Collective Effervescence Research Articles

Wrigley Regulars: Finding Community in the Bleachers (review)

Reviewed by: Wrigley Regulars: Finding Community in the Bleachers P. J. Dragseth Holly Swyers . Wrigley Regulars: Finding Community in the Bleachers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 200 pp. Paper, $25.00. Readers who pick up this book expecting to read about Chicago Cubs baseball are in for a surprise. Swyers, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lake Forest College, suggests that the longtime fans in the centerfield bleachers at Wrigley Field are not a random group, but a structured community. As a member of the inner sanctum, she put together a self-designed informal study which included personal experiences and interviews with some of those fans dubbed "Wrigley Regulars." The result is a cleverly woven fabric of Chicago Cubs baseball and Wrigley Field memories that are the ties that bind this unique community. She begins by stating "too much scholarly ink has been spilled over the question of community" (x), followed by her working definition that touches on such facets as proximity, shared mutual benefits, established rules of behavior, division of labor, biological-emotional-generational connections of members, a common enemy, and, in this case, what Emile Durkheim called a "collective effervescence." To avoid confusion with the die-hard Cubs fans, she quickly points out that die-hard Cubs fans don't require a community [End Page 161] to validate a love of the Cubs, but "loving the Cubs can become the baseline for community." The Wrigley Regulars don't "require" community, either, yet they have inadvertently created one. In their case, proximity is perhaps the second most significant factor behind love of the team because the bleachers are physically isolated from the rest of the park and even have a separate entrance. Prior to the 1980s, when bleacher tickets were only sold on the day of the game, fans got acquainted as they stood in long lines along the outfield wall waiting for Gate N to open, and perhaps sat together at the games. Over time, a division of labor became apparent due to pressures associated with limited seating on strips of benches without defined seats, as early arrivals had the "job" of spreading towels along the benches to save space for friends. They even established a seat of honor for the oldest member of the community in what used to be Section 311, playfully and affectionately referred to as "the Death Seat." Eventually a sort of Wrigley curse about the powers of that seat appeared. The "common enemy" at Wrigley games seems obvious: the visiting team. But, believe it or not, that's not always the case. Swyers points to what she terms "the Lee Elia rant" of April 29, 1983. The team had only won five of its first nineteen games, and the bleacher fans erupted with particularly noisy and tough jeers to the players. It's been said, but not proven, that beer was dumped on an outfielder during the game. Afterward Manager Lee Elia's postgame press conference was a brutal, foul-mouthed attack on fans in the bleachers, accusing them of being a bunch of unemployed bums, among other things, and saying that "eighty-five percent of the f-- world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here" (16). It was all published in the Chicago Tribune and replayed on WGN and other TV news broadcasts with the assumed intent of whipping the bleacher fans into shape. But it more or less backfired and "galvanized bleacher fans into a more united body and gave them a recognizable identity." (p. 16) Soon bleacher fans appeared sporting buttons that read "Working Cubs Fan." The group has social taboos, such as not discussing jobs or professions. However, when one member accidentally revealed his job, their "pencils to Peru" campaign began in support of his endeavors. More seriously, when a longtime member violated a taboo regarding trustworthiness, he was subsequently ostracized. Of course, he returned to the bleachers, but he was no longer accepted by the community. Wrigley nostalgia and discussions of benchmark events is a relished steady diet of the regulars. All members in good standing must be well versed about them: "The Ryne Sandberg Game" against the Phillies on June 23, 1984; Kerry Wood...

Embodying the nation: football,1emotions and the construction of collective identity

The article intends to combine contemporary debates about nations and nationalism with a sociological perspective on collective emotions in its attempt to gain a better understanding of the process of constructing national identity. It will further present interdisciplinary evidence that collective emotions evoked in rituals instigate a number of group-related sociocognitive processes that reinforce enduring feelings of belonging and an emotional priming of collective representations. I will suggest that states of “collective effervescence” (Durkheim) do not only tie individuals to a community, but also provide a strong frame for the creation of symbols and the embodiment of shared meanings defining a community. The second part of the article analyzes examples taken from the football media coverage of the FIFA World Cups 2006 and 1974 (both were held in Germany) in order to provide a comparative case study exemplifying the proposed theoretical approach. The sample illuminates some interesting changes that invite further hypotheses about corresponding changes of national identity in a larger context.

Does acclamation equal agreement? Rethinking collective effervescence through the case of the presidential “tour de France” during the twentieth century

This article discusses the integrative function frequently assigned to festive events by scholars. This function can be summed up in a proposition: experiencing similar emotions during collective gatherings is a powerful element of socialization. The article rejects this oft-developed idea according to which popular fervor could be an efficient tool to measure civic engagement. It raises the following question: what makes enthusiasm “civic”, “patriotic”, “republican” or simply “political”? Based on a study of French presidential tours in France from 1888 to 2007, this article casts a different light on the topic. The enthusiasm of the crowds interacting with the successive French presidents is not civic because an inquiry may find “patriotism” into participants’ minds. It can be called civic simply because the forms and meaning of the festive jubilation, which may be summarized into the formula: “if spectators applaud, it means they support,” necessarily preexist its multiple manifestations.

American Criminology Meets Collins: Global Theory of Intellectual Change and a Policy‐Oriented Field1

Ideas from Randall Collins’sSociology of Philosophiesare applied to U.S. criminology, a policy‐oriented field and one case of differentiation out of a fragmented sociological discipline. Building on previous quantitative work, in‐depth interviews with eight prominent scholars provide the empirical material. As in philosophy, vertical network ties are important. Yet, they may take different forms, with consequences for the shape of horizontal networks and the nature of scholarship. Comparable to philosophy, horizontal network ties provide social capital and opportunities for interaction rituals that generate collective effervescence and emotional energy. Further, the nature of these interactions is dependent on the changing institutional environment in which they are embedded. Such institutional settings, themselves affected by changes in the political economy, also provide material resources, constituting dependencies that produce mediated effects and, in this policy‐oriented field, also direct effects on the nature of scholarship.

The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization (review)

Reviewed by: The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization Shoshana Keller The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization. By Paul Froese. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 264 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). Sociologists rarely get an opportunity to test their theories in the field, and Paul Froese of Baylor University wryly comments, "I expect this is a welcome blessing for most of the population" (p. 38). The rise and fall of that great sociopolitical experiment known as the Soviet Union does provide a venue for such testing, in which Froese applies sociological theories of religion to what he calls the "Soviet Secularization Experiment" to see how well they hold up. The results for the theories are mixed, although this approach does provide some valuable insights into how the religious landscape of the USSR developed. It also raises serious questions, at least in the mind of this historian, about the limits of theoretical modeling for understanding specific societies. The book examines six assertions about the relationship between religion and society: modern scientific knowledge undermines religious belief (Karl Marx); rituals are powerful because of the "collective effervescence" they generate, not because they really connect with the supernatural (Emile Durkheim); religious participation is based on rational calculations of social and/or otherworldly reward (Max Weber; Rodney Starke and Roger Finke); religion is dependent on state support and can be determined by the state (Lev Trotsky); and religious institutions are subject to market forces (Adam Smith). Froese tests these assertions through a chronological survey of Soviet efforts to make the entire population of the former Russian Empire scientific atheists or, when that failed early on, to disrupt the supply of religious institutions and the demand for them. He concludes with a brief chapter on the post-Soviet situation and a meditation on the apparent inseparability of politics and religion. The USSR contained dozens of religions and hundreds of sects. Froese, who draws on mostly English-language secondary sources for his data, confines his analysis to various forms of Christianity and to Central [End Page 544] Asian Islam, on which there has been a recent spate of publishing. Two central points of comparison in the study are the respective fates of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), predominant in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and the Roman Catholic Church, predominant in Lithuania. The Bolsheviks aimed their fiercest assaults against the ROC, which was their rival not so much for political legitimacy as for fundamental beliefs about the nature of the world and humanity. Within weeks of seizing power in October 1917, Vladimir Lenin stripped the church of all state political and financial support. The Communist Party's Union of Militant Godless conducted enthusiastic antireligious propaganda, based on the premise that teaching basic science and demonstrating that faith in God, saints, and miraculous icons was illusory would be sufficient to destroy Orthodoxy. Simultaneously, the party built up an alternate body of "scientific atheist" ritual ("Octoberings" in place of christenings, public processions with red banners and portraits of the leaders in place of holy icons) and belief about the ultimate future of humanity. These actions directly implemented the theories of Trotsky, Marx, and Durkheim. By the late 1920s it became clear that destroying religion was not so easy. The central factor in the turn to open violence was the ascent of Joseph Stalin, who subordinated the entire revolution to his economic program and need for absolute obedience. Over the next ten years the Soviet state imprisoned and murdered thousands of priests, monks, and nuns; burned icons; and seized church buildings and valuables. The government imposed heavy social and economic penalties on churchgoers, everything from job loss to public humiliation, imprisonment, or death. The supply of and demand for Orthodox education for children all but disappeared, as parents would not endanger their children's futures by seeking out the few teachers who survived. A rational actor, assessing the social rewards of participation in the ROC, could only conclude that there were none. Despite the combination of persuasion and violence, the party failed to destroy either the ROC as an institution or popular belief in its tenets. Indeed...

For Durkheim: Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology

Contents: Introduction: why For Durkheim? Part 1 (Re)Discovering Durkheim: Emile Durkheim's matrix On discovering Durkheim Emile Durkheim and social change Durkheim and Husserl: a comparison of the spirit of positivism and the spirit of phenomenology Durkheim, Mathiez and the French revolution: the political context of a sociological classic Situating Durkheim's sociology of work Durkheim, solidarity and September 11. Part 2 Durkheim and Cultural Change: Contextualizing the emergence of modern sociology: the Durkheimian school in search of bygone society Avant-garde art and avant-garde sociology: 'primitivism' and Durkheim ca. 1905a 1913 From Durkheim to Managua: revolutions as religious revivals Sexual anomie, social structure and societal change No laughing matter: applying Durkheim to Danish cartoons. Part 3 Durkheim and Weber: A problem for the sociology of knowledge: the mutual unawareness of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber Neither Marx nor Durkheim a | perhaps Weber Durkheim and Weber: first cousins? Collective effervescence, social change and charisma: Durkheim, Weber and 1989 On the shoulders of Weber and Durkheim: East Asia and emergent modernity Appendix Index.

Bodies in Sync: Interaction Ritual Theory Applied to Sacred Harp Singing

This paper applies interaction theory (Collins 2004) to the case of singing in the United States. We first situate the paper in a tradition of theorizing traced to Durkheim's analysis of collective effervescence, the key to which is that instead of merely expressing social solidarity, physically intense rituals create it. Drawing on recent ethnographic literature as well as our observant participation, we depict Sacred Harp ritual. The music is sung loudly and with gusto, and singers employ their bodies both to produce the sound and to emphasize its significance. We apply Collins's theory to argue that Sacred Harp ritual produces solidarity in the absence of, or prior to, ideological consensus. Sacred Harp singers include evangelicals, atheists, and Jews, with a significant presence of gays and lesbians. Notwithstanding these differences, Sacred Harp constitutes a far-flung solidary community, an emergent shared identity that cross-cuts other, often conflicting identities. We close with suggestions for further applications of a promising theory.

Citizenship through the Collective Effervescence of the Kundalini

Citizenship through the Collective Effervescence of the Kundalini

The Religious Dimensions of Compulsive Buying

This paper examines the implicit religiosity of compulsive buying. Much of the extant literature on the subject focuses on biological and/or psychological factors. I argue that the cycle of behaviour in compulsive buying, which oscillates between euphoria and depression, can be paralleled with Durkheim’s exposition of collective effervescence. In my paper I argue that many of the behaviours expressed in the cycles of compulsive buying can be described as religious, and that the sense of fulfilment striven for in the pursuit of commodity after commodity can be viewed as a desperate need to heal the self and, invariably, to find salvation. My understanding of the religious is discussed in a relationship between the sacred and the profane in the context of Durkheim and then Bataille, which leads me to the conclusion that compulsive buying is an implicitly religious activity.

Shaping feelings in cyberspace: The case of Chinese seafarer-partners

Research has shown that expressing feelings online is subject to feeling rules much like those that govern offline environments. ‘Expressing feelings’, however, is different from ‘feeling feelings’. Does emotional interaction online change how individuals feel and, if so, in what ways? This paper addresses the question by examining a group of Chinese seafarer-partners' activities in an online group. Drawing upon emotion management theory, this paper shows that seafarer-partners in the group helped each other to reframe negative experiences in positive ways in order to suppress unpleasant feelings. It also reveals a corollary process of online emotion-shaping, namely, boosting positive feelings, by drawing upon the concept of collective effervescence. Both processes served to make seafarer-partners feel positive about their relationships. This paper thus extends previous research findings by demonstrating that online support also serves to shape how individuals feel and does so through two processes.

Sorcerer's Apprentices and the `Will to Figuration'

The article deals with Le Collège de Sociologie, an elective organization founded in 1937 by a group of French thinkers, among whom were Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris. It tries to show how the notion of `force' or of `power', constitutive to the `new mythology' the members of the Collège wanted to create, was in fact deeply ambivalent in nature. This ambivalence can be traced back to the internal ambiguities of the Durkheimian theory of the `collective effervescence', which is shown to have influenced not only the collegians' notion of the sacred, but also their conception of power. This ambiguous theoretical heritage is curiously reflected in the conflicting conceptions Bataille and Caillois held of the notion of power — one of the major controversies, which later led to the dissolution of the Collège. The thesis defended here is that the seeds of this controversy lie already in the internal ambiguities of the Durkheimian theory and that these ambivalences were in a certain manner reproduced not only in the dispute between Caillois and Bataille, but also in much of the contemporary social theory drawing its inspiration from the Durkheimian sociology of the sacred.

Politics of the Sacred: Eliade, Bataille and the Fascination of Fascism

Between the two World Wars, the rise of the fascist politico-religious movements proved a fateful return of the ‘collective effervescence’ that Emile Durkheim had placed at the core of the sacred. This article analyses the conception of the sacred in the work of two scholars, Mircea Eliade and Georges Bataille, who both responded to this phenomenon in their work. Their theories are scrutinized with an eye to their political implications: What political commitments underlie their theories? Do the theories contribute to the understanding of the fateful amalgam of religion and politics? It is demonstrated how, despite some important similarities, the two develop radically differing interpretations of the sacred. Eliade occults the political background as well as the violent ramifications of his idealized view of the sacred. Bataille, in his turn, does not shun a certain complicity with forces that fascism exploited, a complicity that does not correspond bit by bit with his overt statements of commitment. Still, from his writing emerges a dynamic conception of the sacred, undersood as a fundamentally ambiguous force, that helps to grasp the—also political—uses, abuses, as well a certain useless residue of the sacred.

Almost under the same sky: reclaiming urbanity beyond an epidemic

This essay deals with the social and political after‐shock introduced by SARS, which is considered here as both a public health outbreak and an urban cultural crisis. In Hong Kong, several years after the epidemic episode, the people’s voice regarding urban spatial politics, governance, and the media has not only grown louder, but has also been profoundly transformed into collective effervescence. This essay is based on over 50 interviews of ordinary Hong Kong residents from a wide spectrum of demographics. A particular focal point of the interviews was, inevitably, the participants’ reformulation of their identity as a function of urban crisis. Chiefly a documentation of the vernaculars of public criticism offered by the citizens of Hong Kong, this essay relates post‐SARS public sentiments to the (somewhat fiddly) development of democratic ideals that is animating our urban imagination today.

Bike Messengers and the Really Real: Effervescence, Reflexivity, and Postmodern Identity

Out of more than two thousand bike messengers in New York City, a few hundred participate in alleycats—illegal races held in open traffic. Surrounding this racing scene is a vibrant messenger community. Messengers who race in or attend alleycats carry their messenger identity into all aspects of their lives. Through direct participant observation, this article proposes that alleycats function as Durkheimian rituals for these messengers. Alleycats express the central values of the social world. Lost in collective effervescence, the individual confronts these values as objectified truths, which allow messengers to form stable identities. Further, bicycles, messenger bags, and other objects become sacred symbols within this ritualization process. The ability of messengers to construct such nonreflexive identities is juxtaposed with theories about the self in postmodernity. In The Meaning of Culture , Allan (1998) claims that reality construction is predicated on affect-meaning—the felt reality of culture. This stance comes from the application of Durkheim’s theory of the role of rituals in producing meaning. Although the ecstatic religious rituals that interested Durkheim may be less evident in our time, any number of secular rituals exist that are similarly essential for creating meaning. Rituals in the Durkheimian sense are not static and archaic ceremonies. According to Collins’s (2004) reading of Durkheim, a ritual is “a mechanism of mutually focused emotion and attention producing a momentarily shared reality” (p. 7). The present article focuses on one example of such a meaning-generating secular ritual among bicycle messengers—“alleycats,” or illegal races held in open traffic. While there are over two thousand messengers in New York City, only a few hundred participate in alleycats. Surrounding this racing scene is a vibrant messenger community. Bike messengers who race in or attend alleycats strongly identify with what can be conceptualized as a messenger lifestyle. That is to say, these individuals do not simply

The Catholic Revolution. New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council (review)

Reviewed by: The Catholic Revolution. New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council Joseph P. Chinnici O.F.M. The Catholic Revolution. New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council. By Andrew Greeley. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 224.) Intending to reprise much of his work on the development of Catholicism in the United States since the Second Vatican Council, the author succinctly charts the "demolition of the structure that said that the Catholic Church would not, could not ever change"(p. 70). Following an introduction which attempts to justify the use of "revolution,"chapter two outlines features of the law-dominated Church of the 1950's, later described as "sin-oriented and focused on a blind obedience relationship between the lay Catholic and the Church leadership"(p. 192). This neatly sets up the argument for "revolution" in chapter three, a summary of Greeley's own research into the standard sociological markers indicating the "drastic change in Catholic attitude and behavior"(p. 38) between 1963 and 1974. Chapters four and five, the most creative of the book, make good use of William Sewell, Jr.'s theory of structural change and Melissa Jo Wilde's use of Durkheim's notion of "collective effervescence"to describe the collapse of inherited structures, the "event"of the Council, and the spread of euphoric change among the laity. The argument is a helpful move beyond Greeley's standard focus on the impact of Humanae Vitae (see [End Page 363] page 43). Chapter six easily joins with nine to reiterate Greeley's insights into the Catholic "religious sensibility,"its sacramentalism and communalism. This approach is set over against the description in chapter seven of the elite managerial cadre of liturgists, ecumenists, catechists, and feminists who "take control of the direction of change in their own areas of concern and impose their views on many parishes, usually without consulting the membership"(p. 83). Next, the author includes a very helpful review of data related to international Catholicism (chapter 8). As Greeley has argued before, the creators of "beige Catholicism" joined with the failure of episcopal leaders at almost every level to cause the current malaise in the Church. His research on the priests, delineated in outline form in chapter ten, describes their behavior as a key indicator in the development of all three dimensions of the revolution:structural collapse and the spread of conciliar effervescence among the laity, the emergence of a Catholicism without metaphor or story, and, in response to change, the development of the "new authoritarian pragmatism."Greeley returns to his commitment to the recovery of the aesthetic sensibility as the central key to the reconstruction of contemporary Catholicism in the final four essays in the book on cultural heritage, the role of beauty in religious education, the importance of "charm"in the exercise of authority, and the need for professional liturgists to listen to the laity. The book concludes with a helpful summary, ten pages of notes, bibliography, and index. An overview of Greeley's provocative insights, The Catholic Revolution is a good book and most helpful in pushing historians to develop a theory of change. Generally uncomfortable with the notion of revolution, most would probably be cautious with respect to the author's over-generalizations and his failure to differentiate in the areas of leadership, episcopal and managerial, and the always "wise" but rather vague "laity." The sociology and theology point in a significant and fruitful direction. In an historical journal it should also be noted that these reflections on ecclesial change take place outside of the context of the civil rights movement, Vietnam, broader political and economic developments, and the culture wars, all of which would locate the "revolution" in the Church within a broader trajectory of change and encourage more sensitive readings of its flawed participants. Joseph P. Chinnici O.F.M. Franciscan School of Theology Berkeley, California Copyright © 2006 The Catholic University of America Press

The Biblical Origins of Nationalism

March/April 2006 · Historically Speaking 21 The Biblical Origins of Nationalism Anthony D. Smith Nationalism is generally assumed to be a secular ideology and a modern movement. While there may be some debate about the nature and dating of nations, there is little or no disagreement about the character and modernity of nationalism. Yet, even here, things are not that clear-cut. Not only do we find strands ofnationalist ideology in earlier periods of history, but closer inspection reveals an early modern form of nationalism, one with an ancient religious pedigree, which I shall term "covenantal" nationalism.1 What can such a term imply? Pacts and oath swearing were common enough in the French Revolution and its successors. In Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere the formation of more or less secret societies whose members were bound to each other by oaths and rituals was a common prelude, or accompaniment, to mass agitation. There were also open, public oath ceremonies. An early example was the celebration of the Fete de la Federation on the Champs de Mars in 1790, when the tricolor was flown and the participants swore to defend the patrie using the selfsame gestures of the Roman oath sworn by the three Horatii brothers in Jacques-Louis David's painting ofLes Horaces of 1784. The point of such oath ceremonies was not to enter into mutually beneficial contracts. It was to bind the nation to its own image of itself. As such it was an act ofworship, and its god was as exclusive as that of any previous monotheism . As the Petition ofAgitators put it in 1792: "The image of the patrie is the sole divinity whom it is permissible to worship."2 In other words, this secular doctrine was embedded in a sacred context and had a religious purpose. Ofcourse, this was not religion in a transcendental mode. It did not seek salvation from a suprahuman, otherworldly cosmos . The salvation it offered was entirely of this world—to be part of the nation progressing through time and history. The immortality it conferred was equally terrestrial: the judgment ofhistory and the praise ofposterity. But it was not less religious for that. Better than any Durkheimian totemism, the rituals of nationalism created social solidarity through collective effervescence in national self-worship , if only temporarily. They also set the nation apart from others and imbued its members with strength and purpose, including aggression and expansion, as happened in Revolutionary France from 1793. Yet these rituals were not the first of their kind. They possessed a lineage, not so much in France perhaps, but certainly in England, Scotland, and the Netherlands. Though these mation was a growing identification of England as an elect nation, a view encouraged by the ideal of the Covenant found in the Hebrew Bible. This in turn encouraged a return to the study and inspiration of the Old Testament (long regarded in Catholic theology as merely a prelude to the gospel of the New Testament), with the laws of the Pentateuch Colonel Titus addresses Oliver Cromwell, undated. The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. are not the only cases—we may cite the cases of Ulster, the northern colonies of the United States, and the Afrikaners—they are the first, and the most striking. Here, we can clearly discern the biblical lineage ofnationalism and the image ofthe ancient Mosaic Covenant.3 Let me start with England. Here the Henrician Reformation, much like those of Denmark and Sweden from the 1530s, was undertaken by the state and elevated the Royal Supremacy in place of papal authority. But it was succeeded by a more radical Protestant reform, whose main legacies were a vernacular Bible and Book of Common Prayer. However, it was the bitter experience of the Marian exiles from 1553 to 1558, reflecting on the Protestant martyrs of Mary's reign, that established a specifically English mode of Protestantism with growing Calvinist tendencies . Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1560-1573) became, after the Bible, the most widely read Protestant text. One of the fruits of this reforand the moral examples of biblical heroes serving as models for the Puritan...

Corps de ballet: the case of the injured ballet dancer.

This paper contributes to debate on social constructionism in the sociology of health and illness through a study of injury among ballet dancers. In this empirical study of classical ballet dancers, we outline a phenomenology of the injured and ageing body in terms of a critical commentary on constructionism. We explore dancers' experiences of embodiment to illustrate our critique of recent interpretations of dance as a textual practice. Those forms of social constructionism that define the body as a text provide a forceful attack on discourses of authority and legitimation, but we argue that they are problematic as epistemologies and ontologies of embodiment. Through a phenomenological understanding of the experiences of embodiment, we observe how injury and ageing disrupt the practical accomplishments that underpin the ballet habitus and the dancer's identity. Although ballet injuries can terminate a dancing career, they are accepted as an inevitable part of the vocation of ballet. Our aim is to understand the interaction between injuries, dancers' experiences of discomfort and the social support that emerges from the ballet dancers as a social group. We draw on the concepts of social solidarity and collective consciousness in Emile Durkheim to show that injury is mediated through the social bonding of dancers into a professional ballet company, where injury is accepted as a sign of vocational commitment, and suggest that this 'collective effervescence' gives a novel meaning to the idea of a corps de ballet.

Collective Effervescence and Communitas: Processual Models of Ritual and Society in Emile Durkheim and Victor Turner

The author delineates a previously unnoticed equivalency betweenEmile Durkheim's concept of collective effervescence andVictor Turner's communitas. The processual model of ritualand society contained within Durkheim's The Elementary Formsof Religious Life, similar to the one later developed by Turner,is then outlined. Durkheim's and Turner's models are compared,including their emphases on the alienating nature of social structure,and the necessity of a dialectical tension between it and collectiveeffervescence/communitas. Finally, the models are considered in lightof recent scholarship in transpersonal anthropology and the anthropologyof consciousness.

Durkheim, Morality and Modernity: Collective Effervescence, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action

The issue of morality has lost its position of importance within the discipline, yet a growing number of sociologists interested in the ambivalent character of (post) modernity have returned to this subject in recent years. This article examines the revival of interest in morality and suggests it would benefit by engaging creatively with Durkheim's writings on homo duplex, collective effervescence, and the social construction of moral orders. After examining this relatively neglected part of Durkheim's work, developed most fully in his «The Elementary Forms of Religious Life», the authors focus on two of the most influential contemporary commentators on morality, Z. Bauman and A. Giddens. Having evaluated the limitations of their respective approaches (which associate the sources of morality respectively with a methodologically individualistic bodily impulse of 'being for the other', and with an increasingly global cognitive reflexivity), they analyse recent writings which have attempted to transcend such difficulties by engaging with some of the tensions in Durkheim's account of sacred moral orders. These highlight those features of Durkheim's work which continue to offer a productive basis on which to develop further a thoroughly sociological appreciation of morality

COLLECTIVE EFFERVESCENCE, SOCIAL CHANGE AND CHARISMA: DURKHEIM, WEBER AND 1989

A meaningful interpretation of the dynamics of recent momentous historical changes - most notably the unexpected and surprising implosion of the Soviet empire in 1989-1990 - may be obtained by recombining aspects of the sociology of religion analyses of Weber and Durkheim. In particular, their complementary notions of `charisma' and `collective effervescence' provide an understanding of how social actors in coercive secular states, confronted by a seeming monopoly of the use of physical force, are able, in certain exceptional circumstances, to mobilise and disarm the state. The assembling of the social or national community is the background to Weber's discussion of charismatic leadership and the foreground to Durkheim. The `velvet revolutions' of 1989 in various countries of Eastern Europe may be seen as manifestations of an historical moment of `collective effervescence' in which the assembled collectivity itself, more than individual figures, manifested the empowerment of charisma.