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3 Kiturim: Griping as a Verbal Ritual In Israeli Discourse INTRODUCTION As many Israelis concede, and some lament, the speech mode known in colloquial Israeli Hebrew as kiturim or kuterai, whose closest English equivalent would be "griping," has become an ever-present speech activity in informal encounters among Israelis. So much so that Friday night gatherings in Israeli homes, which form the major context for middle-class Israelis to get together socially, have earned the label mesibot kiturim, that is, "griping parties." The overall flavor ofthese parties is conveyed by the following lines from an article by a prominent Israeli journalist: About a year ag;o a group of us were sitting at a friend's house and, as is the habit among Israelis, we were griping about the situation. The immediate pretext for this collective bathing in our national-frustration-puddle was a rumor which circulated at the time concerning some instance of corruption in an important government agency (and which, incidentally, later proved to be largely untrue) and some half-insane political act ofa marginal group that manages to conquer the newspaper headlines from time to time (Ma'ariv, 29 Nov. 1980). A few months later, the same author talks about ''the masochistic griping parties held on Friday nights, which more than anything else reflect the attitudes of the public" (Ma 'ariv, 24 April, 1981). Although the Israeli griping mode finds its primordial expression in the type of speech event known as a ''griping party,'' it is by no means restricted to this prototypical context. It is a speech activity well-represented in many more casual and transient contexts. In what follows, I will delineate the structure and functions ofgriping in Israeli discourse, arguing that it constitutes a wellbounded and readily recognizable type of communicative event, both in its more and in its less paradigmatic forms. Moreover, I will not only argue that griping has evolved as im implicitly patterned interactional routine in Israeli social life, but also that its import and functions can be best understood by regarding it as a verbal ritual. The term ''ritual'' as used here refers to patterned symbolic action whose function it is to reaffirm participants' relationship to a culturally sanctioned 35 36 Communal Webs "sacred object" (or "unquestionable" in the secularized language of contemporary anthropology [Moore and Myerhoff 1977]). According to R. Firth, symbolic actions of this kind ''are communicative, but the information they convey refers to the control and regularization ofa social situation rather than to some descriptive fact" (1973b:301). Thus, whereas the "fire rituals" discussed in the next chapter are part ofthe officially recognized ceremonial idiom ofcontemporary Israel, and their ritual dimensions are clearly evident, griping parties are unofficial, unrecognized ceremonies of communal participation, in and through which the gibush-ethos plays itself out. This chapter, therefore, further explores the communicative contexts in which the Israeli accent on group solidarity and a collective orientation find their expression. It takes us from the more institutionalized rhetorics and ceremonial contexts of public life to the privatized domains of people's living rooms, where a ritualized idiom of communally oriented expression of discontent has evolved. The highly collectivistic orientation grounding griping rituals is brought out when they are compared to ritualized episodes for the expression ofdiscontent , which are part of the American cultural repertoire. In a previous study of such episodic sequences and their attendant communication mode (Katriel & Phillipsen 1981), a similar attempt was made to apply the ritual metaphor to the description of the speech event we have dubbed the "communication ritual," to which Americans refer by the locutions " sit down and talk" or ''discuss our relationship.'' This ritual pertains to the domain of intimate relationships and provides the major context for members of the culture to construct as well as to validate personal identities and generate intimacy through the form of talk known as "communication," which is culturally interpreted as "supportive speech." Throughout this chapter, wherever applicable, I will draw comparisons between the forms and functions associated with the American Communication Ritual, on the one hand, and the Israeli Griping Ritual on the other. The observations contained in this chapter are based both on my own intuitions as a "native griper" and on discussions with over fifty informants ofa predominantly middle-class background, ofwhom I recorded spontaneously expressed attitudes towards griping, descriptions of actual griping, as well as elicited responses to various appropriate and inappropriate uses of the term lekater "to gripe" and its morphologically related terms, such as...

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