Treatment Of The Absent Ritual Analysis

Page 100 paragraph 3 Here, Anton talks about negative ritual, which essentially is avoidance. One aspect of this involves Treatment of the Absent. This is when we talk about people differently when they are absent versus how we talk about them when they are present. He notes that even though we are taught that “talking behind someone’s back” is wrong, we still engage in this practice today. For example, if a roommate of mine never cleans up after herself, I may express my true feelings to the others or to my family over the phone; I won’t directly tell her that she is messy and never cleans up (because how we speak depends in part on who we are engaged with). However, not all Treatment of the Absent is negative, it can also be positive. This …show more content…
Along with this, it is noted that we engage in the corrective interchange process, which include apologies, explanations, or accounts of the situation. Anton gives one of his famous examples of the gravy boat and how the individual who spilled the gravy is the preferred one to initiate the process. By doing so, it acknowledges and shows respect for the ritual order. This not only helps to save the face of the individual who spilled the gravy, but also the others involved (since watching him lose face would cause them to lose face as well). An example of this happened to my roommates and I recently where one of their glasses broke. One of them was putting away dishes when a plate fell on top of the glass and caused it to shatter. When we told the other later on, she apologized for breaking the glass but stated that because it was so thin and the plate was so heavy, there was nothing she could have done to prevent it. By giving accounts of what happened, and apologizing, it minimized the seriousness of the event and allowed her to be seen as a considerate person rather than rude if she failed to tell and explain why a glass was