Release date: January 28, 2000
Contact: Nancy Seideman, Director, 404-727-0640, or nseidem@emory.edu

Sloan Foundation Approves $3.6 Million Grant to Emory University to Establish Center on Rituals and Myths in Working Families

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has approved a grant of $3.6 million to Emory University to establish a center on rituals and myths in working families. The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (the Marial Center) will be led by Emory anthropologist Bradd Shore.

Since 1995, the Sloan Foundation has established prestigious research and teaching centers on dual-income middle-class families at four other institutions--Cornell University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan. The Sloan Foundation approached Shore to set up a center that would focus its research and training on the study of ritual and myth in middle-class families in the contemporary American South.

Emory Provost Rebecca Chopp says that, "The Emory/Sloan center is an exciting intellectual endeavor that will reach across the arts and sciences and into a number of our professional schools. By bringing together scholars and students from different schools and centering around a related set of important questions, this center so ably directed by Professor Shore will contribute to Emory's intellectual community and Emory, in turn, will contribute to what we know about the American family."

A major reason the Sloan Foundation approached Emory about establishing such a center, says Shore, is because of the "outstanding group of anthropologists, psychologists and other social scientists who are at Emory, or who are affiliated with the university." The research of eight to ten Emory scholars will be funded for an initial three years by the center, along with up to 14 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Unique to Emory's center will be the incorporation of undergraduate research funding into the program.

Shore is a cultural anthropologist whose areas of expertise include culture and cognition, myth and ritual, religion and language. "At first," Shore says, "People are always puzzled by the very idea that one can actually study 'myth' and 'ritual' in middle-class American life. People sometimes assume that myth and ritual only matter in small-scale, 'traditional' societies, but not in our own lives."

Shore's initial challenge was to rethink the meaning and significance of myth and ritual in a modern American family setting. "It doesn't take much reflection," he says, "to see that the basic themes of ritual and myth---providing a framework for the coordination of time, of activities and of meaning in our lives---these themes are all very much in play in modern life." Shore points out that our struggles to balance home and work obligations, the increasing role of mass media in creating modern myths, the growth of culturally and religiously "mixed" marriages, the changing role of organized religion for American families, and the proliferation of novel forms of communication are all challenging traditional meanings and functions of myth and ritual.

"Something as basic as the viability of 'dinnertime' has become a matter of national debate," says Shore. "Myth and ritual are hardly dead in our lives, but they are taking on many new and sometimes surprising forms. In fact the issues of ritual and myth are so pervasive and crucial in American life, that the real challenge is to define useful boundaries to what we will be studying."

In addition to overseeing the new Sloan Center, Shore is the Emory College Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Sciences and Social Sciences. His early research was doneon conflict and social control in western Samoa. Shores' most recent book, "Culture in Mind: Cognitition, Culture and the Problem of Meaning (Oxford University Press, 1996) rethinks the whole idea of culture in relation to cognitive psychology. Among the numerous cultural analyses in this book, Shore looks at the psychological implications of many familiar American institutions, including baseball, for defining a distinctively American "frame of mind."

The Alfred. P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic non-profit institution, was established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then president and chief executive officer of the General Motors Corporation. In 1995, the foundation initiated a program on working families aimed at creating a community of scholars who have direct knowledge of the issues faced by dual-career families as they cope with the competing demands of work and family, In addition to sponsoring numerous research grants, research at the five Sloan Centers of Working Families focuses on work-family issues across the life course, cultures of care and the experiences and socialization of children and adolescents, and the ethnography of everyday life in working families.

Visit the website for Emory University's Center on Myth and Ritual in American Life ("MARIAL"), one of five Sloan Centers on Working Families, at:

http://www.emory.edu/college/MARIAL/index.html

Return to Archived Social Sciences Releases