Interaction Rituals

Emotions are intrinsically social. Emotions arise in situations as individuals relate to other people, starting in earliest infancy. How can we theorize this, so that we can pre- dict what determines particular kinds of emotional dynamics, and what are their conse- quences? A great many social causes and consequences can be integrated in a theory of interaction rituals (IRs). The theory originates in Durkheim’s analysis of the social basis of religion, but as Erving Goffman showed, the approach can be extended to the mini-rituals of everyday life.

Emotions are not only social, in that they are predictable responses to particular kinds of social interactions; but also they are often collective—they are strengthened by being shared with others. Durkheim (1912/1964) called this emotional intensification col- lective effervescence; it should be regarded not just as the excitement that builds up in focused crowds, but as any intensification of a shared mood that occurs when certain micro-processes of social interaction take place in everyday life. In what follows, we shall see how emotions are involved in social interactions in various ways: as initiating ingredi- ents; as what distinguishes successful from failed social rituals; as motives resulting from rituals that steer individuals’ life-trajectories into particular pathways of social activities; as stratification of emotional energy between social classes and more generally between powerful and powerless persons in social organization; as differences in emotional styles and hence cultural units; as a key feature in shaping and mobilizing political interests; and in determining patterns of violence.

IRs are produced from a small number of ingredients (Collins, 2004). First, human bodies assemble closely enough so that they can perceive the micro-signals they are giv- ing off in their voices, bodily gestures, and facial expressions. Second, they must focus their attention upon the same thing, and become mutually aware of this common focus; this establishes intersubjectivity. Third, they must feel a shared emotion. If these three conditions occur to a sufficient degree, both the emotion and the mutual focus become stronger; they build up into what Durkheim called collective effervescence, the rhythmic entrainment of all participants into a mood that feels stronger than any of them individu- ally, and carries them along as if under a force from outside.

A successful IR has three major consequences. First: solidarity, a feeling of belong- ing together in a common identity. Second: membership symbols, emblems that the group respects and which remind them of their common membership; when these are a physical emblem like a flag or a religious object, Durkheim called them sacred objects; but membership symbols also include actions, gestures, words, and particular persons. Third: emotional energy (EE)—a longer-lasting feeling that individuals take with them from the group, giving them confidence, enthusiasm, and initiative (Collins, 2004).

IRs can be successful or unsuccessful, and at varying strengths along a continuum. IRs can fail; in that case their effects fail—thus we have a predictor of when people will or will not feel identity with a group, respect for symbols, and emotional enthusiasm.

Regarding the ingredients that produce an IR: it does not matter which particular emo- tions it starts off with. A ritual could be put together out of shared happiness, such as a celebration or a party; but very successful rituals can be put together out of shared sadness—such as gathering for a funeral of a member who has died; or out of anger—the chief political emotion, used to galvanize a group to combat the enemy; or out of fear, another common political emotion. As a crucial feature of political rituals and conflict rituals generally, the group and its leaders try to stir up these negative emotions, making them more intense than they would be if the group did not assemble and focus on them.

But here is the important point. The successful ritual, by bringing about mutual focus of attention and rhythmic entrainment, transmutes any shared emotions into a new emotion: the collective effervescence of solidarity. If we are all angry, or sad together, we nevertheless feel better and stronger. IRs are emotion transformers. They take first-order emotions—anger, joy, sadness, etc.—and transform them into solidarity. They create new, higher-order social emotions out of more primitive emotions.

Consider next the outcome side of IRs. Emotional energy is one of the higher-order emotions created by a successful IR. EE too is a variable; when the IR is intense, indi- viduals come away from it pumped up with confidence and enthusiasm; as Durkheim (1912/1964) noted, rituals make you feel stronger, and that is why they are attractive. People are attracted to religion, or politics, or gossipy conversations, or academic lectures—when these are successful IRs; they believe in them, they internalize their messages—which is to say their symbolic meanings; they orient their lives around these kinds of rituals and try to repeat them. EE is the prime motivator of social life; success- ful rituals attract people to particular kinds of events where they have felt collective effervescence in the past. We see this just as strongly on the negative side, where IRs fail. The ritual is flat; collective emotion is not created; hence individuals’ EE falls—they feel depressed, unmotivated, alienated, and they avoid the kinds of situations where failed rituals have happened. This is why the theory is not just IRs but IR chains—individu- als move from one situation to another, not randomly, but steered by the attraction of where higher EE is found, and steered away from situations where they lose EE. ...

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IR theory is an explanation of what people will think, as well as what they will do. At any particular moment, people are speaking certain words or thinking certain thoughts; the thoughts that go through one’s head are internalized from previous talk with other people; more innovative thoughts are assembled out of the ingredients of verbal ideas already internalized. The world is a network of conversations, and what people think at any point in it is a product of what has circulated in previous conversations. There is a crucial emotional component: ideas are better remembered, and make more sense, if they were associated with emotion when they were previously talked about. Thus even in spontaneous private thinking, it is those emotionally-laden ideas that spring to one’s mind. When persons strategize, or vent, or otherwise try to express their aims in words, these are the words that arise in one’s head, and on one’s tongue.

Put more fully: the world is a network of conversations that have different degrees of success or failure as IRs. Successful IRs are those in which the assembled group attains a high degree of mutual focus of attention, sharing a common emotion, and experiencing Durkheimian collective effervescence. ...

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To summarize: material interests do not simply exist and thereby drive struggles among classes and interest groups. They must always be socially formulated, in words and symbols; and this is done when IRs are successful in generating more focus of attention and more shared emotion around certain ways of construing interests than other ways. Not to say the material world doesn’t exist; human bodies, the numbers of people who take part in one ritual camp or another, weapons, vehicles, money, and all the other economic and technological resources make a difference in how the action is mobilized, and who wins. But it all has to go through the eye of a needle, which is the social definition of what we perceive our interests to be, and that is done by the degree of emotionally shared focus in IRs. Material resources are inert and blind until they are put in action by focused networks of humans in full emotional/cognitive communication. Various ways of organizing and focusing IRs are the key to political action.

The basic ideas of the theory are deceptively simple, drawn more or less in equal parts from Durkheim, Goffman, and Mead. Collins starts with the idea of a situation of co-presence, or really any physical gathering. A situation of that sort turns into a ritual when those physically present focus their attention on specific people, objects, or symbols, and are thereby constituted as a distinct group with more or less clear boundaries. This obviously includes religious rituals, but also a vast number of interpersonal interactions, ranging from informal small-group conversations and sexual acts at one end to academic lectures, workplace meetings, conference presentations, political rallies, sports events, and other large-scale physical gatherings with a joint focus at the other end of the scale. With a bit of conceptual stretching one can even include here private rituals (e.g., praying alone, having a solitary cigarette or a cup of coffee before working or after working), with only one participant (these are treated by Collins as secondary rituals, where the focus of attention is on the symbols and objects whose meaning and value is produced in primary social rituals); and one may also wish to treat situations of joint focus but no physical co-presence – mediated interactions, in short – as rituals (though Collins claims, for reasons that will become clear below, that rituals without physical co-presence are far less likely to succeed qua rituals). As should be obvious, the word “ritual” is here being used in a very capacious sense, without reference to the “ceremonial” aspects of many of the activities that we would normally call rituals, or to any hard and fast distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane;” Collins stresses that he wants us to see ritual “almost everywhere” (p. 15). I have no particular problems with this; “ritual”, like “game”, is a family resemblance term. The more interesting move comes when we ask what a ritual is for.

A ritual, for Collins, is basically an amplifier of emotion. (I pause to note that an amplifier of emotion is not necessarily a generator of emotion, though it is not clear whether or not Collins sees any important distinction here). We are literally “pumped up” by a successful ritual – we experience a buzz, exhilaration, enthousiasmos, “collective effervescence.” A great lecture, a sports spectacle in a vast stadium, a great concert, a fire-and-brimstone sermon, the rituals of solidarity among small military units; these interactions motivate us, that is, they set us in motion, send us on our way to act beyond the immediate confines of the group situation (to read the book discussed in the lecture, follow the news of your sports team or music band and wear the team colors, proselytize for your sect, attack the enemy, and perhaps also to do the crappy jobs necessary to gather the material resources to do all of these things). Not every ritual is successful, of course (and not every ritual is equally successful for all participants, even when the ritual is generally successful – more on this point later); some ritual situations bore us, sending our attention wandering, and we end up feeling drained and depressed: think of a boring meeting at your workplace, or an awful lecture ... These rituals are demotivating; as Collins puts it, they sap our “emotional energy.”

Emotional energy (EE) is the all-purpose term Collins uses to talk about the emotions and moods that motivate (anger, righteousness, joy, pride, etc.) or demotivate us (depression, sadness, etc.). A successful ritual generates and amplifies motivating emotions, while an unsuccessful ritual does the contrary. Perhaps Collins’ most controversial claim is the idea that we are basically EE “seekers”: much (all?) of our social activity can be understood as a largely unconscious “flow” along the gradient of maximal EE charge for us, given our particular material resources and positions within the “market” for ritual situations (the set of ritual situations available to us). Our primary “motivation” is the search for motivation; or more precisely, motivation (our “motive power”) is simply a result of emotional amplification in ritual situations, so that we are propelled along “chains” of situations where we achieve high levels of EE and avoid situation chains where the contrary is the case. Thus, our ordinary “interests” cannot be understood apart from the ritual situations which shape and indeed construct them as genuinely motivating values; whether a person cares specifically for material goods, knowledge, or the welfare of some particular group depends on the ritual chains in which they participate and the way these rituals affect their emotional energy. As Collins puts it, “[h]uman behaviour may be characterized as emotional energy tropism. Social sources of EE directly energize behaviour; the strongest energizing situation exerts the strongest pull” (pp. 181-182; he adds that “individuals do not experience such situations as controlling them; because they are being filled with energy, the feel that they [are in] control … When EE is strong, they see immediately what they want to do.”).

In keeping with the “energy” metaphor, Collins argues further that rituals charge symbols, objects, and persons with value (or, in the case of unsuccessful rituals, drain them of value) that then circulate in other rituals (in “chains” of interaction rituals) and in “private” settings (in secondary rituals). Consider a powerful symbol for some group, like the cross. Its power as a symbol – its concentration of meaning and value, and thus its ability to motivate action – is directly related to the success of the rituals in which it is a central focus of attention (church services, prayer rituals, etc.); and it is more powerful for those who participate in these rituals regularly and who are themselves closer to the focus of attention. For these people, the cross becomes an increasingly powerful reminder of their bonds to one another, a genuinely “sacred” object whose violation can engender anger and around which other >norms (prescribing forms of display, handling, material sacrifices, etc.) can also develop. At the same time, the cross obviously does not have the same motivating power for everyone (certainly not for every nominal Christian); its ability to awaken emotional reactions in people outside the ritual situation depends on how it circulates in the various “ritual chains” of people’s lives (whether it is something worn, referred to, exchanged, displayed in painting or art, etc.), and it decays with distance to the rituals that imbue the cross with value.

Thus, once an object or an idea (a “symbol” for short) is “charged” by rituals, it can serve to temporarily reinforce the identities of group members and motivate them to act in accordance with what they take to be the group’s values (defending the symbols that are central to the group’s rituals, for example), even when the group is not gathered together. By the same token, symbols will be inert for those who do not participate in the rituals that invest them with value and meaning; the value and meaning (or more precisely, the motivational potential) of any symbol is always relative to particular groups and their rituals. And, crucially, anything can become a powerful symbol for some group, given a sufficiently successful ritual: a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics or Marx’s Capital, particular places or animals, the image of a person like Hugo Chávez (a charismatic person being simply a person who has been charged with emotional energy in interaction rituals, though we can also think of people who are especially skilled at producing successful interaction rituals), the expression of particular opinions (e.g., the idea that global warming is a hoax or that shape-shifting lizards rule the world); the key point is that these objects and symbols both reinforce the bonds between group members and store reserves of motivation that people can draw on outside the immediate context of the ritual.

Stated more incautiously than I think Collins would, rituals are what I would call engines of sacrality: they produce sacred things the way a generator might charge a battery. There is no room in the theory for a distinction in kind between the sacred and the profane; a sufficiently powerful ritual can make anything that is a joint focus of attention into a sacred object, its sacrality merely the measure of its emotional charge for a particular group. And because rituals are omnipresent in human life, sacred objects and symbols are also omnipresent. (From this point of view, the idea that the modern world is especially “disenchanted” is basically a myth, though I suppose it is possible that rituals in the modern world are more “fragmented” – there are a multiplicity of symbols that become charged with emotional energy and value rather than a relatively small set of such symbols, including the symbol “god”). Or, as the South Indian poet Bavasanna once put it (as quoted by David Shulman):

The pot is a god. The winnowing fan is a god. The stone in the street is a god. The comb is a god. The bowstring is also a god. The bushel is a god and the spouted cup is a god.

Gods, gods, there are so many there’s no place left for a foot.

Though Collins does not say this, this view implies that ritual is prior to belief: belief “in” a cause, or a leader, or a god, or anything of the sort is primarily attachment to particular symbols of group membership that have been charged with value by powerful rituals, and should tend to decay in the absence of rituals “recharging” these symbols. (Collins suggests that a week is a good estimate of the half-life of the emotional charge of most symbols; hence the weekly services of churches or the weekly frequency of many intimate rituals, for example). Moreover, motivated reasoning should be ubiquitous, as indeed it seems to be; for the most part, we do not reason our way to most of our important beliefs, but acquire these through participation in communities with their interaction rituals (which may not look like obvious rituals; note that as long as we are participants in a successful interaction ritual, our focus is on the things the ritual is about, not on the ritual itself). Sociologists time and again find that many (most?) people join social movements before they acquire clear beliefs about issues; we then justify these beliefs ex post and defend them against perceived threats. And when a particular belief becomes entangled with an identity – when it becomes, in other words, a focus in some chain of successful interaction rituals, circulating as a marker of membership in some group– it then becomes more or less immune to rational argument. This is not to say that we cannot on occasion reason our way to various positions; but solid “belief” (in the sense that people most people have in mind when they say that they believe “in” something, ranging from Christianity to socialism) needs a lot of help from interaction ritual chains (understood as repeated, focused interactions that charge certain symbols with value). Belief without ritual and community is typically a fickle thing, discarded just as easily as acquired.

But how do successful rituals manage to amplify emotion and produce sacred objects and symbols? Here Collins draws a picture of human beings as homo saltans. Emotional charge or motivational energy is built up from entrainment: the micro-coordination of gesture, voice, and attention in rhythmic activity, down to tiny fractions of a second. Think of how in an engrossing conversation the partners are wholly attuned to one another, laughing and exhibiting emotional reactions simultaneously, keeping eye contact, taking turns at precisely the right moments, mirroring each other’s reactions; or how a sports event, a sermon, or a concert produces emotional energy through the rhythmic synchronization of the fans or congregants in call and response, or simply in dance. Or consider sexual acts, to which Collins devotes a long and very interesting chapter. Emotional amplification works everywhere through physical resonance; as we become progressively attuned to the physical activity of others, individual emotions (which are, after all, rooted in physical dispositions) come to be shared and amplified. (Consider the difference between listening to a recording of comedian in the privacy of one’s own room and listening to a comedian live while in a room of people laughing; or the fact that one can feel the need to cry when one is surrounded by people crying). no

(We might even say that patterns of micro-coordination are the building blocks of macro-coordination: the larger circuits of collective action are nourished by the smaller-scale rituals of collective micro-activity. Though we are not there yet; we have not yet seen how to translate the micro-coordination characteristic of successful rituals to the patterns of macro-coordination that produces what we normally call power).