Actions

Ritual: Difference between revisions

An Avatar.Global Resource

← Older edit
VisualWikitext
mNo edit summary
mNo edit summary
 
(4 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown)
Line 35: Line 35:
Rituals create symbols, and symbols are intent made visible: "solidarity prolonged and stored in symbols," charge that fades if the ritual is not repeated.<ref>Ibid., 17, 81–87.</ref> Consider two symbol-systems with opposite intents but equally deliberate design. The harsh black and reds of Nazi symbology — the blood banner, the stark angular runes, the massed uniforms — were engineered to intimidate, to signal aggression, and to raise and aim energy toward domination: fear made graphic. The Frutiger-Aero aesthetic of mid-2000s technology marketing — glossy bubbles, translucent glass, dew on grass, utopian blue skies wrapped around consumer devices — was engineered with the opposite intent: to soothe, to raise optimism and awe, and to aim that energy toward consumption, selling technology as benevolent ecological harmony.<ref>On the Frutiger-Aero aesthetic as a named, periodized vernacular style of roughly 2004–2013 tech marketing, see the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute's documentation; the term is internet-aesthetic historiography rather than academic scholarship, and is used here descriptively.</ref> In each case the symbol does not merely mark membership; it telegraphs the direction of the harvested energy before the ritual even begins.
Rituals create symbols, and symbols are intent made visible: "solidarity prolonged and stored in symbols," charge that fades if the ritual is not repeated.<ref>Ibid., 17, 81–87.</ref> Consider two symbol-systems with opposite intents but equally deliberate design. The harsh black and reds of Nazi symbology — the blood banner, the stark angular runes, the massed uniforms — were engineered to intimidate, to signal aggression, and to raise and aim energy toward domination: fear made graphic. The Frutiger-Aero aesthetic of mid-2000s technology marketing — glossy bubbles, translucent glass, dew on grass, utopian blue skies wrapped around consumer devices — was engineered with the opposite intent: to soothe, to raise optimism and awe, and to aim that energy toward consumption, selling technology as benevolent ecological harmony.<ref>On the Frutiger-Aero aesthetic as a named, periodized vernacular style of roughly 2004–2013 tech marketing, see the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute's documentation; the term is internet-aesthetic historiography rather than academic scholarship, and is used here descriptively.</ref> In each case the symbol does not merely mark membership; it telegraphs the direction of the harvested energy before the ritual even begins.


==== The Central Mechanism (according to Collins) ====
==== The Central Mechanisms (according to Collins from Goffman) ====
<blockquote>The central mechanism of interaction ritual theory is that occasions that combine a high degree of mutual focus of attention, that is, a high degree of intersubjectivity, together with a high degree of emotional entrainment—through bodily synchronization, mutual stimulation / arousal of participants’ nervous systems—result in feelings of membership that are attached to cognitive symbols; and result also in the emotional energy of individual participants, giving them feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action in what they consider a morally proper path. These moments of high degree of ritual intensity are high points of experience. They are high points of collective 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.<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 42.</ref> </blockquote>
The central mechanisms of ritual are attention, a shared definition of the situation (e.g., ''this'' is an initiation and not a sporting event), and an obligation (in an initiation event you are obligated to process your thoughts and emotions, in a sporting event, not so much). When one is paying attention, agrees with the situational definition, agrees to the obligations, and utilizes any symbology or paraphernalia appropriate to the situation, one is performing a ritual. 
 
=== Ritual Frames ===
A ritual frame is...
 
Ritual frames help focus attention.
 
Rituals frames construct reality.  <blockquote>The central mechanism of interaction ritual theory is that occasions that combine a high degree of mutual focus of attention, that is, a high degree of intersubjectivity, together with a high degree of emotional entrainment—through bodily synchronization, mutual stimulation / arousal of participants’ nervous systems—result in feelings of membership that are attached to cognitive symbols; and result also in the emotional energy of individual participants, giving them feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action in what they consider a morally proper path. These moments of high degree of ritual intensity are high points of experience. They are high points of collective 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.<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 42.</ref> </blockquote>


=== The Function of Rituals<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 48.</ref> ===
=== The Function of Rituals<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 48.</ref> ===
 
<blockquote>The radical microsociologist, on the other hand, is inclined to think that anyone can be molded into anything, given a strong enough situational process (or chain of such situations).<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 76.</ref></blockquote>
# they generate group solidarity, feeling of membership  
# they generate group solidarity, feeling of membership. They set the boundaries of the group.
# they  "charge up symbolic objects with significance, or... recharge such objects with renewed sentiments of respect."<ref>Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 38.</ref>
# they  generate "shared symbolism,"<ref>Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 14.</ref> "charge up symbolic objects with significance, or... recharge such objects with renewed sentiments of respect."<ref>Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 38.</ref>
# they generate [[Emotional Energy]]
# they generate [[Emotional Energy]]
# they create [[Morality]] "The individual feels moral when he or she is acting with the energy derived from the heightened experience of the group. And indeed, since Durkheim is building a theory of human institutions from the ground up, without assuming any preexisting beliefs or moral standards, he is also indicating that rituals are the source of the group’s standards of morality. It is the heightened experience of intersubjectivity and emotional strength in group rituals that generates the conception of what is good; what is opposed to this is what is evil.<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 39.</ref>  
# they create [[Morality]] "The individual feels moral when he or she is acting with the energy derived from the heightened experience of the group. And indeed, since Durkheim is building a theory of human institutions from the ground up, without assuming any preexisting beliefs or moral standards, he is also indicating that rituals are the source of the group’s standards of morality. It is the heightened experience of intersubjectivity and emotional strength in group rituals that generates the conception of what is good; what is opposed to this is what is evil.<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 39.</ref>  
# They continually re-construct the self (Goffman), but under preexisting and established constraints.
# By affirming group membership and helping to construct self, they meet various [[Seven Essential Needs|essential needs]]. 
== Successful Versus Unsuccessful Rituals ==
The LP typology sorts rituals by intent; Collins's mechanism adds the success dimension. "Not all rituals are successful. Some fail dismally, even painfully; some mercifully fade away. Some are rebelled against as empty formalities, undergone under duress, gleefully discarded when possible."<ref name=":4">Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'', 50–51.</ref> The criterion of success is the same for formal and natural rituals alike: most immediately, a high level of collective effervescence — "the momentary buzz," shared entrainment — and on the output side, the full set of ritual outcomes: feelings of group solidarity, an affirmed identity, respect for the group's symbols, and heightened [[Emotional Energy]].<ref name=":5">Ibid., 51.</ref>
Failure is the absence or shortfall of exactly these products, and participants have vocabulary for it: "an empty ritual," "merely ceremonial," "fell flat."<ref name=":5" /> Operationally, Collins lists the signs: "a low level of collective effervescence, the lack of momentary buzz, no shared entrainment at all or disappointingly little"; then on the output side, "little or no feeling of group solidarity; no sense of one's identity as affirmed or changed; no respect for the group's symbols; no heightened emotional energy — either a flat feeling unaffected by the ritual, or worse yet, a sense of a drag, the feeling of boredom and constraint, even depression, interaction fatigue, a desire to escape."<ref name=":5" /> These form "a continuum of just how badly rituals fail, from mildly missing the mark down through strong ritual abhorrence" — and the strongly negative states matter as much as the positive ones, as in the smashing of icons in the Reformation, or personal rebellion against a formality one wishes never to go through again.<ref name=":5" /> The one-line summary: "Successful rituals are exhilarating; failed rituals are energy draining."<ref>Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'', 53.</ref>
Natural rituals fail for the same reason formal ones do — missing ingredients. The political crowd that mills around aimlessly, attention drifting away from the speaker until the remainder is caught in "a deflationary emotion like rats leaving a sinking ship"; the party "mired in little knots of perfunctory conversations" that never builds collective effervescence. What is missing is a shared focus of attention and a shared initial emotion that can be built up and transformed.<ref name=":4" /> Collins's paired example is the New Year celebration: the one that works has the crowd making noise *at each other* in the hour before midnight — entrainment that dissolves barriers of acquaintanceship and breaks into a crescendo of solidarity gestures at the stroke of twelve; the one that fails keeps everyone "in distinctive little pockets of shared mentality" saying intelligible things to each other, so that shared emotion never builds and midnight gets only "perfunctory acknowledgment, immediately after which many participants say they are tired and want to go home."<ref>Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'', 52–53.</ref>
A third case is the ''forced'' ritual: participation performed under duress, or — more subtly — animated deliberately by someone determined to make the ritual come off. Forced rituals can even succeed at producing entrainment, "but they feel forced insofar as the level of collective effervescence is higher than it would be normally given the existing ingredients"; the entrainment "has an element of deliberation and self-consciousness rather than a natural flow." It takes "considerable effort to be the convivial host or gracious hostess, the life of the party."<ref>Ibid., 53.</ref> Forced rituals therefore tax the very energy they raise — a cost-accounting that connects failure and exploitation: the lower the ingredients, the more work someone must inject to reach a given intensity, and the more of that raised energy the forfeit claims. This is where the success dimension meets [[The Harvest]]: an unsuccessful ritual charges no one, a forced ritual charges the animator, and only a successful ritual leaves surplus energy to be captured.


=== The Long Term Impact of Ritual ===
=== The Long Term Impact of Ritual ===
<blockquote>One chief result of rituals is to charge up symbolic objects with significance, or to recharge such objects with renewed sentiments of respect. Along with this, individual participants get their own reservoir of charge. The “sort of electricity” that Durkheim metaphorically ascribes to the group in its state of heightened excitement is stored in batteries: one component of which is the symbol, and the other pole of which is the individual. Participation in a ritual gives the individual a special kind of energy, which I will call emotional energy.<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 38.</ref>  
The outcome of a ritual can be cognitive (a change or reinforcement of ideas), emotional (catharsis, cathexis), and behavioural, both short and long term.<blockquote>One chief result of rituals is to charge up symbolic objects with significance, or to recharge such objects with renewed sentiments of respect. Along with this, individual participants get their own reservoir of charge. The “sort of electricity” that Durkheim metaphorically ascribes to the group in its state of heightened excitement is stored in batteries: one component of which is the symbol, and the other pole of which is the individual. Participation in a ritual gives the individual a special kind of energy, which I will call emotional energy.<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 38.</ref>  


Now we come to the results of ritual. Collective effervescence is a momentary state, but it carries over into more prolonged effects when it becomes embodied in sentiments of group solidarity, symbols or sacred objects, and individual emotional energy. The experience of heightened mutual awareness and emotional arousal gives rise to group emblems, markers of group identity. <ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 36.</ref>
Now we come to the results of ritual. Collective effervescence is a momentary state, but it carries over into more prolonged effects when it becomes embodied in sentiments of group solidarity, symbols or sacred objects, and individual emotional energy. The experience of heightened mutual awareness and emotional arousal gives rise to group emblems, markers of group identity. <ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 36.</ref>
Line 56: Line 74:


== Quotes ==
== Quotes ==
The sociology of ritual is thus a sociology of gatherings—of crowds, assemblies, congregations, audiences. Through Goffman’s eyes, we can see that these gatherings can also be quite small scale: a couple of acquaintances stopping to talk, or merely nodding in passing, or even strangers avoiding each other’s glance on the street; or, at the intermediate level, a small group eating and drinking around a table. The point is not merely the banal one that people interact best when they are together; there is the much stronger implication that society is above all an embodied activity.21 When human bodies are together in the same place, there is a physical attunement: currents of feeling, a sense of wariness or interest, a palpable change in the atmosphere. The bodies are paying attention to each other, whether at first there is any great conscious awareness of it or not. This bodily inter-orientation is the starting point for what happens next.<ref>Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 34.</ref>
<blockquote>The sociology of ritual is thus a sociology of gatherings—of crowds, assemblies, congregations, audiences. Through Goffman’s eyes, we can see that these gatherings can also be quite small scale: a couple of acquaintances stopping to talk, or merely nodding in passing, or even strangers avoiding each other’s glance on the street; or, at the intermediate level, a small group eating and drinking around a table. The point is not merely the banal one that people interact best when they are together; there is the much stronger implication that society is above all an embodied activity.21 When human bodies are together in the same place, there is a physical attunement: currents of feeling, a sense of wariness or interest, a palpable change in the atmosphere. The bodies are paying attention to each other, whether at first there is any great conscious awareness of it or not. This bodily inter-orientation is the starting point for what happens next.<ref>Randall Collins, ''Interaction Ritual Chains'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 34.</ref>


{{endstuff}}
In the light of Durkheim’s model of rituals, we can take ritual as the missing link between group structure and group ideas. Rituals are the ''nodes of social structure'', and it is in rituals that a group creates its symbols.<ref>Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 26.</ref></blockquote>{{endstuff}}


[[category:terms]]
[[category:terms]]

Latest revision as of 13:57, 14 October 2026

Ritual

A Ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in an isolated location, according to set sequence. Rituals are designed to focus Intent, direct Will, and motivate action towards the accomplishment of a political, productive, spiritual, or creative end, like voting a specific party. Rituals create a groups symbols.[1]

Concept Map

World System >

Comprehensive Framework >

Ritual >

Syncretic Terms

Ritual >

Related LP Terms

Ritual >

Non-LP Related Terms

Ritual >

Notes

Durkheim asks the question "What holds society together." The answer is, ritual. Note this this is not incompatible with critical analysis of social class. "the Durkheimian model is entirely compatible with a view of stratification and group conflict. Indeed, it provides key mechanisms for just how stratification and conflict operate. Rephrase the question as, What holds society together as a pattern of stratified and conflicting groups? The answer is social rituals, operating to create and sustain solidarity within those groups."[2]

A note on typology. Sorted by function, rituals fall into four essential types. Identity rituals affirm group membership; they are the mechanism through which a group periodically recharges its solidarity frames, the shared knowledge and moral feelings that bind members together. Governance rituals regulate conduct and constitute authority; they legitimate power, mark status, and install the rule-set inside the person. Exchange rituals mediate reciprocity; they circulate goods, obligations, and loyalties among members and between members and the sacred.[3] Each type answers a distinct question: identity rituals ask who are we?, governance rituals ask who is in charge?, and exchange rituals ask what do we owe each other? Most actual rituals blend all three modes — the Eucharist is simultaneously an exchange with the divine, an identity marker, and a governance instrument (who may administer it is a governance question that has split churches) — and all three may be analysed with Collins's (2004) ingredients-and-outcomes model.

A Typology of Intent, Not Features

The ritual typology offered here — Identity Ritual, Governance Ritual, Exchange Ritual — is a typology of intent, not a typology of features. No surface characteristic stamps a ritual as one type or another: the same chanting crowd, the same banners, the same synchronized bodies can serve belonging (identity), command (governance), or obligation (exchange), depending on what the ritual is *for* — where the raised energy is aimed and whose interests it serves. Classifying rituals by features is the code-seeking error: "an underlying circularity in the method: positing a code that is then taken as explanation of the ritual behavior that is seen as evidence for the code."[4] Intent, by contrast, is empirically discernible: follow the energy. That is where The Harvest comes in — the typology names the destination of raised power, and the Harvest asks who captures it, and to what ends.

Symbols as Intent Made Visible

Rituals create symbols, and symbols are intent made visible: "solidarity prolonged and stored in symbols," charge that fades if the ritual is not repeated.[5] Consider two symbol-systems with opposite intents but equally deliberate design. The harsh black and reds of Nazi symbology — the blood banner, the stark angular runes, the massed uniforms — were engineered to intimidate, to signal aggression, and to raise and aim energy toward domination: fear made graphic. The Frutiger-Aero aesthetic of mid-2000s technology marketing — glossy bubbles, translucent glass, dew on grass, utopian blue skies wrapped around consumer devices — was engineered with the opposite intent: to soothe, to raise optimism and awe, and to aim that energy toward consumption, selling technology as benevolent ecological harmony.[6] In each case the symbol does not merely mark membership; it telegraphs the direction of the harvested energy before the ritual even begins.

The Central Mechanisms (according to Collins from Goffman)

The central mechanisms of ritual are attention, a shared definition of the situation (e.g., this is an initiation and not a sporting event), and an obligation (in an initiation event you are obligated to process your thoughts and emotions, in a sporting event, not so much). When one is paying attention, agrees with the situational definition, agrees to the obligations, and utilizes any symbology or paraphernalia appropriate to the situation, one is performing a ritual.

Ritual Frames

A ritual frame is...

Ritual frames help focus attention.

Rituals frames construct reality.

The central mechanism of interaction ritual theory is that occasions that combine a high degree of mutual focus of attention, that is, a high degree of intersubjectivity, together with a high degree of emotional entrainment—through bodily synchronization, mutual stimulation / arousal of participants’ nervous systems—result in feelings of membership that are attached to cognitive symbols; and result also in the emotional energy of individual participants, giving them feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action in what they consider a morally proper path. These moments of high degree of ritual intensity are high points of experience. They are high points of collective 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.[7]

The Function of Rituals[8]

The radical microsociologist, on the other hand, is inclined to think that anyone can be molded into anything, given a strong enough situational process (or chain of such situations).[9]

  1. they generate group solidarity, feeling of membership. They set the boundaries of the group.
  2. they generate "shared symbolism,"[10] "charge up symbolic objects with significance, or... recharge such objects with renewed sentiments of respect."[11]
  3. they generate Emotional Energy
  4. they create Morality "The individual feels moral when he or she is acting with the energy derived from the heightened experience of the group. And indeed, since Durkheim is building a theory of human institutions from the ground up, without assuming any preexisting beliefs or moral standards, he is also indicating that rituals are the source of the group’s standards of morality. It is the heightened experience of intersubjectivity and emotional strength in group rituals that generates the conception of what is good; what is opposed to this is what is evil.[12]
  5. They continually re-construct the self (Goffman), but under preexisting and established constraints.
  6. By affirming group membership and helping to construct self, they meet various essential needs.

Successful Versus Unsuccessful Rituals

The LP typology sorts rituals by intent; Collins's mechanism adds the success dimension. "Not all rituals are successful. Some fail dismally, even painfully; some mercifully fade away. Some are rebelled against as empty formalities, undergone under duress, gleefully discarded when possible."[13] The criterion of success is the same for formal and natural rituals alike: most immediately, a high level of collective effervescence — "the momentary buzz," shared entrainment — and on the output side, the full set of ritual outcomes: feelings of group solidarity, an affirmed identity, respect for the group's symbols, and heightened Emotional Energy.[14]

Failure is the absence or shortfall of exactly these products, and participants have vocabulary for it: "an empty ritual," "merely ceremonial," "fell flat."[14] Operationally, Collins lists the signs: "a low level of collective effervescence, the lack of momentary buzz, no shared entrainment at all or disappointingly little"; then on the output side, "little or no feeling of group solidarity; no sense of one's identity as affirmed or changed; no respect for the group's symbols; no heightened emotional energy — either a flat feeling unaffected by the ritual, or worse yet, a sense of a drag, the feeling of boredom and constraint, even depression, interaction fatigue, a desire to escape."[14] These form "a continuum of just how badly rituals fail, from mildly missing the mark down through strong ritual abhorrence" — and the strongly negative states matter as much as the positive ones, as in the smashing of icons in the Reformation, or personal rebellion against a formality one wishes never to go through again.[14] The one-line summary: "Successful rituals are exhilarating; failed rituals are energy draining."[15]

Natural rituals fail for the same reason formal ones do — missing ingredients. The political crowd that mills around aimlessly, attention drifting away from the speaker until the remainder is caught in "a deflationary emotion like rats leaving a sinking ship"; the party "mired in little knots of perfunctory conversations" that never builds collective effervescence. What is missing is a shared focus of attention and a shared initial emotion that can be built up and transformed.[13] Collins's paired example is the New Year celebration: the one that works has the crowd making noise *at each other* in the hour before midnight — entrainment that dissolves barriers of acquaintanceship and breaks into a crescendo of solidarity gestures at the stroke of twelve; the one that fails keeps everyone "in distinctive little pockets of shared mentality" saying intelligible things to each other, so that shared emotion never builds and midnight gets only "perfunctory acknowledgment, immediately after which many participants say they are tired and want to go home."[16]

A third case is the forced ritual: participation performed under duress, or — more subtly — animated deliberately by someone determined to make the ritual come off. Forced rituals can even succeed at producing entrainment, "but they feel forced insofar as the level of collective effervescence is higher than it would be normally given the existing ingredients"; the entrainment "has an element of deliberation and self-consciousness rather than a natural flow." It takes "considerable effort to be the convivial host or gracious hostess, the life of the party."[17] Forced rituals therefore tax the very energy they raise — a cost-accounting that connects failure and exploitation: the lower the ingredients, the more work someone must inject to reach a given intensity, and the more of that raised energy the forfeit claims. This is where the success dimension meets The Harvest: an unsuccessful ritual charges no one, a forced ritual charges the animator, and only a successful ritual leaves surplus energy to be captured.

The Long Term Impact of Ritual

The outcome of a ritual can be cognitive (a change or reinforcement of ideas), emotional (catharsis, cathexis), and behavioural, both short and long term.

One chief result of rituals is to charge up symbolic objects with significance, or to recharge such objects with renewed sentiments of respect. Along with this, individual participants get their own reservoir of charge. The “sort of electricity” that Durkheim metaphorically ascribes to the group in its state of heightened excitement is stored in batteries: one component of which is the symbol, and the other pole of which is the individual. Participation in a ritual gives the individual a special kind of energy, which I will call emotional energy.[18]

Now we come to the results of ritual. Collective effervescence is a momentary state, but it carries over into more prolonged effects when it becomes embodied in sentiments of group solidarity, symbols or sacred objects, and individual emotional energy. The experience of heightened mutual awareness and emotional arousal gives rise to group emblems, markers of group identity. [19]

Society becomes patterned by symbols, or more precisely by respect for symbols; but the symbols are respected only to the extent that they are charged up with sentiments by participation in rituals. Sentiments run down and fade away unless they are periodically renewed.[20]

Rituals Stratify

... the Durkheimian model is entirely compatible with a view of stratification and group conflict. Indeed, it provides key mechanisms for just how stratification and conflict operate. Rephrase the question as, What holds society together as a pattern of stratified and conflicting groups? The answer is social rituals, operating to create and sustain solidarity within those groups. We can elaborate a more complicated answer, and later chapters will do so. Among those complications are these: that some groups have more resources for carrying out their rituals than others, so that some groups have more solidarity and thus can lord it over those who have less; and that these ritually privileged groups have more impressive symbols and fill their members with more emotional energy. We may examine more fine-grained processes of stratification: looking inside the very group that is brought together by participating in a ritual, we can see that some individuals are more privileged than others, by being nearer to the center of the ritual than others. Rituals thus have a double stratifying effect: between ritual insiders and outsiders; and, inside the ritual, between ritual leaders and ritual followers. Rituals are thus key mechanisms, and we might say key weapons, in processes of conflict and domination.[21]

Quotes

The sociology of ritual is thus a sociology of gatherings—of crowds, assemblies, congregations, audiences. Through Goffman’s eyes, we can see that these gatherings can also be quite small scale: a couple of acquaintances stopping to talk, or merely nodding in passing, or even strangers avoiding each other’s glance on the street; or, at the intermediate level, a small group eating and drinking around a table. The point is not merely the banal one that people interact best when they are together; there is the much stronger implication that society is above all an embodied activity.21 When human bodies are together in the same place, there is a physical attunement: currents of feeling, a sense of wariness or interest, a palpable change in the atmosphere. The bodies are paying attention to each other, whether at first there is any great conscious awareness of it or not. This bodily inter-orientation is the starting point for what happens next.[22] In the light of Durkheim’s model of rituals, we can take ritual as the missing link between group structure and group ideas. Rituals are the nodes of social structure, and it is in rituals that a group creates its symbols.[23]

==Citation and Legal==

The SpiritWiki is a freely available, open-access Knowledge System devoted to health, healing, and reconnection. You may freely use information in the SpiritWiki; citation and attribution are welcomed, but not required. You can help this knowledge system grow by joining its Patreon.

The SpiritWiki is marked CC0 1.0 Universal and in the public domain, free for everyone on the planet to use. Please support its growth.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 26.
  2. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 26.
  3. ↑ The typology builds on the Durkheim–Goffman–Collins lineage of ritual theory: Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995 [1912]); Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (New York: Anchor, 1967); Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). The exchange type draws on Marcel Mauss, The Gift (New York: Norton, 1990 [1925]).
  4. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 33–34; on the code-seeking program generally, 25–30.
  5. ↑ Ibid., 17, 81–87.
  6. ↑ On the Frutiger-Aero aesthetic as a named, periodized vernacular style of roughly 2004–2013 tech marketing, see the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute's documentation; the term is internet-aesthetic historiography rather than academic scholarship, and is used here descriptively.
  7. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 42.
  8. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 48.
  9. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 76.
  10. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 14.
  11. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 38.
  12. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 39.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, 50–51.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 Ibid., 51.
  15. ↑ Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, 53.
  16. ↑ Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, 52–53.
  17. ↑ Ibid., 53.
  18. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 38.
  19. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 36.
  20. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 36.
  21. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 41.
  22. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 34.
  23. ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 26.

Retrieved from "https://spiritwiki.lightningpath.org/index.php?title=Ritual&oldid=38493"