Text:

“Okay, so I went to a really small private high school and it was a really tight-knit community and to start the to, uh, kick off the school year, we’d have the all-school handshake. So we’d essentially all line up the student body, shoulder to shoulder, along the perimeter of the formal gardens, with the headmaster at one end. And then the headmaster and the entire school president would stand side by side and flip a coin. And if it was heads, they would go to the right, and if it was tails, they would go to the left, or whichever way.

Context:

This was a ritual the informant participated in every year at her small private boarding school in Illinois. The tradition is held at the beginning of each school year as a formal opening ceremony for the entire school. It’s set in the formal gardens, and the coin flip, she noted, decided which way the handshake procession would go, injecting an element of chance into what was otherwise a very ordered tradition.

Analysis
The all-school handshake is a ritual of initiation and collective renewal — a physical enactment of the social ties that constitute the school as a community. By having each member shake the hand of every other member, the tradition performs a kind of annual social contract; each participant touching every other participant materializes the school becoming a web of mutual relationships. The coin flip is especially interesting as a ritual element—it adds a moment of chance to an otherwise highly ordered event, reminding participants that the direction of the community is, in part, determined by forces beyond any individual’s control, and that all are equally subject to that uncertainty.