Sociology of emotions and rituals: some readings from Durkheim

Abstract

This contribution aims to illustrate how Erving Goffman and Randall Collins develop Durkheim’s ritualistic-emotional model, making it an essential element in rituals of interaction (Goffman, 1967; Collins, 1975). In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Émile Durkheim (1912) considered the importance of emotional factors, objectified in ritual experiences, as agents of cohesion indispensable to social unity, found for Erving Goffman in the ritual representation of everyday life in which reciprocal relationships originate. For Collins, emotional solidarity, and ritual order, are traceable in all those modes of interaction in which subjects, by reactivating their feelings, regenerate processes of sharing and belonging. Drawing on Durkheim’s analysis, this article illustrated how the ritual and emotional dimension represents a crucial theoretical junction for both Goffman’s sociology, committed to observing the presentation of the self in social contexts, and for Collins, who is attentive to interpreting the social interactions that are reproduced in “micro-situations”, and the emotional energy generated in contemporary rituals.