Introduction

In this final chapter of Part II, I set out to examine the notion of the performer's moral responsibility via individual agency (Fischer and Ravizza 1998; cf. Chapter 1) in rites of moral aggression. As the previous chapters have made clear, rites of moral aggression are reactive forms of behaviour, which aim to restore the communal moral order and the normative flow of an event, and – unless they are politely fringed – to transgress the recipient's status from a ratified to an un/deratified member of the ‘civil society’. The uniqueness of rites of moral aggression is that the default moral sanctioning of impolite fringing disappears in these punitive actions, provided that they fulfil the community's moral expectations (as a social drama, cf. Chapter 1). The anthropologist Victor Turner (1967) defined such scenarios as the ritual of ‘anti-structure’, and I refer to them as transgressive rituals: in such ritual actions, the normative/default moral order of a society or a group and the consequent normative flow of interaction are temporarily suspended and transgressed, to be restored with the completion of the ritual. Yet, transgressive rites of moral aggression are different from other rites that Turner (1967) defines as anti-structural, such as rites of sexual initiation in tribal societies, because of their reactive nature, which not only triggers – but in fact requires – ad hoc behaviour from the performer. As we saw in Chapter 5, countering the heckler and intervening as a bystander are interactionally (co-)constructed rituals. As a result of the importance of ad hoc behaviour, the ritual performer needs to find a balance between animating the claimed normative view of the public, on the one hand, and coping with the challenges of these conflictive interactions as an individual, on the other. Furthermore, the performers of rituals are not robots: when someone counters a heckler, steps in to prevent a wrongdoer from abusing a victim, or performs another rite of aggression, he tends to be aware of his role as a sound box of the community. Being a figurehead of the community entails that the performer may want to index and construct his own identity; such attempts can be observed as soon as one deviates from the ‘script’ of a rite of moral aggression by personalising the ritual action.