Ritual

Ritual: Survival, Resistance, Joy is an eight-part, monthly PBS docuseries, which premiered during Black History Month in 2023. All eight episodes are now available on PBS.org and on the station's YouTube channel, PBS Voices. The episodes delve into rituals of the Black diaspora, depicting folk beliefs, foodways, and intangible and tangible cultural practices passed and shared between multiple generations of Blacks and Indigenous communities. Host Tarriona “Tank” Ball, a New Orleans native and frontwoman of the GRAMMY award-nominated group Tank and The Bangas, masterfully fosters culturally rooted connections with guest scholars and artists. The tradition bearers featured in each episode often inform the audience of their respective customs and traditions through participatory engagement, talking with Tank about their work as they cook a recipe, play and sing a song in a church atmosphere, or hunt and fish.Episode 1, “How Did Black Graveyards Become Battlegrounds of Resistance?,” introduces benevolent societies, gravekeeping, and the sacred music of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The episode addresses and describes cultural meanings associated with burials that are propagated by the Southern Black diaspora. Though the entire series explores folk beliefs and interactions with Black ecology, tangible and intangible conservation, and the valuing and disvaluing of Black life, Episode 1 introduces the discourse on how practicing communities approach non-Black responses to African American life. Featured guest Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, states, “The very act of taking care of the burial grounds is so important, right! It respects that space and ensures it is a peaceful resting [area] so people can come and commune with their ancestors. It is also a historical record!” (06:58). Setting the tone for the series, this episode suggests that the ritual act of taking care of graves for transcended ancestors is a revolutionary statement intended to reject the notion that enslaved peoples were valued only for their work, and that there is no value in the death of Black bodies, or the living memory of Black life.Foodways and the social implications of food, Black imprisonment, and White supremacy are contextualized in Ritual. Episode 2, “Why Does This Soup Symbolize Freedom for Haitians?,” features a soup called joumou, historically only consumed by the White elite, yet made by the imprisoned and enslaved Blacks of Haiti. After the Haitian Revolution, the soup became the focal point of liberation celebrations and is now known as Haiti's national dish. The idea of foodways, which includes the sacred and symbolic spaces involved with cooking, like the kitchen, is front and center in Ritual. The program communicates that the significance of both the kitchen and foodways entails more than just recipes and taste, though recipes and taste are important. The kitchen represents a safe space for Black and Indigenous folk beliefs and rituals, where discussions and informal cooking lessons are passed down through generations. Maggie Gomez, a Voodoo priestess and tradition bearer who is featured in this episode, shares, “My great grandma taught me how to do it. At the house, everyone had to learn how to make the old food in case of emergency. Even the kids. My grandma would call us up into the kitchen and say, ‘Watch what I am doing,’ so this is how everyone in my house learned how to cook” (08:08). The women of my own family, who are from Louisiana and Mississippi, and my wife and her lineage in the South Carolina Gullah region, all learned to cook in this way. They refer to their kitchen cabinets as their medicine chests or medicine cabinets. In the series, as I've also witnessed in my own life, the kitchen can be a healing tool to aid in building connection with the land and its sacred resources.Each episode of the series communicates to the audience that the rituals observed and explored and the people who participate in them are all connected. Ritual also raises the point that Black cultural rituals often function as survival methods. Episodes 3 and 4, which discuss Black Indians of New Orleans and the practice of Hoodoo, respectively, identify rituals that have put Blacks in danger. Interviewees explain how, historically, practitioners had to secretly undertake ritual activities. In Episode 3, the Second Chief of the Golden Eagles Tribe, Joseph Boudreauz, Jr. says, “150 years ago, to be a masking Indian in the street was illegal. The police department was given instructions that if they saw any Black men dancing or parading in any kind of costume that resembled Indians, they would take them to jail! Our culture was always built on [secrets] because we could not be ourselves” (08:53). Though the series is African-centric, Boudreaux, Jr., also explains that dark-skinned Indians had to live in secret, always afraid of being taken to reservations, which further explains the guarded and secretive nature of Black Masking Indian culture. Traditional Black expressions such as call and response live in Black ritual forms and are represented in practices and performances ranging from the second line (the strutting and dancing line that follows the main line of New Orleans parades and celebrations) and Mardi Gras parades to church choirs singing at repasses (feasts that follow the viewing, service, and burial at many Southern Black funerals) and other celebratory events.One of my favorite moments of the Ritual series happens in Episode 5, “How River Baptisms Shaped Black Musical Tradition.” Deacon Ted Bradley shares what it was like to baptize church members in rivers, which required using sticks to remove snakes and other wildlife prior to the ceremony. Memories such as Bradley's, combined with narratives shared by other guests on this episode and others, demonstrate the importance of primary sources in telling the story of Black traditions, evoking collective memory and representing Black folk with firsthand information. The inclusion of Mexican traditions, such as corridos and border ballads, in the series illustrates the shared and connected experience of marginalized groups dealing with oppressive systems in the Americas. Great storytellers and tradition bearers such as Grayhawk Perkins give the series credibility by representing Black and Indigenous communities and their diverse rituals that, in many ways, overlap. For example, Episode 8, “Inside One of the South's Oldest Rituals,” discusses hunting traditions and practices and drives home the idea that rituals transcend community and race.As a whole, the series also presents examples of the prevalence of sound in Black rituals and traditions. Black traditional music, oral and aural history, and living testimonies to the Black experience are presented throughout the series. Interviewees describe and emphasize how these expressions function and are involved in various Black and Indigenous spaces. We see examples of the importance of aural traditions in the singing and dancing involved in the Green Corn Ceremonies in Episode 7 and Episode 5, both of which highlight the significance of music in church settings within Black communities.As a series, Ritual invites a discussion about ethnographic field interviews and participatory observation. I recently taught an undergraduate course called “African American Folklore” and could envision incorporating Ritual episodes into at least 4 weeks of my lessons. The program not only adds firsthand accounts in contemporary form to the discourse on Black folk traditions, but it also encompasses what many scholars of folklore studies currently aim to do: collaborate with communities of practice to inform scholars and the public of their traditions, folklore, and group narratives while assisting communities in creating communal repositories.These collaborations, seamlessly captured and broadcasted in this series, address African American foodways and family folklore, Black folk belief and spirituality, music, and African American tangible and intangible culture. In “African American Diversity and the Study of Folklore,” an essay featured in the 1993 special issue of the Journal of American Folklore, “Theorizing Folklore: Toward New Perspectives on the Politics of Culture” (52[2/4]:151-71), John Roberts wrote, “The source of a perception of pathology associated with African American vernacular creativity derives from the fact that, within a Eurocentric discourse of folkness, European folk are not only seen as the original folk, but also European folklore is seen as defining folklore” (p. 161). Ritual provides an inside perspective on Black folklore, discussing and disseminating it through the lens of Black folk and practitioners, which is significant for academic, public, and grade school programming. The show can also function as an example of public folklore, providing a blueprint of strategies for public and academic folklorists, broadcasting stations, and funders to collaborate, create, and engage with stories for public platforms. This type of programming could be accompanied by curricula that could be utilized in a classroom or museum setting. Furthermore, it illuminates the methodology and collaboration with community utilized in collaborative ethnography, a concept described by folklorist Emily Hilliard in Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia. Hilliard introduces the concept of collaborative ethnography to an intended general readership, describing how the methodology “frames narratives as participatory and equitable dialogues, so that dialogue and equity become both the topic and the method” (University of North Carolina Press, 2022:xiv). As far as public folklore and community engagement are concerned, Ritual exemplifies this collective method. In an interview about the program, co-producer Avery White explains that she hopes Ritual will encourage an inclusive style of storytelling that becomes the norm. It is commendable and inspiring to see the application of concerted discourse and collaborative storytelling of Black and Indigenous folklife employed in a PBS television show, presenting what can be a solid direction for the discipline of folklore

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