ABSTRACT
This chapter looks closely at some of the ways in which stylized, small-scale institutional rituals of the Catholic Church were repurposed in a Catholic school classroom in Philadelphia amongst Vietnamese American and Mexican students. It analyzes a classroom-level interaction between a small group of students, where academic roles and tasks were hotly contested and negotiated, as apercus of how the fleeting but artful deployment of Catholic ritual may function as an interactional resource. The chapter outlines how students creatively used the ritual text of the Catholic act of contrition to pivot footing and reconstrue a tense peer exchange in their classroom. It explores the notion of “interpersonal verbal ritual”, the small-scale, everyday, habituated practices with which we engage one another in face-to-face encounters. When standard protocols of “face” and larger-scaled political ideologies about conversation violate the ritual order of the encounter, it is “apologies, which are part of the flow of deference rituals in conversation”.
