Abstract
In common parlance the terms ‘ritual’, ‘ceremony’ and ‘symbols’ have a bad reputation. Qualifiers such as ‘mere’, ‘just’ and ‘only’ are usually adjoined to all these terms, discrediting their meaning as modes of social action. We encounter negative conceptions of such actions, described as ‘only’ and ‘merely symbolic’ or ‘just’ a ‘ceremonial rehearsal’, lacking any political significance. The same holds true for the perception of rites and rituals in the study of public apologies. As Danielle Celermajer observes, the ‘qualifier “mere” is ubiquitous’.1 On the one hand, state apologies are branded as ‘abortive rituals’2 or late ‘modern rituals of repentance’3 stripped of any political significance. On the other hand, the performance of ‘a ceremonial apology without genuinely apologizing’ is seen as ‘one form in which apology has been politically miscarried over the years’.4 The dominant perception is that a ‘ritual apology is insincere and therefore meaningless’.5 Thus, in public opinion, as well as in the literature on public apologies, observers and social scientists tend to reduce the concept of ‘ritual’ to an insignificant, residual category.
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Notes
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era’, Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 2 (2000): 171–186.
Hermann Lübbe, Ich entschuldige mich: Das neue politische Bußritual (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 2001).
Jean-Marc Coicaud and Jibecke Jönsson, ‘Elements for Road Map for a Politics of Apology’, in The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, ed. Mark Gibney et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 86.
See also Nick Smith, ‘The Categorical Apology’, Journal of Social Philosophy 36, no. 4 (2005): 474.
Alison Dundes Renteln, ‘Apologies: A Cross-Cultural Analysis’, in The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, ed. Mark Gibney et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), fn 11.
Danielle Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 250–258;
Nava Löwenheim, ‘A Haunted Past: Requesting Forgiveness for Wrongdoing in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2009): 537–538;
Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 91–117.
Mary Douglas, In the Active Voice (New York: Routledge, 2011), 36.
Marc H. Ross, ‘Ritual and the Politics of Reconciliation’, in From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation, ed. Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 211.
Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980);
Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic Books, 1971).
Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy’, in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen and Jason L. Mast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–90;
Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, ‘Introduction: Secular Rituals: Forms and Meanings’, in Secular Ritual, ed. Sally F. Moore et al. (Assen: van Gorcum, 1977), 3–24.
Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998);
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 54.
Ruti Teitel, ‘The Transitional Apology’, in Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation, ed. Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 101–114;
Danielle Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Kora Andrieu, ‘“Sorry for the Genocide”: How Public Apologies Can Help Promote National Reconciliation’, Millennium — Journal of International Studies 38, no.1 (2009): 3–23.
Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Barry Schwartz, ‘Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II’. American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 909.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995).
Victor W. Turner, ‘Das Liminale und das Liminoide in Spiel, “Fluß” und Ritual: Ein Essay zur vergleichenden Symbologie’, in Vom Ritual zum Theater: Der Ernst des menschlichen Spiels, ed. Victor W. Turner (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus-Verlag, 2009), 69.
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, ‘Articulating Consensus: The Ritual and Rhetoric f Media Events’, in Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 167.
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, ‘Télévision d’intervention et spectacle politique: Agir par le rituel’, Hermès, 17–18 (1995): 174.
Zohar Kampf, ‘The Pragmatics of Forgiveness: Judgments of Apologies in the Israeli Political Arena’, Discourse Society 19, no. 5 (2008): 581; Martin Müller, ‘Doing Discourse Analysis in Critical Geopolitics’, L’Espace Politique 12 (2010), accessed 25 October 2012, http://espacepolitique.revues.org/index1743.html.
George Sanford, Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory (New York: Routledge, 2005), i.
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© 2014 Michel-André Horelt
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Horelt, MA. (2014). The Power of Ritual Ceremonies in State Apologies: An Empirical Analysis of the Bilateral Polish-Russian Commemoration Ceremony in Katyn in 2010. In: Mihai, M., Thaler, M. (eds) On the Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies. Rhetoric, Politics and Society Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343727_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343727_5
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