Ritual Intensity
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Ritual Intensity
For Collins, Ritual intensity is the degree to which a ritual succeeds in building mutual focus of attention and emotional entrainment — the strength of the self-reinforcing feedback loop that, at its peak, produces the Emotional Energy of Collective Effervescence.[1]
Concept Map
Key Terms
Ritual >
- Collective Effervescence
- Consecration
- Exchange Ritual
- Governance Ritual
- Identity Ritual
- Interaction Ritual
- Ritual Intensity
- The Harvest
Syncretic Terms
Related LP Terms
Non-LP Related Terms
Notes
Collins offers no formal definition, but treats it as a variable spanning everyday encounters: "the higher the ritual intensity, the more emotion is generated both in the immediate present and for long-term effects," and it "operates as a multiplier" for every other stratifying aspect of ritual.[2] High-intensity rituals are "high points of experience... because of the peaks of emotional energy generated there"; low-intensity, failed, or forced rituals drain participants instead.[3] And because emotional energy "fades away over a period of time unless a sufficiently intense ritual attunement is reenacted," ritual intensity is the variable that determines how much power a ritual raises, and how long that charge lasts.[4] In the Lightning Path framework, Identity Ritual, Governance Ritual, and Exchange Ritual name where the raised energy is aimed; ritual intensity names how much is raised — and The Harvest asks who captures it.
Ritual intensity formally; it enters the theory as the answer to the question "How successful is the interaction ritual?"[5] Success is measured by how far the four ingredients (bodily co-presence, barriers to outsiders, mutual focus, shared mood) ignite the feedback process of entrainment and collective effervescence.[6] Every encounter in daily life "is to be put in the scale and weighed against the standard of ritual intensity"; intensity is not constant across situations because "what makes the difference is the structural arrangement of the situation."[7]
The Model
High ritual intensity marks the peaks of the mechanism. "These moments of high degree of ritual intensity are high points of experience... the key moments of history, the times when significant things happen. These are moments that tear up old social structures or leave them behind, and shape new social structures."[8] Chapter 3 makes ritual intensity one of four aspects of stratified ritual effects (alongside centrality, social density, and diversity of ritual ties): it multiplies the others, since "the higher the ritual intensity, the more emotion is generated both in the immediate present and for long-term effects."[9] Failed, empty, and forced rituals sit at the bottom of the scale; they drain participants rather than charge them.
Examples
At the high end: championship victory pile-ons, the crowds of 9/11, religious revivals, sexual intercourse as archetypal entrainment. At the low end: the elevator meeting, the perfunctory phone call, the compulsory ceremony. The stratification consequences are direct: "it is games that make sports heroes," because winners participate in high-intensity rituals and losers in low-intensity ones.[10] Access itself is stratified: "the dimension of ritual intensity stratifies people in terms of their personal access: who gets to take part in high-intensity rituals, and who is left out of them."[11]
Decay and Recharge
Ritual intensity has a temporal economics. Emotional energy "fades away over a period of time unless a sufficiently intense ritual attunement is reenacted" — Durkheim's proposition that the appendix treats as empirically testable.[12] Symbols likewise lose their charge: "if the ritual is not carried out for a time, the sacredness fades away."[13] A group's symbols are only as meaningful as "what level of emotional intensity is reached in the first-order social encounters" where they are used.[14] Low-intensity ritual life is thus a slow discharge; high-intensity ritual life is a maintenance problem for whoever holds the symbols.
Quotes
If every social encounter of everyday life... is to be put in the scale and weighed against the standard of ritual intensity, we would not expect ritual intensity to be the same everywhere... What makes the difference is the structural arrangement of the situation.[15]
The higher the ritual intensity, the more emotion is generated both in the immediate present and for long-term effects. Ritual intensity thus operates as a multiplier for the other three aspects of ritual effects.[16]
The dimension of ritual intensity stratifies people in terms of their personal access: who gets to take part in high-intensity rituals, and who is left out of them.[17]
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Footnotes
- ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 42, 50–51.
- ↑ Ibid., 116.
- ↑ Ibid., 42, 50–53.
- ↑ Ibid., 134.
- ↑ Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, 116.
- ↑ Ibid., 47–56.
- ↑ Ibid., 50–51.
- ↑ Ibid., 42.
- ↑ Ibid., 116.
- ↑ Ibid., 123.
- ↑ Ibid., 275.
- ↑ Ibid., 134.
- ↑ Ibid., 17.
- ↑ Ibid., xii.
- ↑ Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, 50–51.
- ↑ Ibid., 116.
- ↑ Ibid., 275.