Group rituals play an important role in strengthening community cohesion and affirming social values. From traditional rituals to modern social performances, we explore the meaning and function of changing group rituals.
People gather to perform a “ritual of gathering. Durkheim examines the gathering rituals of Australian tribes from the perspective of community cohesion. When a problem arises, tribal people stop their subsistence activities and perform a ritual of assembly, using their shared system of sacred and secular classification to determine whether the situation is sacred or secular. In the process, they realize anew what sacredness they share and regenerate the weakened moral community around it. After the collective ritual, the tribal people return to the mundane world of everyday life with the sacredness in their hearts. This imbues the subsistence activities, which were simply a matter of eating and living, with a moral meaning associated with the sacred.
Durkheim emphasizes the importance of these collective rituals, explaining that they allow individuals to reaffirm the values of the community and strengthen social cohesion. He also argues that collective rituals continue to play an important role in modern society. In modern society, collective rituals still play an important role in affirming community values and strengthening social cohesion. For example, national holidays, religious festivals, and sporting events can all be seen as examples of collective rituals in modern society. Through these events, people can reaffirm the values of the community to which they belong and strengthen their bonds with other members.
Durkheim believes that collective rituals in modern society will not end with the regeneration of existing moral communities, but will create new moral communities. For example, the French Revolution was a collective ritual that created a new sanctity of liberty, equality, and fraternity and formed a new moral community around it. Durkheim believes that the newly created sacredness will provide a moral meaning that can unite individuals who live in the profane world in pursuit of their own interests.
Parsons and Smelser embody these theoretical insights in functionalist theory. They replace sacredness with the word value. In modern society, values are latent beneath everyday social life, and then come to the surface and are generalized throughout the country in times of crisis, when their moral meaning is shaken to its core. In ordinary life, people live according to goals that embody their self-interest and norms that guide the realization of those goals, rather than according to values. But in times of crisis, people’s attention is shifted from their own particular interests to universal values. People perform collective rituals based on values to relieve the psychological tension and pressure caused by the crisis. As a result, social cohesion is restored. Parsons and Smelser see this as similar to the process by which an organism restores its homeostasis, which has been disrupted by environmental pressures, through physiological processes.
Alexander accepts Parsons and Smelser’s theory, but sees their biological metaphor as limited in exploring the collective rituals of complex modern society, and instead proposes “social performance theory” as an alternative. He argues that collective rituals that generalize values across society do not occur naturally in modern society like the physiological functions of organisms, but are processes with indeterminate outcomes. In modern society, the elements of social performance are not only differentiated, but each element has autonomy. Therefore, social performance that fuses these elements requires cultural practices that maximize contingency. This is why Alexander emphasizes that, unlike functionalist theory, we should empirically and in detail study under what conditions and through what processes the elements of performance are fused.
The elements of social performance in modern society include a script that embodies various classification systems in performance; actors who perform various scripts in their own ways; an audience that is internally differentiated by class, region of origin, age, and gender; mise-en-scène that produces a performance by creating various lines of movement in time and space; symbolic means of production that spread performances to a wide audience beyond the limits of time and space; and so on. There are highly differentiated social powers that cannot collectively control the process of producing, distributing, and interpreting performances. However, in a totalitarian society without the differentiation and autonomy of the elements, there is only the mobilization of the masses by the state power, and it is difficult for social performances to take place.
In modern society, collective rituals are becoming more diverse and complex. The development of the Internet and social media has made it possible for people around the world to participate in collective rituals simultaneously. For example, the global climate change movement or large-scale online campaigns are examples of collective rituals in which people around the world participate simultaneously. These modern collective rituals help individuals reaffirm their sense of responsibility as members of the global community and form shared values on global issues.
