Durkheim examines the collective rituals of Australian tribes to illustrate the process of renewing community cohesion through the use of a categorization system of holy and unholy. In modern societies, collective rituals also create new moral communities, which Parsons and Smelser crystallized into functionalist theory. Alexander extends this to social performance theory to explain the complexity of collective rituals in modern society.
People come together to perform ‘collective rituals’. Durkheim explores the collective rituals of Australian tribes from the perspective of community cohesion. When tribal people encounter a problematic situation, they stop their subsistence activities and perform a collective ritual to determine whether the situation is sacred or profane, using their shared classification system of sacred and profane. In the process, they renew their awareness of their shared sacredness and regenerate their weakened moral community around it. At the end of the ceremony, the tribal people return to the mundane world with the sacred in their hearts. Subsistence activities, which were once merely a matter of survival, take on a moral meaning connected to the sacred.
Durkheim emphasizes the importance of these collective rituals, explaining how they allow individuals to reaffirm community values and strengthen social cohesion. He also argues that collective rituals still play an important role in modern society. Even in modern societies, collective rituals play an important role in reaffirming community values and strengthening social cohesion. For example, national celebrations, religious festivals, and sporting events are all examples of collective rituals in modern society. These events allow people to reaffirm the values of their community and strengthen their bonds with other members.
Durkheim believes that collective rituals in modern society do not end with the regeneration of existing moral communities, but rather the creation of new ones. The French Revolution, for example, was a collective ritual that created new sacrednesses, such as liberty, equality, and fraternity, and organized a new moral community around them. Durkheim believes that these newly created sacreds will provide moral meaning to bind individuals living in a world of self-interested individuals.
Parsons and Smelser crystallize these theoretical insights into a functionalist theory. They rephrase sacredness in terms of values. In modern societies, values are latent beneath the surface of normal social life, rising to the surface in times of crisis when moral meaning is shaken to its roots and generalized across the country. In normal life, people are not driven by values, but by goals that embody their self-interest and norms that guide their realization. In times of crisis, however, people’s attention shifts from their specialized interests to universal values. People lean on values and perform collective rituals that relieve the psychological tensions and pressures of the crisis. As a result, social cohesion is restored. Parsons and Smelser see this as analogous to the physiological process by which an organism restores homeostatic functions that have been disrupted by environmental pressures.
While Alexander accepts Parsons and Smelser’s theory, he recognizes the limitations of their biological metaphor for exploring the complexity of collective rituals in modern societies, and proposes a social performance theory as an alternative. He sees collective rituals, which generalize values to the whole society, as a process with an undetermined outcome, rather than a natural progression like the physiology of an organism. In modern society, not only are the elements of social performance differentiated, but each element has its own autonomy. Therefore, the social performance that fuses these elements requires a cultural practice that maximizes contingency. This is why Alexander emphasizes that, unlike functionalist theories, we need to empirically explore in detail under what conditions and through what processes the elements of performance converge.
The elements of social performance in contemporary society include scripts that embody various classifications of performance, actors who perform these scripts in their own ways, audiences that are internally divided by class, region of origin, age, gender, etc., mise-en-scène that organizes the performance in a variety of temporal and spatial ways, symbolic means of production that disseminate the performance beyond the limits of time and space to a wide audience, and social power that is highly fragmented to the extent that it does not collectively control the processes of production, distribution, and interpretation. However, in totalitarian societies where there is no differentiation and autonomy of elements, social performances are unlikely to occur, as there is only mass mobilization by state power.
In modern society, collective rituals are becoming more diversified and complex. The development of the internet and social media has made it possible for collective rituals to involve people from all over the world at the same time. For example, the global climate change movement or large-scale online campaigns are examples of collective rituals that involve people all over the world at the same time. These modern collective rituals reaffirm individuals’ sense of responsibility as members of the global community and contribute to the formation of shared values around global issues.
