Ceremonial in the Current Cultural Anthropology - Media Influences

Extensive ritual research, through the examination of different schools of thought or through the disciplines that assumed it, has led to generating a rich literature on the subject, which accumulated various approaches of disarming complexity around the ritual concept. As specially elaborated cultural creations, in whose scheme the sequential acts play their own logic and in which words carry particular meanings and objects a multitude of significances, the rites represent today a dimension that belongs at the same time to anthropology, psychology, sociology, journalism, history or to other sciences that “have the courage” to methodologically inquire such a rich and complex field of study. The proliferation of new lifestyles in postrevolutionary Romania, the emergence of social categories oriented towards novel, exclusivist occupations which draw the direct and immediate attention of media consumers: local barons, media moguls, drug dealers, mafia leaders, stars from the entertainment industry, have reshaped and directed the patterns of performance, understanding and hypostatization of ritual events towards the loisir, which is embraced by a growing number of individuals desiring social identification with “models” promoted by the mass media. This research looks into models of ritual performance belonging to the higher class, in order to determine the relationship between lifestyle, mass-media and specific ritual behaviour