Kalkal as a Relational Interactional Ritual: the Case of Kalkal in Dorehami

Kalkal or kal andākhtan (lit. ‘throwing a kal’) is a ubiquitous culturally shared practice in the Iranian culture that has not yet caught the attention of linguists. In this research, conducted within the discipline of interpersonal pragmatics, and based on the analysis of 20 instances of kalkal in the reality TV talk show Dorehami, it has been shown that kalkal displays the features of relational interactional rituals as defined by Kádár (2013, 2017). Entertaining Kalkal is shown to be a recurrent performance with a schematic structure recognizable to cultural insiders with certain formal and functional features; it symbolically embodies the moral order of the situated interaction as well as the moral order of the larger institution and the Iranian culture that pre-allocate roles and resources to its participants; it is liminal in the sense that the participants go beyond the border between what is perceived to be ordinary and the extraordinary; and, finally, it arouses the emotions of its participants and auieences.