Chapter 5 focuses on the phenomenon of mimesis. All rituals are mimetic because ritual language use itself triggers replication and reciprocation. However, Chapter 5 will show that in various interactionally complex rituals one can observe a specific mimetic phenomenon – ‘performative mimesis’ – which has not received sufficient attention in the study of language use, and which is worth exploring if one wants to understand why in certain ritual contexts language users play ‘roles’. Simply put, the concept of ‘performative mimesis’ refers to contrived interactional performance whereby the performer sustains mimicking a predated interactional schema, just like an actor in a theatre manages a performance on stage by enacting a role. Performative mimesis is a particularly interesting phenomenon to consider because the participants of a ritual which necessitates such mimetic behaviour follow often invisible and uncodified scripts. Chapter 5 includes a case study which describes performative mimesis in Chinese university military training courses, representing an understudied ritual drawn from the realm of higher education in China.

Chapter 6 investigates the ritual phenomenon of (self-)display. Any instance of ritual language use implies a sense of displaying: the participants of a ritual tend to display their awareness of the rights and obligations and related conventions holding for the context which necessitates the given ritual. In certain ritual scenarios, especially if a ritual is competitive, display transforms into self-display, i.e., through following – and often excessively over-doing – the pragmatic conventions of the ritual one may as much display one’s awareness of these conventions. Chapter 6 considers how different degrees of self-displaying behaviour can be distinguished from one another. As a case study, I investigate a corpus of historical Chinese letters written by an epistolary expert Gong Weizhai to various recipients, including both ‘ordinary’ recipients such as patrons, family members, lovers, and so on, and fellow epistolary expert friends representing ‘professional’ recipients. With this latter audience, Gong engaged in a playful self-displaying competition as to who can be ‘more’ intricately deferential and humorous to the other.