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Rituals Elicit Emotions to Define and Shape Public Life: a Neo-Durkheimian Theory

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Public Emotions

Abstract

In the public space of consumption and display in the high street, of the fury of the street demonstration, the streetwise bravado and fear of the mean streets and also in the intense publicity of the meeting held off the streets, public life is an emotional affair in which both requisite and inappropriate feelings are achieved, sustained, modulated and controlled by ritual and bodily performance. Indeed, the differing degrees of publicity of these spaces are only defined ritually. Rituals mark them off from each other by the practices of emotional management ritually prescribed and ritually violated in each case. The conflicts that these rituals enact and amplify can readily erupt and polarise, unless other rituals provide the basis for settlements between their competing imperatives and accountabilities.

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Authors
  1. Perri Six
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nottingham Trent University, UK

    Perri Six

  2. University of East London, UK

    Susannah Radstone  & Corinne Squire  & 

  3. University of Nottingham, UK

    Amal Treacher

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© 2007 Perri 6

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Perri Six (2007). Rituals Elicit Emotions to Define and Shape Public Life: a Neo-Durkheimian Theory. In: Perri Six, Radstone, S., Squire, C., Treacher, A. (eds) Public Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598225_2

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