Routine and Ritual Small Talk in Chinese rural shops

In this study, we propose an integrative approach to Small Talk by bringing together routine and ritual, and also by approaching Small Talk through the lens of ritual, speech acts and discourse. Routine manifestations of Small Talk include banal phatic interaction, such as weather talk which follows conventionalised patterns, has limited bonding capacity and no deeper meaning. Ritual Small Talk, on the other hand, refers to phatic interaction which also follows conventionalised patterns but has a deeper purpose and meaning, and has a more lasting bonding capacity. We analyse a corpus featuring shop-talk in a rural Chinese town, hence filling a knowledge since Small Talk in rural settings has been understudied. We conduct a bipartite analysis, i.e. we first consider how interactions in our corpus tend to be opened and closed, and then we analyse our data through Small Talk themes. Our analysis shows that in Chinese rural shops routines do not simply dissolve when the participants become more familiar, but rather they transform into ritual. This finding shows that Small Talk in the setting studied operates differently from what has been observed in urbanised contexts.