Abstract
In a grade 4/5 composite class at Redfield Primary School, Mrs. Tilly reads out the words for her weekly class spelling list. ‘Patience’, she calls out loudly across the quiet room, ‘you need to have patience with your parents, especially with your mum if she is talking to a friend. Patience’. To contextualise each word, Mrs. Tilly places it in a sentence, pauses, then repeats it again. Some children look around the room as they decide how to spell each word. Others cover their workbook with their free arm and write without hesitation. Mrs. Tilly continues this pattern over the course of the lesson, reading out the spelling words and their associated meanings. As she progresses down her list, her accompanying sentences make frequent reference to a moral order around consumerism, status and collective identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Goffman picked up Durkheim’s (1955[1912]) earlier focus on the solidarity of ritual practice through this attention on everyday acts of presenting the self towards others and his focus on situational interactions of rituals which made up daily life for adults in 1950s North America. Such actions, Goffman stressed, ‘incorporate and exemplify’ the officially accredited values of society and ‘do honour’ to that which is socially valued. These were the ‘sacred objects’ to which Durkheim had long ago referred (Goffman 1959: 45). However, in Goffman’s own mid-twentieth-century America, the foremost of these rituals now took place around the self. It is the self, Goffman argued, that is now ‘treated as it were a little god’ in the minor presentation and avoidance rituals of everyday life (1967: 232; see Chap. 2). Durkheim and Goffman both outline mechanisms through which society is ‘held together’ by social rituals, and which in turn produce social formations of moral order. Yet as Collins (2004) and Hochschild (1983) further assert, these theoretical works omit the central role of emotions in social engagement, cohesion formation and dissolution. Collins introduces the role of emotion in collective settings to Goffman’s ritual theory, showing how emotions contribute to the forging of moral and emotional solidarity. Even if we take society as being held together by values and morals, Collins continues, these must be recognised as cognitions ‘infused with emotion’. Emotions actually function as the ‘glue’ within ‘mechanisms of solidarity’. In focusing on emotions and social interactions, Collins shows how it is the conditions of what he calls ‘interaction rituals’ that ultimately determine whether they are effective or otherwise, and which define their potential contributions to group solidarity. These conditions rely on forms of what he terms ‘emotional coordination’, and this in turn produces feelings of social solidarity (2004: 102–8). As solidarity becomes produced by social interactions within a group, its outcomes have the potential to lead to sustained feelings of group attachment. The kind of ‘emotional energy’ cultivated during social interactions also has a controlling quality from the group side, akin to what Durkheim long ago called ‘moral sentiment’ (Collins 2004: xii–xvi, 17, 109–10). Collins suggests that emotional energy is the type of energy we accumulate from a series of successful interactions with others.
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Butler, R. (2019). Cutting Down. In: Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods. Perspectives on Children and Young People, vol 7. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1102-4_4
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