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Ritual and style across cultures 175

Communicative acts like greeting, expressing well-being, extending greetings
to others, expressing interest, etc., all serve to maintain a symbolic order among
the participants in a chain of activities. The semiotics of dress and habit, space
and presentation of food has ritualistic dimensions. For example, the semiotics
of dress is gendered in most cultures and recreates a gendered social cosmos. In
Western and many Eastern cultures, the female sex attributes exclusiveness and
delicacy to itself by dressing in lace and silk stockings, whereas men’s corre-
sponding dress code attributes robustness to the male sex. Many activities aris-
ing in social interaction thus carry with them ritual aspects and stand in some re-
lation to membership significance. Just as drinking wine and eating bread at
communion in a Christian church fulfill no practical or instrumental function –
they neither quench the thirst nor relieve the hunger of the participants – the eat-
ing and drinking at a party are not meant entirely to fulfill these functions, either.
Goffman (1967) indeed mentions parties as ceremonial events several times. In
many parts of the world, alcoholic drinks are obligatory at events to which
guests are invited in the evening. Drinking is ritually associated with “loosening
up”, informality, imbuing cheeriness and suppressing rigidity. In some areas, es-
pecially for men, shared drinking is a part of “brotherly” binding. In Caucasian
Georgia, whenever a guest appears, he or she must be especially honored, and
among men the ritual dimension of drinking always comes into play (Kotthoff
1991b, 1995). To his considerable surprise, a man coming from the West may
find himself required to empty a glass of Cognac even when invited to breakfast.
Interaction rituals are thus an essential means of symbolizing the quality of re-
lationships.
In this article we will examine the speech genre of toasting to show the
interconnection of style and ritual. It will be discussed how a pathetic style of
the toasting ritual creates a religious sphere for the dinner table society in Geor-
gia. In other formerly Soviet republics the ritual was also carried out in pathetic
style but without prayer formulas. Western people, in contrast, practice toasting
as a form of supporting “positive face needs” (i.e., thanking, congratulating, see
below).
Goffman’s interest in the interaction order is considerably more general than
that of, e.g., Brown and Levinson (1987). From a sociological perspective, he
assumes that the social order reveals itself in forms of interaction but is also his-
torically grounded in it. Over the span of his career Goffman attempted to es-
tablish person-to-person interaction as a separate field of study. In connection
with his studies of the interaction order, he also addressed those normative acts
which have implications for the social place of individuals. He observed the
dramatization of the social order in everyday encounters. Like linguistic anthro-
pologists (see Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz in this volume), Goffman sees the
access to social roles, ranks and functions not only as exogenous factors of com-
munication but also as something produced in the social encounter.