Contemporary Sociological Theory. Группа авторов

games. At peak moments, built up emotionally in proportion to the amount of tension through the series of previous contests, there takes place an informal ritual in which the players touch each other repeatedly while repeating a few simple words or cries of victory. The bigger the victory and the more the suspense, the more body contact, and the more prolonged contact: the range goes from slapping hands, to body hugs, to piling onto a heap of bodies at the playing field. This is a stratified ritual, since the fans would also like to participate not only with their voices but by getting bodily as near to the players as possible. They are usually prevented from approaching them, thus leaving the high degree of bodily contact as a solidarity ritual reserved for the elite in the center of the ceremony; the fans can only watch, vocally participate, and engage in some bodily contact with each other.

      Another observation supporting the preference for bodily present rituals is that attendance at sports events and other mass audience occasions has not declined with the availability of television. This is so even though, for many sports, television provides a better view of the action and the details of the athletes’ performance. But people nevertheless prefer to go to the game, especially if it is a “big game” – that is a game in which the consequences are considered important and hence one can confidently expect to be part of an excited crowd. Watching on television is a second best if one cannot get tickets; and in that case, the preferred spectator experience – again, related to how much emotional intensity the game is expected to generate among its spectators – is to assemble a group of fans, a mini-crowd that provides its own resonance for building up shared excitement. Even for games that are routine – without important implications in the league standings, or other such significance – a large part of the pleasures of attending consists in just the moments when the crowd collectively builds up a sense of anticipation and its shared enthusiasm over the flow of events.

      Games are rituals, contrived to produce situations of dramatic tension and victory; the rules of scoring and moving into position to score have been tinkered with over the years in order to make it “a better game” – which is to say, to provide moments of collective emotion. It is perfectly in keeping with such developments that sports emblems become sacred objects, venerated and treated with respect. Sports celebrities are themselves sacred objects, in just the same manner that Durkheim (1912/1965, 243-44) describes a political leader becoming an emblem for the crowd of which he is a center of attention […]. The overt intent of the game – to win victories by following certain rules of competition, or to display athletic skill – is merely the surface content. What motivates people to witness games is primarily the experience of being at a highly successful ritual: successful because it has been contrived so that the ritual ingredients will all be present to a very high degree, especially the occurrence of strong emotion in a setting where it can be amplified by bodily interaction within the crowd focusing attention on the action of the game. The leisure time of modern societies – since the mid-nineteenth century when a sufficiently large group of spectators became available, free from the constraints of household and work – has become dominated by this species of deliberately invented ritual, designed to provide moments of ritual solidarity that previously would have been provided by religion, warfare, or political ceremony.

      Sports events do not have the same recognized status as other formal rituals, but are generally regarded as a form of play, of the non-serious part of the world. Nevertheless, they are eminently successful in providing high points of ritual experience, and for many people they are preferred to participating in religious rituals (as evident when games compete with church services on Sundays). Games are natural rituals insofar as they unconsciously or nondeliberately bring about the ingredients for a successful ritual. But they are scheduled, predictable, and contrived (using a ritual technology to generate what might be considered an artificial ritual experience), and they bring together a community that has no other coherence, and no other purpose, than the experience of the peaks of ritual emotion itself.

      The mechanism operates in the case of other forms of entertainment. Attending a concert has little advantage over listening to recordings as far as hearing the music is concerned; generally one hears it best on recordings. It is the experience of belonging to a focused crowd that provides the lure of a popular entertainment group; all the more so if the entertainers already have the status of being a sacred object, giving fans the additional excitement of being close to them – even if it is hundreds of feet away in a big arena. The main experience of the pop concert is the mood of the other fans; this is a textbook case of mutual buildup of emotion through bodily feedback in all its modalities. The same applies to a classical music performance, although the mood is more sedate, in keeping with the difference in social-class tone and atmosphere. Here, too, it is the experience of being at a special event – the hush of attention before the orchestra starts, the collective focus on the musicians – that makes the experience at the opera or the symphony a more significant experience than listening to the same music privately at home. This is not simply a matter of being seen by other people at a high-culture event – since under contemporary conditions these crowds are typically anonymous, in contrast to the more enclosed high-status communities in previous centuries who recognized each other at the opera – but comes from the subjective feelings of the ritual experience. The hypothesis is that participants have a stronger identification as persons attached to high culture if the crowd has been enthusiastic in response to the performance, than when the collective response is weaker; and that the effect of ritual intensity is stronger than the effect of being recognized by other people.

      Televised and radio-broadcast concerts have such effects only weakly. The same holds for political and religious gatherings. Politicians’ campaign speeches, nominating conventions, and important official addresses are televised and can be experienced at a distance. Nevertheless, persons who are strong partisans want to be physically present, confirming a reciprocal relation between identity and physical presence. The hypothesis is that attending political events in person increases partisanship, to the extent that the speech is a “good one” – in other words, that it involves the interplay of speaker and crowd that builds up shared enthusiasm; and reciprocally, those persons who already have an identification with the political leader or faction have a stronger desire to take part. The running off of these repetitive relationships is a self-reinforcing IR chain.

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      Religious services, like other collective experience of ritual, vary in their intensity. Distance media can provide some of the sense of shared attention and emotion, which give a feeling of attraction, membership, and respect. The strongest effects are reserved, however, for full bodily assembly. Conversion experiences – coming forward to be born again, or otherwise committing oneself to a life of religious dedication – happen primarily at big evangelical meetings (Johnson 1971). Personal presence in a crowd, worked up collectively to a strong shared emotion, gives the impetus for reshaping one’s identity. The downside of religious conversion confirms the pattern as well. A considerable proportion of persons who are born again drop out of religious participation within a year; many persons are born again numerous times (Bromley 1988; Richardson 1978). It is the big, intense religious gatherings that bring forth the emotion and the shift in membership attachment; as one settles back into the routine of smaller and less collectively emotional church services, and then drifts away from attending, the identification and the emotional energy also fade.

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      On the whole, it appears that large-scale, relatively formal rituals come off better by remote communication than do small-scale natural rituals. This seems to be so because large-scale rituals are working with established symbols, already built up through previous iteration of an IR chain. Relatively impersonal rituals convey membership in large groups, only part of which ever assembles in one place; and thus distance communication gives a sense of something large that one belongs to. But this is effective only if there is at least intermittent personal contact with some other members, worshipers of the same symbols. And the remote broadcast must convey the audience’s participation, not merely its leaders or performers.

      How then do we assess recent forms of communication, including email and the Internet? For the most part, these lack the flow of interaction in real time; even if electronic communications happen within minutes, this is not the rhythm of immediate vocal participation, which as we shall see, is honed to tenths of seconds.