This week in North Philly Notes, Sébastien Tutenges and Philip Smith, editors of Collective Effervescence, write about human connection in today’s alienating, over-individualized world.
Something is happening to “collective effervescence.” The concept is no longer confined to dusty volumes of classical French sociology. Today podcast hosts, public intellectuals, and best-selling authors routinely invoke it when discussing belonging, ritual, awe, and the need for more human connection in today’s alienating, over-individualized world. The concept was formulated over one hundred years ago by the French founder of sociology, Émile Durkheim. His original understanding emphasized the positive impacts of high-energy gatherings involving physically co-present groups engaged in religious ritual activity. These events pivoted around dance, music, and chanting. There was a sense of buzz as isolated individuals became a “society” with purpose and meaning.
The truth of Durkheim’s analysis seems self-evident. We’ve all experienced collective effervescence in our everyday lives – at a concert, drinking with friends, during a wedding party, or in a sports stadium. But many questions remain. Can collective effervescence occur without physical co-presence, for instance, in live-streamed events or online gaming communities? Can it emerge in low-energy or silent group practices such as meditation or prayer? Can it be generated in the routine spaces of everyday life: courtrooms, workplaces, and bookshops? Can it be slow-burning and long-lasting rather than ecstatic and transitory? Most crucial of all, when does it generate positive solidarity and when does it fuel exclusion, deviance, or violent evil?
These questions motivated us to put together the edited volume Collective Effervescence. Although the title might be simple and unimaginative, the contents are anything but. They challenge expectations. We reached out to leading scholars to stress test the concept rather than make predictable applications. Drawing upon their latest research, the book identifies and examines for the first time the varied forms of effervescence: loud and quiet, sacred and secular, co-present and digitally mediated, euphoric and dark.
Taken together, the book shows that collective effervescence is neither a relic of ancient religion nor simply a fancy word for the excitement of crowds. It is a social superglue, adaptable and sticking to almost anything. Not only can it be squeezed out of the tube in ecstatic gatherings, it can also quietly bond those engaged in shared contemplation, stick to the depths of the personality, catalyse crazy and criminal behaviors, bind colleagues in the workplace, and fuse with the social anxieties of our age. In a world marked by polarization, digital mediation, and armed conflict, collective effervescence is not only ubiquitous but also constantly taking new forms as it brings people together. The urgent task for our age is to understand how it is generated, when it binds, and when it burns like the droplet that got in your eye. This book takes up that challenge.
Filed under: american studies, Anthropology, cultural studies, Education, Mass Media and Communications, Music, Religion, sociology | Tagged: belonging, Colllective Effervescence, conflict, crowds, Emile Durkheim, euphoria, gatherings, groups, history, philosophy, polarization, politics, practice, religion, ritual, sacred, society, sociology, solidarity, unity | Leave a comment »
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