space as the stage, the tourist groups with different emotional energy intensities are temporarily liberated from structured social relations; and then through the common attention and mutual concern of the body present, and with the help of various symbolic interaction behaviors, a new emotional energy II characterized by group unity and emotional sharing is finally formed. Emotional Energy II. can make tourists maintain a relatively optimistic, confident and positive psychological state when returning to the world of daily life; on the other hand, it also makes tourists look forward to their next trip. Emotional energy is constantly gathered, formed and decayed in such a chain of causal cycles, and guides and adjusts people's flow between the world of daily life and the world of tourism.
The author creatively combines the two models of interactive ritual chain and sacred travel in the tourism world to form a new theoretical framework, which profoundly reveals the content, mechanism and law of tourism experience in the tourism field.
Figure 3 The dynamic mechanism of emotional energy in tourism experience
2.3 Sense of tourism ceremony
YAN Xingyu, YANG Xiaozhong. Characteristics of Tourism Ritual and Its Influence on Tourism Destination Management[J]. Tourism Journal, 2020, 35(09): 104-112.
It has been 40 years since the introduction of the theory of tourism rituals, however, from the perspective of tourists, the study of the sense of ritual experienced by tourists is relatively scarce. As an indicator of in-depth spiritual experience, the sense of tourism ceremony is the core and soul of expressing the spiritual comfort of tourists in tourism activities. The authors point out that as more and more tourists pursue ritualistic experiences in the travel process, destination management faces new requirements.
Based on this, the article focuses on the characteristics of tourism rituals and their impact on tourism destination management. First of all, on the basis of the review of relevant literature, the author proposes the definition of tourism ritual sense: "When tourists are integrated into the specific ritual situation of tourist destinations, participate in various tourism ritual activities provided by tourist destinations, and establish contact with the outside world, the sum of emotional responses generated is the sense of ceremony in tourism, including a sense of awe, happiness, pleasure, solemnity, etc.", that is, the essence of tourism ritual is a sacred tourism experience. Secondly, based on the characteristics and functions of tourism experience and rituals, the author summarizes the four characteristics and four functions of tourism ritual sense, namely subjectivity, participation, process, situational characteristics, as well as transformation, standardization and cohesion, entertainment, and strengthening functions. Then, the author analyzes the impact of tourism ritual on destination management from three aspects: planning and development, marketing methods and utility, service quality and satisfaction evaluation system. Taking the destination planning and development of red tourism as an example, the tourists' sense of tourism ceremony appeal has a certain guiding effect on the destination planning theme, spatial layout, atmosphere creation, image positioning: red tourism has cultural, educational and political attributes, which requires tourist destinations to highlight the red theme in the planning and development process, and create a ceremonial atmosphere through specific scene design and ceremonial activities, such as "the horn of victory" and "the spirit of Jinggangshan".
The article extends the perspective from ritual to ritual, from tourists to destinations, providing new ideas for ritual research in the field of tourism, and also putting forward specific suggestions for the marketing of rituals in destinations.
Figure 4 Research framework on the impact of tourism rituals on tourism destination management
Epilogue
The use of rituals has had an impact that cannot be ignored. Compared with the marketing field, the research on rituals in the tourism field is still in the stage of theoretical construction, and the research content is mostly the elaboration of the essence, connotation, characteristics and functions of tourism ceremonies and tourism rituals, but there is not enough attention to how to apply ritual theory in tourism practice and how to measure the sense of ceremony of tourists from the perspective of tourism experience. There are still many unique concepts in ritual theory, such as collective jubilation and emotional energy, which need to be widely verified in the field of tourism marketing management. Only by combining the qualitative research methods of anthropology and sociology with the quantitative research methods of marketing management can we further explore the application potential of ritual theory in a wider range.
bibliography
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Wei Haiying, Wang Ying, Ran Yaxuan, Zhang Yishi, Shu Lifang. Small Things, Big Happiness: The Impact of Service Rituals on Brand Well-being from the Perspective of Interactive Ritual Chain Theory[J]. Advances in Psychological Science, 2018, 26(07): 1141-1151.
[7] Nelson Greyburn. Anthropology and the Age of Tourism[M]. Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2009.
Zhao Hongmei. On the Application of Ritual Theory in Tourism Research: A Commentary on Professor Nalsh Graeben's "Tourism Ritual Theory"[J]. Tourism Journal, 2007(09): 70-74.
Xie Yanjun, Xu Ying. Interactive Rituals in Tourism Fields: A Dynamic Analysis of Emotional Energy in Tourism Experience[J]. Tourism Science, 2016, 30(01): 1-15.
Yan Xingyu, Yang Xiaozhong. Characteristics of Tourism Ritual and Its Influence on Tourism Destination Management[J]. Tourism Journal, 2020, 35(09): 104-112.
Responsible Editor || Xingyang Lv, Associate Professor, School of Business Administration, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics
The picture and text were transferred from the Tourism Journal, invaded and deleted!