experience carried within. This is surely true, as most social scientists would agree, as far as early childhood socialization is concerned. The argument of IR theory carries this further: we are constantly being socialized by our interactional experiences throughout our lives. But not in a unidirectional and homogeneous way; it is intense interaction rituals that generate the most powerful emotional energy and the most vivid symbols, and it is these that are internalized. Contrary to an implication of Freudian theory and others that stress early childhood experience, socialization once laid down does not endure forever; emotional energies and symbolic meanings fade if they are not renewed. IR theory is not a model of a wind-up doll, programmed early in life, which ever after walks through the pattern once laid down. It is a theory of moment-to-moment motivation, situation by situation. Thus it has high theoretical ambitions: to explain what any individual will do, at any moment in time; what he or she will feel, think, and say.
Chapter 2
At the center of an interaction ritual is the process in which participants develop a mutual focus of attention and become entrained in each other’s bodily micro-rhythms and emotions. This chapter will present the details of this process in an explicit model of processes that take place in time: a fine-grained flow of micro-events that build up in patterns of split seconds and ebb away in longer periods of minutes, hours, and days. Rituals are constructed from a combination of
ingredients that grow to differing levels of intensity, and result in the ritual outcomes of solidarity, symbolism, and individual emotional energy. This model enables us to examine carefully each part of the process. We will see what contingencies and variations can occur in each segment, and what effects these have on the outcomes. There are many different kinds of collective consciousness or intersubjectivity: different kinds of group membership, of symbolism, and of emotional tones of social experience. I will put forth a theory of how variations in interaction rituals generate the myriad varieties of human social life.
At a number of points, it is possible to bolster the theoretical model by empirical evidence from contemporary microsociology, notably studies of verbal conversation and studies in the sociology of emotions. As an illustration of what we can get from theoretical analysis of live video recordings of natural human interaction, I will present an analysis of a documentary film of firefighters and street crowds in the September 11, 2001 attack on New York City. This raw data brings out vividly how some IR conditions lead to merely momentary, others to long-term, effects.
Ritual ingredients, processes, and outcomes
Figure 3.1 depicts interaction ritual as a set of processes with causal connections and feedback loops among them. Everything in the model is a variable.
Figure 3.1 Interaction ritual.
Interaction ritual (IR) has four main ingredients or initiating conditions:
1 Two or more people are physically assembled in the same place, so that they affect each other by their bodily presence, whether it is in the foreground of their conscious attention or not.
2 There are boundaries to outsiders so that participants have a sense of who is taking part and who is excluded.
3 People focus their attention upon a common object or activity, and by communicating this focus to each other become mutually aware of each other’s focus of attention.
4 They share a common mood or emotional experience.
These ingredients feedback upon each other. Most importantly, number 3, the mutual focus of attention, and number 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