A genealogy of conceptual confusion: Epistemological fault lines across media-ritual concepts

Research on media–ritual intersections deploys seven concepts: media events, media rituals, mediatized rituals, media ritualization, ritual mediatization, ritual media, and ritualized media. Their overlap generates unmarked substitution between analytically divergent registers. The slippage is a structural consequence of three epistemological tributaries (Durkheimian social theory, Carey's ritual view, and mediatization theory), each foregrounding a different dimension of the same phenomena. Genealogical analysis diagnoses four confusions: process conflated with product, unmarked shifting among power paradigms, materiality–practice divergence, and directional inversion. Three fault lines (integration vs. domination, process vs. structure, exceptional vs. everyday) constitute a meta-theoretical framework. The article advances positioned conceptual deployment: researchers specify their coordinates along all three dimensions. The seven concepts serve as a diagnostic case: concept use in communication research presupposes epistemological commitments, marked or not. An under-theorized intersection, mediatized ritualization, is advanced as a provisional theoretical proposition about how platform architectures may reshape ritualized media practice.