In 1976 Paris-based British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organized a wine-tasting event at which French wines were pitted against American ones. The American wines were the surprising winners in the tournament, beating some of the most vaunted French wines. Although this ritual garnered little attention at the time, in intervening years its significance has grown progressively, particularly as the elite dominance of French wines has decreased. For those advocating for the liberating force of globalization in the wine industry, the ‘Judgement of Paris’ tournament ritual serves as a convenient marker of the shift in the balance of power from the Old World to the New World and from English wine critics to the American Robert Parker. The ‘Judgement of Paris’ shows how tournament rituals are co-opted retrospectively by forces seeking to reconfigure fields. Using theories of collective memory and social remembering, I show how vested social actors seeking to reconfigure fields co-opt tournament rituals retrospectively. The instance of retrospective utility stands in stark contrast to prospective models of tournament rituals, where institutional entrepreneurs try to shape the unfolding of a field. Thus, ephemeral tournaments that might otherwise have been forgotten have retrospective utility, especially for those shaping the collective memory of the field in order to suit future interests.

Tournament rituals as field-configuration mechanisms

Appadurai (1986: 21) defines tournaments of value as ‘complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally well-defined way from the routines of economic life. Participation in them is likely to be both a privilege of those in power and an instrument of status contests among them’. Tournament rituals, a concept derived from this definition, are ceremonial spectacles enacted with periodic regularity in organizational fields and set apart from humdrum everyday routines (Anand and Watson, 2004). Examples of tournament rituals include awards ceremonies such as the Grammy Awards and the Booker Prize.