From Ritual to Performance in the Study of Religion: the case of Rick Steves' Europe

Over the last twenty years, challenges have been waged at the viability of ritual to capture the complexities and indeterminacies of late modern life: how can we prioritize symbolic meanings of the sacred and profane in analysis while also capturing interpretive agency and contingency? The analytic framework of social performance is a robust solution. I argue that social performance analysis is a valuable approach for scholars of religion, given the framework’s sensitivity to meaning, aesthetics, and audience agency in powering ritual action as well as the ways in which power—both material and symbolic—empowers and constrains ritual action. This framework also doubles as a strong methodological advocate for the importance of studying religion, given the ways it illuminates moral frameworks that undergird seemingly secular spaces. This paper explores these conceptual affordances through a multi-method qualitative study of American travel writer, PBS host, and Lutheran philanthropist Rick Steves.