Ritual is an important tool for making sense of meaningful, orderly action that seeks to catalyze a particular resonance or response. Robert Bellah’s (1967) famous notion of “civil religion,” for example, was elucidated through the ways the ritual of presidential addresses catalyzes citizen engagement with the most sacred beliefs of American political life. Over the last twenty years in sociology, however, challenges have been waged at the viability and expansiveness of ritual to capture the complexities and indeterminacies of late modern life, including from Bellah’s own students (Alexander 2004; Gorski 2017). How can we study ritual, or ritual-like action, in a way that prioritizes symbolic meanings of the sacred and profane (à la Durkheim [1995]) while also capturing interpretive agency and contingencies in action?
In response, I offer the analytic framework of social performance, or cultural pragmatics, which uses six elements—background representations/foreground scripts, actors, audiences, mise-en-scéne, means to symbolic production, and boundaries of social power (both material and symbolic)—to analyze ritual-like social action. While this framework has most frequently been used in studies of politics (e.g., Alexander 2010; Mast 2013; Altınordu 2017; Karakaya 2020; Villegas 2020; Morgan 2021), I argue that social performance analysis is a valuable approach for scholars of religion, especially given the framework’s sensitivity to interpretation and meaning in powering ritual action, and the ways in which power—both material and symbolic—shape, empower, and constrain ritual action.
This paper explores these theoretical affordances for studies of ritual in religion through a multi-method qualitative study of American travel writer, PBS host, and Lutheran philanthropist Rick Steves. Across nine years of ethnographic study of Rick Steves’ Europe guided group tours, text analysis of his 60-book guidebook series (which sells 1 million copies a year) and his long-running PBS show and NPR radio show, and interviews with Steves’ staff and travelers, I demonstrate the power of social performance to reveal the ways in which travel is not only a consumptive practice of leisure but a project of moral formation akin to religious ritual. Combining social performance with literature on religion, media, and religious nationalism (e.g., Asad 1983; Morgan 2005; West 2008; Jennings 2010; Kaell 2014; Lofton 2017; Zubrzycki 2022; Sonnevend 2024) I argue that Steves’ performance of travel presents European travel as a pilgrimage-like opportunity that can catalyze a “cosmopolitan revelation” that purifies travelers of the evils of “small town, small mind” or ethnocentric thinking. This is promised through engagement with what Steves calls “travel as a political act” (2018), a prescriptive and redemptive philosophy that says if Americans travel the “Rick Steves way” they can have their “ethnocentric self-assuredness walloped” and be transformed (vii-27).
In our current political moment, Rick Steves has emerged as an important religious and political activist who directly counters the Trump administration, amongst other progressive endeavors. Through his media programs on the history of European fascism, public talks on Lutheranism and “travel as a spiritual act,” and evangelizing for the sacrality of locality and tradition in a rapidly globalizing world, I return to Bellah’s concept of “civil religion” and consider how Steves’ performance of travel as a pilgrimage ritual renders him a “civil religionist” who advocates for a global and “genuinely trans-national” civil religion, as Bellah calls it (18), in which American civil religion is only one amongst many.
This study is thus not only a theoretical engagement with ritual and social performance frameworks that seek to refine and expand conceptual understanding, but also a study of how concepts of ritual and performance illuminate the ways religion, and projects of moral formation, are hidden in seemingly secular spaces like travel. Social performance theory, as an extension of ritual studies and a sociology of ritual, is a powerful advocate for the importance of studying religion today.
References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy,” Sociological Theory22 (4): 527-573.
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2010. The Performance of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Altınordu, Ateş. 2017. “A Midsummer Night’s Coup: Performance and Power in Turkey’s July 15 Coup Attempt,” Qualitative Sociology 40:139–164. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-017-9354-y
Asad, Talal. 1983. “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man 18 (2): 237-259.
Bellah, Robert. 1967. “Civil religion in America,” Daedalus 96(Winter):1-21.
Durkheim, Emile. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. by Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press.
Gorski, Philip. 2017. American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jennings, Willie James. 2010. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kaell, Hillary. 2014. Walking Where Jesus Walked. New York: New York University Press.
Karakaya, Yağmur. 2020. “The Conquest of Hearts: The Central Role of Ottoman Nostalgia within Contemporary Turkish Populism,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology (8): 125-157.
Lofton, Kathryn. 2017. Consuming Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mast, Jason. 2013. The Performative Presidency. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Morgan, David. 2005. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Morgan, Marcus. 2021. “Symbolic action and constraint: the cultural logic of the 2017 UK General Election,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 10(3):355-397. doi: 10.1057/s41290-021-00129-y.
Sonnevend, Julia. 2024. Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics. Princeton.
Steves, Rick. 2018. Travel as a Political Act. Berkeley, CA: Avalon Travel.
Villegas, Celso M. 2020. “Performing rituals of affliction: how a Governor’s Press conferences provided mediatized sanctuary in Ohio,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 8: 352–383.
West, Brad. 2008. “Enchanting Pasts: The Role of International Civil Religious Pilgrimage in Reimagining National Collective Memory,” Sociological Theory 26 (3): 258-270.
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.