Tina Dacin's ICOS talk on Cambridge High Table

Tina Dacin of Queens University just gave the ICOS talk on research she's been doing that came out of her sabbatical year at Cambridge. She was fascinated by high table,  the very formal dining traditions within each of the colleges for students, fellows and the college master, with the fellows and master having their own table - often literally on a raised platform in the hall.

She brought out lots of interesting issues about the various functions of these highly-scripted activities: for maintaining universities over time, for affecting social mobility and for reproducing British class consciousness. But the aspect that seems relevant for this blog was her classification of high table as a ritual.

I was of two minds about the choice of that term. Tina has been studying the background scholarship - she started off by listing, among many others, Richard Schechner, Maurice Halbwachs, and Victor Turner, so she probably chose 'ritual' carefully. And that's a term we often use when we want to indicate that things are tightly constrained by norms.  But I also have the idea that to be a ritual a collective activity needs to be efficacious. Marriage, the eucharist, baptism, animal sacrifice and the like actually transform the status of either the universe or some of the participants. If done properly they propitiate the gods, or make you really married. This is part of why it is especially important that they are done correctly.

But at high table, while there is a lot at stake for newbies trying to follow the complex conventions of which fork to use, or which form of address, there isn't really a transformation being effected, as I understand it. (An exception might be those once-a-month occasions when new fellows are inducted into a college. Then someone really is made a fellow.) At a regular dinner, if someone does something that simply "isn't done" (as Dacin noted she was told at one point when she wanted to leave the table to greet a fellow Canadian) it doesn't follow that the purpose of the evening's activity wasn't properly accomplished. In contrast, if the groom doesn't say "I do" at the wedding there are much deeper repercussions.

Wondering about whether I would use 'ritual' (and thinking maybe not), got me thinking about whether I would use 'routine' instead. High table certainly seems like the sort of activities that have been labeled "recurring action patterns" of organizations. But trying to be careful about the terms used within that broad category raises the question of whether very scripted social occasions like high table, conducted regularly within an organization like a Cambridge college, are properly called 'routines'.

It seems like the production of the meal for the participants by the staff would qualify. Dacin went over things like chefs and kitchens and silver-polishing that all have to be mobilized to bring it off every evening.

But what about just filing out to the table in the proper order, wearing your academic gown, eating, drinking and making small talk according to the local social rules? Is a fellow who does that many nights per week engaged in a routine? Is a routine like a ritual, in the classic (efficacious) sense of the term: requiring that a participant feels that correct performance is required to successfully accomplish some larger goal? If so, then maybe high table is not a routine either.

I guess I lean toward the idea that an action pattern could be a routine without meeting the stronger requirements for using 'ritual'. So maybe one could say that Dacin is actually studying the dining routine at Cambridge in the way that Martha Feldman studied the budgeting routine at the university housing office where she did her field work. It could be important to its being a routine that there is some purpose to the activity - in this case that would be dining - but maybe it's not actually a ritual since, with the exception of inductions, no major transformation is accomplished and violations of norms only embarrass the participants involved.