4, the common mood, reinforce each other. As the persons become more tightly focused on their common activity, more aware of what each other is doing and feeling, and more aware of each other’s awareness, they experience their shared emotion more intensely, as it comes to dominate their awareness. Members of a cheering crowd become more enthusiastic, just as participants at a religious service become more respectful and solemn, or at a funeral become more sorrowful, than before they began. It is the same on the small-scale level of a conversation; as the interaction becomes more engrossing, participants get caught up in the rhythm and mood of the talk. We shall examine the micro-empirical evidence on this later. The key process is participants’ mutual entrainment of emotion and attention, producing a shared emotional / cognitive experience. What Durkheim called collective consciousness is this micro-situational production of moments of intersubjectivity.
There are four main outcomes of interaction rituals. To the extent that the ingredients successfully combine and build up to high levels of mutually focused and emotionally shared attention, participants have the experience of
1 group solidarity, a feeling of membership;
2 emotional energy [EE] in the individual: a feeling of confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative in taking action;
3 symbols that represent the group: emblems or other representations (visual icons, words, gestures) that members feel are associated with themselves collectively; these are Durkheim’s “sacred objects.” Persons pumped up with feelings of group solidarity treat symbols with great respect and defend them against the disrespect of outsiders, and even more, of renegade insiders;
4 feelings of morality: the sense of rightness in adhering to the group, respecting its symbols, and defending both against transgressors. Along with this goes the sense of moral evil or impropriety in violating the group’s solidarity and its symbolic representations.
These are the basic elements of the theory. In the following sections I will examine the evidence on how each of these operates.
Formal rituals and natural rituals
At first glance, what seems to be missing in this list are just those items that make up the usual definition of “ritual.” In common parlance, a ritual is a formal ceremony, the going through of a set of stereotyped actions: reciting verbal formulas, singing, making traditional gestures, wearing traditional costumes. As we have seen from Durkheim’s analysis of religious ritual, the formality and the stereotyped activity are not the crucial ingredients; they only contribute to the core process of intersubjectivity and shared emotion, which is to say to the experience of collective consciousness and collective effervescence, insofar as they contribute to a mutual focus of attention. This is indicated on the far left side of Figure 4.1, where a dashed arrow flows from “common action or event (including stereotyped formalities)” to “mutual focus of attention.” Stereotyped formulas can generate a socially successful ritual, if indeed the participants also experience a shared emotion, and if they go on to heighten their sense of mutual participation by becoming strongly aware of each other’s consciousness. Without this, the ritual is merely “formal,” an empty going through of the forms, even a dead ceremonialism.
Mutual focus of attention is a crucial ingredient for a ritual to work; but this focus may come about spontaneously and without explicit concern that this is happening. Goffman’s examples of the little interaction rituals of everyday sociability are generally of this sort. Whether you call people by their first names or not is usually not a matter of conscious attention, but it is a small-scale ritual nevertheless; and as we shall see, the difference between high-solidarity conversations and low-solidarity conversations happens on the level of rhythmic features that have no formally recognized rules attached to them. Goffman’s examples come from the small scale of momentary social encounters, but spontaneously enacted rituals occur also on a larger scale of public groups, as in the examples Durkheim gives of political and military situations parallel to religious rituals. The crowds gathered during the French Revolution were often improvising new rituals. These were highly effective, even at their first moment without the resources of stereotyped activities, because they had a high degree of mutual focus and shared emotion. Out of such situations, as Durkheim was fond of noting, new symbols are created.
We may refer to those interactions as “natural rituals” that build up mutual focus and emotional entrainment without formally stereotyped procedures; and to those that are initiated by a commonly recognized apparatus of ceremonial procedures as “formal rituals.” From the point of view of what makes an interaction ritual work, the core ingredients, processes, and outcomes are the same. Both natural ritual and formal rituals can generate symbols and feelings of membership, and both can reach high degrees of intensity. Beyond this commonality, not all symbolic memberships are of the same kind, and the details of how rituals are put together will affect the kind of membership categories that result. As we shall see, rituals initiated by formal procedures have a stronger effect on broadcasting and affirming a rigid sense of group boundaries than do rituals that begin spontaneously by a naturally occurring focus of attention and shared emotion. The latter give a more fluid sense of membership, unless they become crystallized and prolonged in symbols, which thereby tend to make subsequent IRs more formal. […]
Failed rituals, empty rituals, forced rituals
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. These variations are useful for refining our theory, and for testing the conditions that make rituals operate. Unsuccessful rituals are important substantively as well, for if every social encounter of everyday life from the most minor up to the major public gatherings is to be put before the scale and weighed against the standard of ritual intensity, we would not expect ritual intensity to be the same everywhere. Since I am going to argue that life is structured around the contrast between successful, socially magnetic ritual situations with their high degree of emotion, motivation, and symbolic charge, and situations of lesser ritualism, it is necessary to sharpen our eyes as to what makes the difference between rituals that are strong and those that are weak. Individuals are attracted to the most intense ritual charges they can get, indifferent to lesser rituals, and repelled by others; we see best what is doing the attracting if we look at what is causing the indifference and the repulsion.
Failed rituals are easiest to see in the case of formal rituals, since there is a public announcement and widespread understanding that a ritual is being attempted. Then we shall cast a glance at natural rituals that fail: political or other gatherings that don’t click, demonstrations that don’t come off; and at the little Goffmanian rituals of everyday life that don’t work.
[…]
In this respect, natural rituals fail for much the same reasons that formal rituals can be empty: the political crowd that mills around aimlessly, its members’ attention distracted to things happening outside the person making the speech or away from the enemy symbol to be confronted – individuals and little subgroups drifting away until those who are left are caught up in a deflationary emotion like rats leaving a sinking ship; the party that remains mired in little knots of perfunctory conversations and never builds up a collective effervescence. Here the missing ingredients are both a lack of shared attention – since duos are too fragmented from the larger group – and lack of a shared initial emotion that can be built up and transformed into a sense of collective participation. Low-intensity, perfunctory, or halting conversations exist in abundance, and in obvious contrast to those conversations that are engrossing. Although our normal form of attribution is to regard the conversations as indicators of the personalities one is encountering, these are situational outcomes that can be explained, as we shall later see in more detail, by the differing matchups of stocks of significant symbols to talk about, and by
