Our project about rituals in families is part of a broader case study on the production of the social through rituals at a primary school in an inner city area of Berlin, which also includes projects about rituals at school and in peer groups dealing with media and gender. In our project we want to provide a thick description of the performative aspects of rituals in institutional contexts and our work is focussed on the processes of community production.
  Our hypothesis is that families become social communities (Gemeinschaften) within verbal and nonverbal forms of interaction. These forms are ritualised and constantly performed on the family stage. The performative quality of these forms allows for roles, unity, intimacy, solidarity and integration to be developed in the family. This means that the family as an institution is not only characterised by collectively shared symbolic knowledge (Douglas 1986), but also by staging this knowledge through rituals, which verify the family order and integrity (Eder 1997). Families are dramatic fields of action. For us, the notion of family as a community is characterised by two aspects: it is a room of shared experiences (Mannheim 1980) and a system of interactions, which creates its unity also in diverged actions (Burgess 1926).
  Our investigation brings to the foreground the ritual and educational forms of interactions during the family meal and at Christmas. Eating rituals belong to the category of patterned interactions. This type of ritual mediates between simple daily habits and very highly symbolical family celebrations, such as Christmas.
  One of our aims is to analyse the style of family practical rituals using qualitative research methods (ethnography). The basic underlying question is: ”What the hell is going on here?” (Geertz). But contrary to many ethnographical projects which try to discover the unknown, our interest is to investigate the seemingly familiar in the banality of daily rituals in families. To do so, four methods are combined: observations, talk analyses, group discussions and interviews. Throughout our research, the concept of performativity is regarded as a search instrument corresponding to conventionalised practices, their performance character and their effects. In this sense the performative elements occur specifically according to the given method.
  Our observations concentrate on one hand on the expressive quality and the development of nonverbal interactions and attitudes, and on the other hand on the space in which the ritual takes place. Thus we also hope to understand synesthetical moments and contextualisations such as atmosphere, smells, music and pictures in the ritual space as well as insignificant or incidental actions.
  Our analysis of taped talks in daily rituals under performative aspects gives priority to dramaturgy and discourse organisation, to indexing quality of predicates, notions and particles, distribution of roles, to forms of speech acts. (An example follows shortly.)
  In our interpretations of group discussions we ask: how (modi operandi) does the family set itself thematically as a community? In general we want to focus on mutualities between the ritual types of patterned interactions and celebrations, and on forms of consideration as well as on the performance of the family as community in our presence. A central question arises here as to which borders and opportunities of transformation exist in the community.

  In the analyses of the interviews our focus is on the following questions: how does a common and shared room of experiences develop in the family despite individual perspectives on rituals? How are ritual practices legitimised? And also, which traditions are developed in the background of the family?
  In the following we will present an example of a ritualised sequence - how a family works on differences between the generations - to derive some continuing comments about ritualised institution in education.
  Example: A ritualised sequence of arranging the differences between generations
  A ritual sequence for us is defined by the arrangement and presentation of verbal and nonverbal interactions (conventions, procedures) which are locally and temporally delimited, which suggest scenic-mimetic reproduction and represent normative demands and in which the community can be described as both a medium and a result of this process. Ritual passages show how the family solve the central problem of creating itself as a unity within differences and balancing between continuity and change.
  The chosen passage is taken from a lunch time conversation in the Maier family involving the mother and her 12 year old daughter, Dorothea. The mother is separated and works as a religion teacher under the auspices of the protestant church. Dorothea left primary school last summer. Usually the family have lunch and dinner together at the eating table in the sitting room. Lunch usually takes place round 2.30 and dinner between 6 to 7 p.m.
  Lunch on Thursday, 3rd June 1999:
1 M I'm going to have to leave early. I need to buy something. Bread and some
drinks.
2 M I could just through it all in the car.
3 D Hm. (5)
4 M Or you could go and buy it from the bakery.
5 D Hm (negative).
6 M Oh, go on.
7 D I always forget to do it.
8 M No.
9 D Yes.
10 M I'll write you a note.
11 M It's only to the bakery.
12 D Then you can do it!
13 M Only (swallows the wrong way), only to the bakery.
14 D Oh, o.k. (low)
  Analysis under performative aspects
  For the present this short dialogue appears to be a negotiation process of responsibilities in a family. And even in this short passage, the variation of framings and the connected opportunities of interpretation attract attention. Here, family tasks are shared out with only a few cryptic statements, in what seems to be a dialogue of minimal art in which stereotypes are used as arguments. The scene is highly indexical: a lot is suggested implicitly and this remains un-outspoken throughout the dialogue, even though the family members are aware of this. The dramaturgy of this small scene can be typified (lines 1-5) as the opening and closure of an ellipsis (syntactically incomplete statement), (lines 6-11) as excursion about the daughter's competences, and at the end (from lines 12-14), as symmetric discourse "inter pares". In this sense a non-intentional learning paradigm appears: With the ellipsis the mother opens up the possibility for Dorothea to how proof of a range of competence such as cognitive, social and practical competence. But more fundamentally, the fact is that she allows Dorothea to find a return to her ”offer” and that she makes the symmetry between the partners of dialogue in that situation possible. With this she opens up the room for an autonomous decision for her daughter. In this respect, the small passage is not only about shopping, but first of all about the question how should which roles and responsibilities are shared in the family.
  Our interpretation suggests one see this passage as a working out process of the differences between childhood on the one hand and particular competences of youth and adulthood on the other hand. The mother educates the daughter regarding perspective taking, understanding, competence improving and autonomy. But it is also possible to see here a motherly strategy of relief and power. In both respects the passage manifests the educational work on the difference between generations. Thus, education does not immediately apply to the domination of the children, but to the relation between the generations and its control (Benjamin 1984).
  Under performative aspects the (ritualised) solution is characterised by reciprocal complementarity: The mother thinks of the family's supplies and "forgets" her role, the daughter "always" forgets beverages and bread, but takes the role of the mother. The community keeps existing, because both of them accept this solution at the end. Dorothea proves her solidarity and by that her capacity to understand and to take responsibilities in the family. The implicit understanding in the family's communication causes such a solidarity, which seems to be all the more important, all the more stabilising in that it is not made into a topic.
  Continuing comments about ritualised institution/insertion
  Ritualised sequences are part of a family ritual. Their complexity is in no way inferior to the ”big” ritual: under a functional aspect, ritualised sequences express the acknowledgement and affirmation of community; under a coordinating aspect, they reveal social opportunities of integration and solidarity in the community. From a socialising perspective, ritualised sequences are a medium to develop identities and roles, and from symbolic point of view, they refer to correlations in the family biography and to the social milieu. With regard to the performative aspect, which is of most interest to us, the above-named features become dimensions of experiences, which constitute communal orders.
  Ritual sequences or passages present the correlation between individual attitudes and the family institution. They express the normative demands of a family, the attitude of expectation and of expectation of expectations (Luhmann) as well as possible sanctions for members. In this connection, rituals acquire familial solidarity not notion-reflexively, but inconspicuously: with scenic-mimetic participation and duplication in verbal interactions. Family as a performative community constitutes itself fundamentally by bodily and verbal unconscious expressive processes of recognition (Bourdieu 1982).
  If our ritualised sequence is seen as a ritual of institution (rite d‘institution), then it is connected with the realisation of strategies of legitimation and acknowledgement, which want to reveal an arbitrary distinction - in our case the role attribution - as a natural one. Consequently education is fundamentally the performative process of rituals of institution, which creates a social identity by calling lasting dispositions and availabilities. The seemingly incidental ”o.k.” in the passage acknowledges the delegating discursive power of the mother. The community of mother and daughter finds in this way its acknowledgment through the mutual and complementary recognition of the new roles and their importance for the community.