solidarity and identity is stronger to just the extent that the crowd goes beyond being passive observers to actively taking part. This is an experience not only of responding to other people in the crowd (and to those on the stage, the playing field, or the podium) but of affecting them, thus becoming more of a part of the mutual entrainment by throwing oneself into it more fully. Thus applause is no mere passive response; the pleasure of the performance is to a considerable degree created in those moments when one has the opportunity to applaud, and from the audience’s side the performer or the political speech-maker is being used to facilitate one’s own feeling of collective action. Such effects are visible in a very high degree in collective experience where the crowd becomes very active, and especially in destructive or violent acts. Thus taking part in an ethnic riot (Horowitz 2001) is not simply a way of acting out a preexisting ethnic identity, but a way of strengthening it, re-creating or even creating it. The greater the entrainment, the greater the solidarity and identity consequences; and entrainment reaches much higher levels by activity than passivity.
Often these focused crowds acquire a symbol that can prolong the sense of the experience: usually this symbol is taken from whatever it was that the audience was consciously focused upon. For sports fans, this is the team itself, usually encapsulated in shorthand emblems; for entertainment fans, it is the performers, or possibly the music, play, or film itself that becomes the Durkheimian sacred object. But focused crowds nevertheless have rather weak long-term solidarity; their symbols, although charged up by the crowd’s moment of collective effervescence, do not reinvoke the crowd itself, which on the whole is anonymous to most of its participants. There is no way for members of the group to recognize each other or identify with each other, except via what they clapped for. Those who happened to be together at an exciting moment at a sports stadium do not have much of a tie afterward. They may share some collective symbols, such as wearing the same team emblem, but their solidarity is rather situationally specific, reserved for those occasions when they happen to be at another sporting event, or in some area of conversation around just those symbols. These are examples of secondary group identities: groups whose members do not know each other personally. Benedict Anderson (1991) famously called them “imagined communities,” but this is not quite accurate. What they imagine – what they have an image of – is the symbol that they focus upon, and the “community” is a volatile and episodic experience that comes out just at moments of high ritual intensity.
Focused crowds develop their collective effervescence in those moments when they are active rather than passive spectators. But since their feeling of solidarity is prolonged by symbols that are for the most part presented to them from outside, they do not have much opportunity to use those symbols in their own lives, as ingredients for constructing similarly engrossing IRs. These are passively received symbols that must wait to be recharged when there next occurs a performance of the concert, the game, or the political assembly. At best, they can recirculate the symbols in a second-order, conversational ritual, a reflexive meta-ritual referring to these primary rituals.
[…]
In sum, there are several distinctive ways in which symbols circulate and prolong group membership beyond ephemeral situations of emotional intensity. One is as objects that are in the focus of attention of emotionally entrained but otherwise anonymous crowds. The second is as symbols built up out of personal identities and narratives, in conversational rituals marking the tie between the conversationalists and the symbolic objects they are talking about. These symbols generally operate in two quite different circuits of social relationships; typically, the symbols of audiences, fans, partisans, and followers circulate from one mass gathering to another, and tend to fade in the interim; the symbols of personal identities and reputations are the small change of social relationships (and of business relationships), generally of lesser momentary intensity than audience symbols but used so frequently and in self-reinforcing networks so as to permeate their participants’ sense of reality.
REFERENCES
1 Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
2 Bromley, Daniel G. 1988. Falling from the Faith. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
3 Durkheim, Emile. 1965 (1912). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
4 Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
5 Horowitz, Donald J. 2001. The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
6 Johnson, Weldon, T. 1971. “The Religious Crusade: Revival or Ritual?” American Journal of Sociology, 76: 873–80.
7 Lamont, Michele. 2000. The Dignity of Working Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
8 Richardson, James, T., ed. 1978. Conversion Careers: In and Out of New Religions. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
9 Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review, 51: 273–86.
Part II
Structure and Agency
Introduction to Part II
1 “A Theory of Group Solidarity”
2 “Metatheory: Explanation in Social Science”
3 “Catnets”
4 “Some New Rules of Sociological Method”
Introduction to Part II
A consistent tension in sociological theory lies between two fundamental visions of how social life unfolds. On the one hand, we have “structural” points of view that emphasize the role of durable social practices, resources, norms, and institutions that shape how people behave. The classical roots for this perspective are obvious in Marx (historical materialism; see Vol. 1, Part III) and Durkheim (social facts; see Vol. 1, Part IV)). On the other hand, much social theorizing is about what people do and how their actions matter. This agentic approach is similarly rooted in classical thought (consider Weber’s work on social action, Vol. 1, Part V) and, in its purposive-action variant, forms the core axiom of contemporary micro-economic theory. Known colloquially as the “structure/agency” problem, the tension turns on how we account for both sides of a process that, at some degree, we know must be both true and incomplete. That is, it is obvious that people are agentic in some domains and to some degree locally making choices that affect their life and life chances and collectively acting (or not) to affect wider social and political features. The apparent reality of consequential choices is evident in the many biographies detailing people’s lives and historical accounts of pivotal events – actors experience their lives through an agentic lens. However, at the same time, durable inequalities deeply rooted in race, class, and gender, and other long-lasting cultural patterns persist, often despite concerted efforts to change them, and the best predictor of most outcomes in social life is the accident of where people are born.
The conundrum is not merely a question of empirical scope; rather, it is a question of theoretical incompleteness and internal consistency. A clear and consistent theory at either pole is generally incapable of accounting for core observations from the other pole. For example, a model built on well-internalized norms leaves people making pseudo-choices and living only seemingly agentic lives, as the institutionalized norms and practices are so deeply rooted
