“Were you there?”: A ritual of legitimacy among Vietnam veterans

Abstract

This study is an ethnography of speaking which describes and analyzes a communicative ritual found among some Vietnam veterans: a ritual of legitimacy. The research focuses on the communal function of speech and examines how people constitute communal identities with their communication. Participant‐observation, using the ethnography of speaking descriptive‐theoretic framework, was used to study communication rituals within an organization of Vietnam veterans. The analysis revealed a specified sequence of symbolic acts which I term a ritual of legitimacy—which allowed the speakers to create and affirm a sense of communal identity as Vietnam veterans.