ABSTRACT
The popular understanding of ritual is shaped less by scholarly debate than by media presentation. The media package rites into saleable, consumable products. Documentaries and other programs aired on television market not only the paraphernalia and performances of rites but also the idea of ritual. Because it attends to the full range of ritual, ritual studies must attend not only to scholarly definitions of ritual but to popular depictions as well, because they help form the attitudes participants carry into the enactment of rites. The trouble is that media renditions of rites (as enacted) and ritual (as thought about) are seldom studied critically even by ritual studies scholars, because they are often preoccupied with physically and socially embodied rites, rather than virtual ritualizing. But media renditions of ritualized activity persist, for example, in Survivor and other so-called “reality” shows. So it is worth attending to the details of a specific example.
