Design and Ritual. Crossed narratives among design, anthropology and sociology

This paper aims to underline disciplinary relations among design, anthropology and sociology in rituals. It also aims to verify the potentiality of this relation in creation of new kinds of scenarios, objects, places able to generate rituals and new social behaviors. Nowadays there are several rituals able to re-define themselves in heterogeneous social contexts; for this reason you can define the ritual as a “social must” (Martine Segalen 2002, Pierre Legendre 2005). Issues such as identity, memory and belonging especially in social contexts defined by migration, multiculturalism and cultural frictions, are crucial subjects for design approach. This paper aims at describing the power of rituals as a driving force of cultural identity. The focus will be on the provocative idea that it is possible to reinvent rituals, that it is possible to introduce some changes into a very codified and traditional practice. Just this flexibility allows the ritual to reinvent and survive in different contexts and to become an opportunity of comparison for a specific community to reaffirm the legitimacy of its values or to establish new ones. The value of ritual as a fundamental moment for negotiation of the cultural and social value between individuals and communities; it is a topic of interest for the current research because it identifies a range of markers of identity in the form of objects, places and ritual behaviors. Analyzing rituals through design tools one observes that the ritual practice possesses some morphological features, needs a specific context in terms of both time and space and encourages a collective dimension because it produces meaning for a specific group of people. This aspect contributes to social cohesion and encourages a sense of identity and responsibility/commitment that helps individuals to feel part of a community and enables important dynamics of dialogue with other communities.