Commencement as Civic Ritual: An Anthropological Analysis

Introduction: Commencement as a Subject of Anthropological Study

Anthropologists can use descriptive, longitudinal, comparative, and multiscale research when studying human societies around the world — and can deploy these same methods quite close to home, even within the scholastic environment that surrounds them and surrounds their students. The 2003 article by Peter Magolda, entitled "Saying Good-Bye: An Anthropological Examination of a Commencement Ritual," conducts a descriptive anthropology of a specific graduation commencement that will become part of the author's larger study of exit rituals in higher education. The graduation event described in the article is a singular one, however. It occurred in "May 2001 at a medium-size public, 4-year residential campus in the Midwest, serving mostly traditional-age students." Thus, the anthropological research is observational and descriptive, but will later be combined with larger comparative analysis of different graduation ceremonies at different locations across the United States. (Magolda, 2003, p. 1)

As manifest in the article's title, the researcher Peter M. Magolda sees the commencement ritual as a liminal ritual — a rite of passage from one state of being into another — in which college students say good-bye to their old lives as students and hello to their new lives as citizens and workers in a capitalist democracy. "Commencement, an institutionally sponsored annual exit ceremony on most American college campuses," has come to celebrate "the academic accomplishments of graduating students and marks the end of their college careers and the beginning of their lives in the real world." (Magolda, 2003, p. 1)

Rather than comparing high school and college commencements, or subsuming all commencement ceremonies into the same category, the paper focuses on college commencement alone. The author believes this ritual has become particularly significant as a marker of status — from youth to adulthood, from student to worker. It is the last civic ritual in a young person's life for many secular students, and thus "illuminates the power of rituals to transmit cultural norms and provides an anthropological perspective that benefits scholars, practitioners, and policy makers as they endeavor to better understand and modify campus culture." In other words, the author suggests, students move from the relatively carefree and questioning days of college into a more rigorously structured and conformist style of behavior through the regime of the commencement ceremony. (Magolda, 2003, p. 1)

The ritualistic nature of commencement is manifest even in the language of the rite. Much as a hymnal, a Mass, or a Kaddish ceremony provides pre-set words in different faiths, commencement graduation rhetoric — urging students to become "good citizens" of the world or national community, to "make a difference in society," to "become the leaders of tomorrow," or simply to "get out there and do something" — has become so commonplace that the parental audience and the students themselves hardly question whether college actually prepares graduates to meet the challenges of citizenship, or whether there is any meaningful bridge between the questioning spirit of the college classroom and the demands of civic life in America. (Magolda, 2003, p. 1)

Magolda justifies his anthropology of commencement rituals on the grounds that the ritualistic nature of the rite is so ingrained in the fabric of campus culture that it has become immune from the kind of critical analysis anthropology is designed to bring forth through examination. What is most familiar can be most foreign to analysis, the author suggests. Meanings are embedded in the structure of the rite, and rituals — particularly those that take place in educational contexts — "are seldom scrutinized" yet exist as "important sources for revealing social and cultural conditions," such as, for example, the heightened social anxiety following September 11th. Rituals in general "reveal much about the ritual organizers and participants," and "are political acts that communicate expectations and norms for behavior and performance (that is, transmit culture)" of citizenship and societal identity. Even the act of sitting still, silently, and listening to the rhetoric of citizenship and service is peculiar to commencement and is not characteristic of the college experience in general.

Type of Anthropology and Methodology

Although Magolda states that he will later expand his anthropology of commencement into a larger comparative study, he defends his primarily descriptive approach as both valid and essential to his thesis — that commencement attempts to inculcate American social participation as central to civic identity. "One way that anthropologists enhance awareness of the power and reality of culture is through the study of ritual, a cultural form." (Magolda, 2003, p. 1) He calls his specific descriptive methodology "interpretive interactionism," in which he both observes, participates in, and interacts with the commencement environment while maintaining an anthropologist's critical perspective.

To do so, he collected data using three primary ethnographic tools: observations (descriptive analysis), statistical data — such as the fact that approximately 1.2 million college seniors officially complete the requirements for a baccalaureate degree each year, and more than half a million students receive associate degrees — as well as interviews, participation, and artifact analysis, though description forms the main part of the author's interpretive method. He "kept a detailed chronology of my fieldwork activities including the date, time, location of each event and a list of those with whom I interacted. I recorded my observations, participation, and interviews in a notebook and elaborated upon these notes shortly after each event. Whenever permissible, I audiotaped formal interviews and videotaped public events and checked my findings with participants." (Magolda, 2003, pp. 1–2) In this way, Magolda attempted to guard against an overly subjective approach to descriptive research while still valuing the importance of anthropological narrative when deconstructing a civic rite.

The author describes the ceremony in detail, complete with Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1" and proud, sleepy graduates who appear to be traditional-age seniors in the 22-to-24-year-old range, though older students occasionally appear in the double-file procession. The university president exclaims: "Good morning, Class of 2001! It is my pleasure to welcome you to [University]'s 162nd Spring Commencement. Please remain standing and join [Student], a senior voice performance major, in the singing of our national anthem."