The Twenty-first-century Study of Collective Effervescence
Expanding the Context of Fieldwork
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/firn.v7i1.70Keywords:
anthropology, ethnography, religious studies, sociology, transpersonal psychologyAbstract
Durkheim situated the notion of collective effervescence at the source of religious vitality, if not the source of religion itself. Although Durkheim asserted that collective forces/sentiments are measurable and can be investigated scientifically, this phenomenon has been almost entirely neglected by scholars. This article argues that the scientific investigation of collective effervescence requires anthropologists and other scholars to go beyond their current practices of armchair scholarship. Such a move engenders an epistemic pluralist methodology that includes the firsthand subjective and inter-subjective data of lived experience rather than relying solely on conceptual knowledge acquired through text-like verbal utterances.
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References
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Blainey, Mark. 2010. “The Future of a Discipline: Considering the Ontological/Methodological Future of the Anthropology of Consciousness, Part II: Towards an Ethnometaphysics of Consciousness: Suggested Adjustments in SAC’s Quest to Reroute the Main(Stream),” Anthropology of Consciousness, 21.2, 113–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3537. 2010.01025.x
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Brown, Karen McCarthy. 2001. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Buehler, Arthur F. 1998. Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Shaykh. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
—2011. Revealed Grace: The Juristic Sufism of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624). Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae.
Caillois, Roger. 1950. L’homme et le sacrè. Paris: Gallimard.
Carlton-Ford, Steven L. 1993. The Effect of Ritual and Charisma: The Creation of Collective Effervescence and the Support of Psychic Strength. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Chua, Liana. 2009. “A Cambridge Anthropologist in Borneo: The A.C. Haddon Photographic Collection, 1898–1899,” Borneo Research Bulletin. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_hb036/is_40/ai_n53906204/?tag=content;col1 (accessed 30 January 2011).
Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
De Santillana, Giorgio. 1978. The Crime of Galileo. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1970. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Random House. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203426623
Durkheim, Émile. 1905. Review of Maurice Pellison’s article “La Sècularisation de la morale au XVIIe siècle,” La Rèvolution française, no. 1903, 385–408 in L’année sociologique 8.
—1965. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. New York: The Free Press.
Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. 1965. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fardon, Richard. 1987. “The Faithful Disciple: On Mary Douglas and Durkheim,” Anthropology Today, 3.5, 4–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3032886
Frazer, George. 1890. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 2 vols. London: Macmillan.
Fujiwara, Satoko. 2001. “The Emergence of the Sacred: A Historical and Theoretical Critique of a Key Concept in the Study of Religion,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago.
Goldenweiser, A. A. 1915. Review of Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, American Anthropologist, 17, 719–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1915.17.4.02a00090
—1917. “Religion and Society: A Critique of Emile Durkheim’s Theory of the Origin and Nature of Religion,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 14.5, 113–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2940655
Goodman, Felicitas D. 1971. “Glossolalia and Single-Limb Trance: Some Parallels,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 19, 92–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000286310
—1990. “A Trance Dance with Masks: Research and Performance at the Cuyamungue Institute,” TDR (1988-), 34.1, 102–14.
Goulet, Jean-Guy A., and Bruce Granville Miller. 2007. “Introduction: Embodied Knowledge: Steps Towards a Radical Anthropology of Cross-cultural Encounters,” in J.-G. A. Goulet and B. G. Miller, eds. Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1–13.
Hammnett, Ian. 1984. “Durkheim and the Study of Religion,” in Steven Fenton et al., eds. Durkheim and Modern Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 202–18.
James, William. 1985. The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin Marty. New York: Penguin Books.
Koss-Chioino, Joan, and Philip Hefner, eds. 2006. Spiritual Transformation and Healing. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Kremer, Jürgen W. 2003. “Ethnoautobiography as Practice of Radical Presence: Storying the Self in Participatory Visions,” ReVision, 26.2, 5–13.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Laderman, Carol. 1993. Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine, and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Laszlo, Ervin, Stanislav Grof and Peter Russell. 2003. The Consciousness Revolution. Las Vegas, NV: Elf Rock.
Laughlin, Charles D. 1975. “Transpersonal Anthropology: Some Methodological Issues,” Western Canadian Anthropology, 5, 29–60. http://www.biogeneticstructuralism.com/ docs/tp_anthro_some_meth_issues.rtf (accessed 10 February 2011).
—1989. “Transpersonal Anthropology: What is it, and what are the Problems We Face in Doing it? http://www.biogeneticstructuralism.com/docs/tp_anthro.rtf (accessed 5 February 2011).
Laughlin, Charles D., John McManus and Jon Shearer. 1983. “Dreams, Trance and Visions: What a Transpersonal Anthropology Might Look Like,” Anthropology of Consciousness (Phoenix Journal of Transpersonal Anthropology), 7.1-2, 141–59.
Laughlin, Charles D., John McManus, Robert A. Rubinstein and Jon Shearer. 1986. “The Ritual Transformation of Experience,” Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 7A, 107–36.
Leach, Edmund. 1985. “Anthropology of Religion: British and French Schools,” in Ninian Smart et al., eds. Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2: 215–62.
Long, Joseph K. 1977. “Verification of Psi in Ethnographic Fieldwork,” in Joseph K. Long ed. Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology. London: Scarecrow Press, 243–70.
Lukes, Steven. 1985. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 2008. Argonauts of the Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Press.
Mellor, Philip A. 1998. “Sacred Contagion and Social Vitality: Collective Effervescence in Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse,” Durkheimian Studies, 4, 87–114.
Olaveson, Tim. 2001. “Collective Effervescence and Communitas: Processual Models of Ritual and Society in Émile Durkheim and Victor Turner,” Dialectical Anthropology, 26.2, 89– 124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1020447706406
—2004. “Connectedness and the Rave Experience: Rave as a New Religious Movement?” in Graham St. John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion. New York: Routledge, 85–106.
Ono, Michikuni. 1996. “Collective Effervescence and Symbolism,” Durkheimian Studies, 2, 79–98.
Pickering, W. S. F. 1984. Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion. London: Routledge Kegan & Paul.
—2001. Émile Durkheim: Critical Assessments of Leading Sociologists, 5 vols. London: Routledge.
Popper, Karl. 2002. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Prattis, J. Ian. 1997. Anthropology at the Edge: Essays on Culture, Symbol, and Consciousness. New York: University Press of America.
Ramp, William. 1998. “Effervescence, Differentiation and Representation in The Elementary Forms,” in N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller, eds. On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Routledge, 136–48.
Roberts, Thomas B., ed. 2001. Psychoactive Sacramentals: Essays on Entheogens and Religion. San Francisco: Council on Spiritual Practices.
—2006. Psychedelic Horizons. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic Philosophy Documentation Center.
Sagen, Carl. n.d. See http://atheism.about.com/library/quotes/bl_q_CSagan.htm (accessed 4 February 2010).
Scholl, Mark, and Stephan A. Schwartz. 2005. “Whither Psi and Anthropology? An Incomplete History of SAC’s Origins, its Relationship with Transpersonal Psychology and the Untold Stories of Castaneda’s Controversy,” Anthropology of Consciousness, 16.1, 6–24.
—2010. “The Future of a Discipline: Considering the Ontological/Methodological Future of the Anthropology of Consciousness, Part I,” Anthropology of Consciousness, 21.1, 1–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3537.2010.01018.x
Shilling, Chris, and Philip A. Mellor. 1998. “Durkheim, Morality and Modernity: Collective Effervescence, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action,” British Journal of Sociology, 49.2, 193–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/591309
Smith, Philip, and Jeffrey C. Alexander. 1996. “Durkheim’s Religious Revival,” American Journal of Sociology, 102.2, 585–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/230959
Spencer, Baldwin, and F. J. Gillen. 1899. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan.
Tart, Charles. 2009. The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.
Tiryakian, Edward A. 1995. “Collective Effervescence, Social Change and Charisma: Durkheim, Weber and 1989,” International Sociology 10.3, 269–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 026858095010003002
Turnbull, Colin. 1990. “Liminality: A Synthesis of Subjective and Objective Experience,” in Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, eds. By Means of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 50–81.
Turner, Edith. 1993. “The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?” Anthropology of Consciousness, 4.1, 9–12.
—1994. “A Visible Spirit Form in Zambia,” in David E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. New York: Broadview Press, 71–98.
—2006. “Advances in the Study of Spirit Experience: Drawing Together Many Threads,” Anthropology of Consciousness, 17.2, 33–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ac.2006.17.2.33
Wallace, B. Alan. 2000. The Taboo of Subjectivity: Towards a New Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Watson, John B. 1913. “Psychology as the Behaviourist Views it,” Psychological Review, 20, 158– 77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0074428
Willis, Roy, with K. B. S. Chisanga, H. M. K. Sikazwe, Kapembwa B. Sikazwe and Sylvia Nanyangwe. 1999. Some Spirits Heal, Others Only Dance: A Journey into Human Selfhood in an African Village. Oxford: Berg.
Winkelman, M. 1986. “Trance States: A Theoretical Model and Cross-Cultural Analysis,” Ethos, 14, 174–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/eth.1986.14.2.02a00040
Blainey, Mark. 2010. “The Future of a Discipline: Considering the Ontological/Methodological Future of the Anthropology of Consciousness, Part II: Towards an Ethnometaphysics of Consciousness: Suggested Adjustments in SAC’s Quest to Reroute the Main(Stream),” Anthropology of Consciousness, 21.2, 113–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3537. 2010.01025.x
Bourguignon, Erika. 1973. Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social Change. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press.
Brown, Karen McCarthy. 2001. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Buehler, Arthur F. 1998. Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Shaykh. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
—2011. Revealed Grace: The Juristic Sufism of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624). Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae.
Caillois, Roger. 1950. L’homme et le sacrè. Paris: Gallimard.
Carlton-Ford, Steven L. 1993. The Effect of Ritual and Charisma: The Creation of Collective Effervescence and the Support of Psychic Strength. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Chua, Liana. 2009. “A Cambridge Anthropologist in Borneo: The A.C. Haddon Photographic Collection, 1898–1899,” Borneo Research Bulletin. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_hb036/is_40/ai_n53906204/?tag=content;col1 (accessed 30 January 2011).
Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
De Santillana, Giorgio. 1978. The Crime of Galileo. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1970. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Random House. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203426623
Durkheim, Émile. 1905. Review of Maurice Pellison’s article “La Sècularisation de la morale au XVIIe siècle,” La Rèvolution française, no. 1903, 385–408 in L’année sociologique 8.
—1965. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. New York: The Free Press.
Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. 1965. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fardon, Richard. 1987. “The Faithful Disciple: On Mary Douglas and Durkheim,” Anthropology Today, 3.5, 4–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3032886
Frazer, George. 1890. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 2 vols. London: Macmillan.
Fujiwara, Satoko. 2001. “The Emergence of the Sacred: A Historical and Theoretical Critique of a Key Concept in the Study of Religion,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago.
Goldenweiser, A. A. 1915. Review of Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, American Anthropologist, 17, 719–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1915.17.4.02a00090
—1917. “Religion and Society: A Critique of Emile Durkheim’s Theory of the Origin and Nature of Religion,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 14.5, 113–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2940655
Goodman, Felicitas D. 1971. “Glossolalia and Single-Limb Trance: Some Parallels,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 19, 92–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000286310
—1990. “A Trance Dance with Masks: Research and Performance at the Cuyamungue Institute,” TDR (1988-), 34.1, 102–14.
Goulet, Jean-Guy A., and Bruce Granville Miller. 2007. “Introduction: Embodied Knowledge: Steps Towards a Radical Anthropology of Cross-cultural Encounters,” in J.-G. A. Goulet and B. G. Miller, eds. Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1–13.
Hammnett, Ian. 1984. “Durkheim and the Study of Religion,” in Steven Fenton et al., eds. Durkheim and Modern Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 202–18.
James, William. 1985. The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin Marty. New York: Penguin Books.
Koss-Chioino, Joan, and Philip Hefner, eds. 2006. Spiritual Transformation and Healing. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Kremer, Jürgen W. 2003. “Ethnoautobiography as Practice of Radical Presence: Storying the Self in Participatory Visions,” ReVision, 26.2, 5–13.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Laderman, Carol. 1993. Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine, and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Laszlo, Ervin, Stanislav Grof and Peter Russell. 2003. The Consciousness Revolution. Las Vegas, NV: Elf Rock.
Laughlin, Charles D. 1975. “Transpersonal Anthropology: Some Methodological Issues,” Western Canadian Anthropology, 5, 29–60. http://www.biogeneticstructuralism.com/ docs/tp_anthro_some_meth_issues.rtf (accessed 10 February 2011).
—1989. “Transpersonal Anthropology: What is it, and what are the Problems We Face in Doing it? http://www.biogeneticstructuralism.com/docs/tp_anthro.rtf (accessed 5 February 2011).
Laughlin, Charles D., John McManus and Jon Shearer. 1983. “Dreams, Trance and Visions: What a Transpersonal Anthropology Might Look Like,” Anthropology of Consciousness (Phoenix Journal of Transpersonal Anthropology), 7.1-2, 141–59.
Laughlin, Charles D., John McManus, Robert A. Rubinstein and Jon Shearer. 1986. “The Ritual Transformation of Experience,” Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 7A, 107–36.
Leach, Edmund. 1985. “Anthropology of Religion: British and French Schools,” in Ninian Smart et al., eds. Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2: 215–62.
Long, Joseph K. 1977. “Verification of Psi in Ethnographic Fieldwork,” in Joseph K. Long ed. Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology. London: Scarecrow Press, 243–70.
Lukes, Steven. 1985. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 2008. Argonauts of the Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Press.
Mellor, Philip A. 1998. “Sacred Contagion and Social Vitality: Collective Effervescence in Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse,” Durkheimian Studies, 4, 87–114.
Olaveson, Tim. 2001. “Collective Effervescence and Communitas: Processual Models of Ritual and Society in Émile Durkheim and Victor Turner,” Dialectical Anthropology, 26.2, 89– 124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1020447706406
—2004. “Connectedness and the Rave Experience: Rave as a New Religious Movement?” in Graham St. John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion. New York: Routledge, 85–106.
Ono, Michikuni. 1996. “Collective Effervescence and Symbolism,” Durkheimian Studies, 2, 79–98.
Pickering, W. S. F. 1984. Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion. London: Routledge Kegan & Paul.
—2001. Émile Durkheim: Critical Assessments of Leading Sociologists, 5 vols. London: Routledge.
Popper, Karl. 2002. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Prattis, J. Ian. 1997. Anthropology at the Edge: Essays on Culture, Symbol, and Consciousness. New York: University Press of America.
Ramp, William. 1998. “Effervescence, Differentiation and Representation in The Elementary Forms,” in N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller, eds. On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Routledge, 136–48.
Roberts, Thomas B., ed. 2001. Psychoactive Sacramentals: Essays on Entheogens and Religion. San Francisco: Council on Spiritual Practices.
—2006. Psychedelic Horizons. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic Philosophy Documentation Center.
Sagen, Carl. n.d. See http://atheism.about.com/library/quotes/bl_q_CSagan.htm (accessed 4 February 2010).
Scholl, Mark, and Stephan A. Schwartz. 2005. “Whither Psi and Anthropology? An Incomplete History of SAC’s Origins, its Relationship with Transpersonal Psychology and the Untold Stories of Castaneda’s Controversy,” Anthropology of Consciousness, 16.1, 6–24.
—2010. “The Future of a Discipline: Considering the Ontological/Methodological Future of the Anthropology of Consciousness, Part I,” Anthropology of Consciousness, 21.1, 1–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3537.2010.01018.x
Shilling, Chris, and Philip A. Mellor. 1998. “Durkheim, Morality and Modernity: Collective Effervescence, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action,” British Journal of Sociology, 49.2, 193–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/591309
Smith, Philip, and Jeffrey C. Alexander. 1996. “Durkheim’s Religious Revival,” American Journal of Sociology, 102.2, 585–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/230959
Spencer, Baldwin, and F. J. Gillen. 1899. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan.
Tart, Charles. 2009. The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.
Tiryakian, Edward A. 1995. “Collective Effervescence, Social Change and Charisma: Durkheim, Weber and 1989,” International Sociology 10.3, 269–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 026858095010003002
Turnbull, Colin. 1990. “Liminality: A Synthesis of Subjective and Objective Experience,” in Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, eds. By Means of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 50–81.
Turner, Edith. 1993. “The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?” Anthropology of Consciousness, 4.1, 9–12.
—1994. “A Visible Spirit Form in Zambia,” in David E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. New York: Broadview Press, 71–98.
—2006. “Advances in the Study of Spirit Experience: Drawing Together Many Threads,” Anthropology of Consciousness, 17.2, 33–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ac.2006.17.2.33
Wallace, B. Alan. 2000. The Taboo of Subjectivity: Towards a New Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Watson, John B. 1913. “Psychology as the Behaviourist Views it,” Psychological Review, 20, 158– 77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0074428
Willis, Roy, with K. B. S. Chisanga, H. M. K. Sikazwe, Kapembwa B. Sikazwe and Sylvia Nanyangwe. 1999. Some Spirits Heal, Others Only Dance: A Journey into Human Selfhood in an African Village. Oxford: Berg.
Winkelman, M. 1986. “Trance States: A Theoretical Model and Cross-Cultural Analysis,” Ethos, 14, 174–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/eth.1986.14.2.02a00040
Published
2012-12-14
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Section
Articles
How to Cite
Buehler, A. (2012). The Twenty-first-century Study of Collective Effervescence: Expanding the Context of Fieldwork. Fieldwork in Religion, 7(1), 70-97. https://doi.org/10.1558/firn.v7i1.70
