Becoming iconic

the cases of Woodstock and Bayreuth

Philip E. Smith

pp. 171-183

in: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmański, Bernhard Giesen (eds), Iconic power, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

In his Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Émile Durkheim reflects at length on the role of ritual. Its purpose, he says, is to renew social bonds. This is achieved through the manipulation and invocation of sacred and profane symbols in situations involving intense, rhythmical, embodied actions such as music and dance. A current dispute in Durkheimian sociology concerns a matter of analytic primacy, in effect weighting either the first or the second part of the sentence you have just read. Scholarly attention was traditionally given to symbol content. Ritual is said to "work" because of tightly held, deeply meaningful beliefs. It is the close encounter with sacred icons, texts, and myths that generates ritual behaviors. These might in turn drive broader social outcomes such as solidarity, collective identity, and coordinated political action. More recently, critics have suggested that action comes before meaning. The argument here is that the content of symbolic belief systems is vague or contradictory, and whatever significance is present is not fully shared. Yet embodied ritual actions can still have effects. They generate emotional energy in the absence of meaning through the experience of bodily copresence and rhythmic alignment (Bellah 2005; Collins 2005). From unpromising beginnings arise those very same sociological outcomes of solidarity, identity, and action. Meanings exist, to be sure, but as the outcome of proximate activity. They emerge, it is said, from the interaction process. This argument against a strongly semiotic or hermeneutic version of the cultural turn is in essence a pragmatistic one.