Making Catholics: The Ritual Production of Conformity in a Catholic Junior High School

Abstract

A great deal of conceptual confusion still surrounds the meaning of the word “ritual.” Consequently, ritual continues to have an ambiguous status in social science research. This is especially true of studies which attempt to analyze modern institutional life and contemporary cultural formations. This paper critically reconsiders the concept of ritual, particularly in the light of anthropologist Victor Turner's discussion of root paradigms. The author draws from recent work in ritual studies to analyze classroom instruction in a junior high school in downtown Toronto, Canada. Classroom instruction was discovered to be part of an intricate ritual system and was differentiated along religious and secular dimensions. Pervading all of classroom life, two root paradigms—which the author calls “becoming a Catholic” and “becoming a worker”—nested the values of the larger society. Corporate capitalist values associated with “becoming a worker” were discovered to complement closely those values associated with “becoming a Catholic.” Furthermore, the dialectical relationship between the root paradigms served to create the “ritual charter” of the school known as “becoming a citizen.”