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In a college anthropology class, we had an assignment to describe some kind of set ... ritual form? I forget how they worded it - that we had experience with, and we couldn't think of anything that made sense. In the end, we decided to go with something that we were familiar with from a lot of firsthand experience but that we thought there wouldn't be much to say about: going to a classical music concert.
After all, what's there to say about the conventions and etiquette a classical music concert? They're just a normal thing, or even kinda boring, aside from the music.
...oh my goodness were we wrong about that.
Like, okay, the applause thing. You do not enter the concert hall except before the concert or during applause, lest you interrupt the music. You don't applaud during the music, ever. You don't applaud between movements of a piece that has multiple movements, ever. You applaud at the beginning of the concert when the person or people walk out onto the stage to take their bows before the performance (which they do, or which just the conductor does in the case of an orchestra), you applaud at the end of each piece (another reason to take the programme from the - *looks up word* door staff? the person who lets you in and stops you coming in while a piece is playing - is so you know how many movements each piece has and can keep track of when it will end), and you applaud some more when the concert ends because everyone likes getting a standing ovation and it's honestly almost the polite thing to do at this point, feels like.
(Although we went to a lot of really good concerts, so they probably deserved a fair few of those ovations.)
All of this was "kinda boring, I don't know what I'd talk about".
...and I think stuff like the flag thing and the National Anthem thing and the Pledge of Allegiance thing and the Founding Fathers thing and the Constitution thing are like that in the US. What's with having someone sing the National Anthem before baseball games in the US? Why are there flags in so many school classrooms in the US? Why was there a flag in the room where our local coin club met? Why did we do a pledge of allegiance before coin club meetings? Why are we as a society so invested in the opinions and words of a bunch of dead white slaveholders? This stuff - the forms and content of the US civil religion - is not boring, is not natural, is not just the way things are. There is so much to say about it.
