Status, Power and Ritual Interaction

A Relational Reading of Durkheim, Goffman and Collins

Theodore D. Kemper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409427360
• eBook ISBN: 9781317050100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sociologists Émile Durkheim, Erving Goffman and Randall Collins broadly suppose that ritual is foundational for social life. By contrast, this book argues that ritual is merely surface, beneath which lie status and power, the behavioral dimensions that drive all social interaction. Status, Power and Ritual Interaction identifies status and power as the twin forces that structure social relations, determine emotions and link individuals to the reference groups that deliver culture and administer preferences, actions, beliefs and ideas. An especially important contention is that allegiance to ideas, even those as fundamental as the belief that 1 + 1 = 2, is primarily faithfulness to the reference groups that foster the ideas and not to the ideas themselves. This triggers the counter-intuitive deduction that the self, a concept many sociologists, social psychologists and therapists prize so highly, is feckless and irrelevant. Status-power theory leads also to derivations about motivation, play, humor, sacred symbols, social bonding, creative thought, love and sex and other social involvements now either obscure or misunderstood. Engaging with Durkheim (on collective effervescence), Goffman (on ritual-cum-public order) and Collins (on interaction ritual), this book is richly illustrated with instances of how to examine many central questions about society and social interaction from the status-power perspective. It speaks not only to sociologists, but also to anthropologists, behavioral economists and social and clinical psychologists - to all disciplines that examine or treat of social life.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Above all else, social life is relational and my aim in this book is to make the case for that proposition by means of a radical theory of social relations. The theory has been presented in Kemper (1978; 2006; Kemper and Collins 1990), but has not been arrayed before this against competitive approaches. Through an examination and critique of work by Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman and Randall Collins, I claim certain territory that is now in their domain. In a rough way, these authors comprise a single theoretical family: Goffman acknowledged Durkheim and Collins acknowledges both Durkheim and Goffman as intellectual forebears. Each, in his work, addresses certain broad sociological questions and argues a solution, namely, the ritual character of social interaction, which has gained either significant assent or widespread notice.1 My intervention is to suggest that in each case a more theoretically fruitful solution to the same problems is available through the status-power theory2 of social relations.

I refer to status-power theory as radical because it deals with fundamental processes in social interaction and reveals an intelligible relational source and aim at the foundation of a large swath of social behavior. Applied uncompromisingly, status-power theory provides a broad mantle covering many loosely-related phenomena. Helpfully, there are few technical terms in the theory. Status and power are the two central concepts and their definition comprehends much that sociologists who study social interaction—what actors do to, with, for, about, against each other—are already familiar with. Taken at its strongest, my argument is that a comprehensive and informative explanation of social life rests crucially upon the examination of status-power relations. Let this be the first and overriding, super-axiom of the theory. What it means is that the inspection of any sociological problem should address as systematically as possible the relational standing of the actors vis-à-vis each other in status and power terms. Much of this book is devoted to this kind of analysis and the work below contains dozens of instances of how it may be done.

Speaking sociologically,3 I argue that what gets everyone up in the morning and what explains behavior, motives and choices during the day is largely relational. By this I mean that individuals and groups necessarily take other individuals and/or groups into account, as means, as opportunities and as constraints. But also as targets for what Goffman (1953, p. 103) in early work called “considerateness.” I will argue below that the major aims of individuals and groups are relational, that is, they can be understood and expressed as processes involved with gaining and/or maintaining status and power and with according status to and avoiding the power of others. These may be thought of as the ‘primary processes’ in social relations, whereby relational objectives are directly to the fore. But there is also a ‘secondary process’ whereby the aims themselves and the means of attaining them are derived and maintained via status-power relational processes. All actors are embedded in a web of status-power connections with others and it is out of these connections that even the guiding ideas—call it the operating culture—of the individual are derived and, once derived, supported.

In a stimulating paper, Willer and Webster (1970) argued for the use of concepts at the “construct” level, rather than at the level of observables. From the perspective of this book, such common notions as ambition, patriotism, conformity, love, authority, attention, religiosity, duty, sociability and so forth—the span of more or less recognizable human activities and interests—are observation-level designations for an underlying construct-level relational framework that operates along the status-power dimensions. These dimensions are the behavioral channels in which individuals and groups engage with each other, whether irenically, competitively or conflictfully, whether with kindness or cruelty, whether for cooperation or domination.

Without apprehending what is denoted by the status-power dimensions, we can have no good understanding of what goes on in situations, gatherings, encounters— in any kind of assembly, collective undertaking or group. Status-power relational theory provides a window and a nomenclature as well as axioms and propositions to specify both the processes and outcomes that are theoretically possible among participants. Marriage, colleagueship, friendship, casual encounters, bureaucratic hierarchy, parent-child relations, street violence, charisma, collective enthusiasm and so on, all come under the rubric of status-power analysis.

Status-power relational theory is not new. In one form or another it has been available perhaps longer than any other comparable, broad-band approach to social behavior. It has a provenance in ancient Greek philosophy through the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Empedocles; it resonates in Hegel (Honneth 1995) and was touched on obliquely by Freud.4 Only in the late 1940s and early 1950s did researchers, using newly available methods, come upon the status-power dimensions in a garb that makes them suitable for contemporary social theory (see Kemper 1978, 2006; Kemper and Collins 1990). Through an examination and critical re-reading of one strand of the Durkheimian tradition, I claim for status-power theory a broad consideration.

The main pivot of my attention here will be the extraordinary devotion by Durkheim, Goffman and Collins to ritual.5 While rituals are widely practiced and appear to have salutary effects for group solidarity, I believe that Durkheim, Goffman and Collins overlook or misconceive what is analytically involved when people engage in ritual and what makes for ritual success, that is, when ritual does succeed. Durkheim and Collins argue that emotion is the important ingredient in the making of social solidarity, with emotion a marked constituent of ritual occasions, thus making emotion a kind of “social cement.” Although ritual is often characterized by emotion, the emotion itself is not simply a product of the ritual doings—the sacrifice of the bullock, the dance around the fire, the chanting of the psalm—but is, rather, the consequence of a relational meaning that inheres in these activities and is vital to the rite. In other words, the emotion engendered in ritual— Durkheim’s collective effervescence, for example—no matter how intense, is not the sociologically important thing. It is merely a sign of the underlying status-power relational ramifications of the behavior to the participants. Another way of thinking about this is to understand that ritual is not magic, which achieves its presumed effects in an opaque manner that defies examination. By contrast, ritual is relationship in action, succeeding or failing in relational terms. Seen in this way, ritual becomes transparent in terms of status-power dynamics. In formulating the problem in this way I am not discounting emotion, but rather pointing to the fact that emotion, regardless of how flamboyant, is only an integument. At the core are the relational aims and outcomes that engender the emotion in the first place (Kemper 1978, Chapter 13 in this volume). Without the activation of the relational effects, the emotion is stillborn and the rite is feckless, as will be seen below. Rituals that fail do so because they have not evoked the proper relational involvement for their participants. In this book, I define the relational in terms of the status and power dimensions and I argue that the sociological analysis of ritual requires these relational dimensions in order to afford a plausible grasp of any results that may occur. My effort here is to effect a kind of disenchantment, opening up the occluded and mystified process of ritual so as as to make its constituents available to a sociologically productive analysis.

In Chapter 2, I define the status and power dimensions and provide several axioms that provide a foundation for theory construction using these dimensions. I view status as the domain of voluntary compliance, where, in varying degrees and without threat or coercion, actors willingly comply with the desires and interests of other actors. Much of social life takes place in the status domain, people voluntarily complying with the requests of others and intentionally serving their interests without protest. Power, on the other hand, is the Weberian domain of involuntary compliance, where actors comply with the desires and interests of other actors only under threat or duress. Power is a last resort when the appeal to status fails, as it often does. Taken together, status and power make up a comprehensive format of what can usefully be called “social relations.”

In Chapter 3, I provide several derivations from the theory: First is a brief review of a theory of emotions (further examined in Chapter 13). This was the earliest derivation of the theory and has been covered in detail in many publications (including Kemper 1978, 2006). The second derivation is a theory of ideas that suggests that the content of ideas is less a reason for people professing them than is the constellation of status-power relations with reference groups for which the ideas have currency. The third derivation argues that sociological theory has no need for a concept of the self and that it is more efficient to address questions to one’s salient reference groups, the panel of others with which one is in status-power relations, than it is to the notion of the self. The fourth derivation is a theory of motivation, which is something of a ‘no-no’ for sociologists because it presumes knowledge of the psyche, a domain that is not the sociologist’s province. The status-power approach to motivation taken here allows for an assessment of psychic operations that is entirely consonant with sociological cautions against doing so. The fifth derivation is a theory of the serious and of play. These are seen to comprise states of interaction that vary according to the moral rigidity of status-power relations. The sixth and final derivation is a theory of wit and humor, with status-power notions helping us to understand that we do not laugh at what is funny, but that we call funny what we laugh at for straightforward relational reasons.

One of Durkheim’s most important theoretical contributions was the concept of collective effervescence, by which, after assembling, mainly but not always for ritual purposes, individuals are apparently energized and motivated to bond with each other and to revere and support group identity and moral imperatives. Durkheim argued strongly for the necessity of such emotionally fervid experience as a basis for group solidarity. But Durkheim does not tell us what of sociological interest is happening when collective effervescence and bonding occur. There is a theoretical black box here and we are left unenlightened as to why collective effervescence should give rise to group-sustaining effects. In Chapter 4, I examine Durkheim’s argument and propose that only when status-power relations are favorable to participants is solidarity a likely outcome.

Durkheim’s most important book, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, is long on discourse and scant on empirical materials, except for what he mainly derived from ethnographic reports by Spencer and Gillen ([1899] 1968, 1904), Howitt (1904) and other recorders of Australian Aborigine life. But Durkheim does offer a few historical or conceptual instances of either real or imaginable events in Western and/or more modern society. Durkheim puts these into the service of collective effervescence. But, again, in none of them does he help us to understand sociologically what is going on. For example, to take instances Durkheim cites, how did one of the most dramatic occurrences of the French Revolution, the meeting of the National Assembly on the night of June 4, 1789, come like a coup de foudre to abolish feudalism in France in one stroke? How does a charismatic speaker come to magnetize a crowd of listeners? What takes place when a man obeys his god? These and other instances of collective effervescence, as Durkheim reads it, lead to sometimes astounding outcomes. But he does not tell us at all what is happening sociologically so that it plausibly leads to the kinds of social results Durkheim discusses. In Chapter 5, I examine a number of these illustrative instances from the status-power relational position.

In Chapter 6, I turn to the work of Goffman. Goffman was a proud student of Durkheim, paying him homage as the source of an idea that was to persist in Goffman’s work across the span of his 30-year career, namely the ritual character of all social interaction. From Durkheim, Goffman learned that, as Durkheim put it, the individual was “sacred,” that sacred objects must be treated with respect and that one paid respect to sacred objects through ritual. Goffman’s discourse about interaction in small, face-to-face groups was thus addressed to an openly acknowledged religious phenomenon—the individual is a “deity,” and this despite the obvious growing secularization of modern society.

Whether Goffman actually read Durkheim accurately about the sacredness of the individual is debatable. Whether Durkheim himself believed what he was saying as a literal truth about the sacredness of the individual is also debatable. It may be that Durkheim, with important interests of his own, provided a metaphor that Goffman also treated as metaphor, one that we should not take seriously for theoretical purposes. Whatever the facts here, Goffman proceeded to make much of ritual. Properly understood, as I will show in Chapter 6, Goffman’s application of the ritual metaphor—so I will treat it—was, despite its religious baggage, correct in an important respect: it is another, although obscure, way of referring to the relational dimension of status. But, in part overawed by his Durkheimian model and by the intellectual frisson dowered by the religious metaphor and in part reacting with ferocious disdain against the experimental social psychology of his day, Goffman did not see far enough. My main critique is that he missed the other crucial dimension of social relationships, namely power, and therefore spun a lopsided and incomplete account of social behavior.

One of Goffman’s innovations was to examine behavior in small, face-to-face groups where participants monitored each other’s conduct and, aware of such monitoring, were guided by what they observed. This was not, in his day, sociology of the usual kind, which for the most part dealt instead with the social organization and structure of large groups. Goffman was here bringing into sociology the kind of material that ethnographers of small communities, primitive or not, were conventionally dealing with. And we owe Goffman greatly for his acuteness in carving out this territory as legitimate matter for sociological scrutiny.

But Goffman, as are we all, was a researcher of his time and in the course of opening up the new territory, had several debts to pay to earlier sociologists, including Durkheim—now in a different sense from his obligation for ritual—and also to the Functionalists of his day, particularly Talcott Parsons. He took over wholesale the Functionalist interest in social systems and social order and focused his analytic lens in such a way as to make these Functionalist concerns his own. Thus, though the groups he studied were, in the main, numerically small, they were to be treated sociologically as if they confronted the same problems as whole societies. Indeed, for Goffman, they were societies, little social systems.

But here, again, I believe, Goffman erred, seduced by the need for sociological legitimacy, pursuing which he created a model of analysis that was perhaps not even appropriate for large groups, namely how groups maintain “social order.” In Chapter 7, I challenge Goffman’s misplaced application of social order analysis to such foci as situations, occasions, gatherings and encounters. I oppose the status-power relational approach to Goffman’s questionable notions of how order is preserved and what disorder, when it occurs, actually puts at risk.

Goffman’s work is replete with examples, drawn from a miscellany of sources— for example, newspaper reports, plays, novels, etiquette books—and sometimes simply made up for the occasion, and for which he has been criticized (Schegloff 1988). In any case, they illustrate his concepts and sometimes hint at how they may be applied. But they support what I believe is a static and/or incomplete picture of social life. In Chapter 8, I apply status-power theory to a number of Goffman’s concrete examples, with the intention of revealing the dynamic, fully relational aspects (that is, both status and power) that do not appear in Goffman’s presentation. This is similar to the work of Chapter 5, in which status-power theory is applied to Durkheim’s examples.

Next I treat the work of Randall Collins, a lineal theoretical descendant of both Durkheim and Goffman. Collins was a classroom student of Goffman and took over a great deal of Goffman’s perspective, all the while creatively shaping it into his own theoretical mold. One constant in the three-generation lineage is the concept of ritual. As did Durkheim and Goffman, Collins anchors much of his theoretical enterprise to this notion. It pervades his examination of virtually all types of social interaction and he acknowledges, somewhat outside strictly theoretical bounds, his tendency to see ritual almost everywhere (2004, p. 15). Notwithstanding, Collins applies the ritual idea with a force and brio that makes him estimable company for his predecessors.

In Chapter 9, I take up Collins’s innovative adaptation of Durkheimian ritual. Collins extends ritual to the domain of conflict, an approach that at first seems at odds with Durkheim’s understanding of ritual as the main fount of solidarity. Collins’s daring step is to see ritual as the source of the Durkheimian solidarity within groups that are competing or in conflict among themselves. This done, Collins goes on along the lines of Goffman to elaborate the ritual metaphor in the domain of micro-interaction, the arena of one-on-one or c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Status and Power
• 3 Derivations from Status-Power Theory
• 4 Status-Power and Collective Effervescence: I
• 5 Status-Power and Collective Effervescence: II
• 6 Ritual: Goffman’s Big Idea
• 7 Situation, Occasion, Gathering, Encounter and Social Relations
• 8 Reading Goffman in Status-Power Terms
• 9 Collins’s Interaction Ritual
• 10 Collins’s Power and Status Rituals
• 11 Talking, Talks, Thinking and Thought
• 12 Entrainment, Mutual Entrainment and Self-Entrainment
• 13 Emotions: Status-Power vs. Interaction Ritual Theory
• 14 Sex and Love
• 15 Prediction and Postdiction
• Appendix: Sacred Symbols
• Bibliography
• Index