situations as the following of rules and uses these inferred rules as a tool for
constructing the rest of the world, one arrives at a type of idealism.
In sociology, emphasis on the primacy of the local was introduced by
symbolic interactionism and radicalized by ethnomethodology; as a research
technique and as an explicit epistemology, the stance has been picked up by
the branch of sociologists of science who study the local production of scientific
knowledge in laboratory sites. To deny that anything exists other than the local
is true in one sense, misleading in another. It is true that nothing exists which
is not thoroughly local; if it did not exist locally, where could it possibly be
found? But no local situation stands alone; situations surround one another in
time and space. The macro-level of society should be conceived not as a vertical
layer above the micro, as if it were in a different place, but as the unfurling of
the scroll of micro-situations. Micro-situations are embedded in macro-pat-
terns, which are just the ways that situations are linked to one another;
causality—agency, if you like—flows inward as well as outward. What happens
here and now depends on what has happened there and then. We can under-
stand macro-patterns, without reifying them as if they were self-subsisting
objects, by seeing the macro as the dynamics of networks, the meshing of
chains of local encounters that I call interaction ritual chains.
The sociology of ideas (which as a research field has become concerned
mainly with the sociology of scientific knowledge) encounters serious limits in
understanding knowledge as a purely local construction. The significant ideas
which are the topics of intellectual history are those which are carried trans-
locally. Examining the local site of knowledge production misses what another
branch of the sociology of science has been good at investigating: the groups
of thinkers, the chains of network contacts, the rivalries between one segment
of an argumentative community and another. Groups and chains face both
inward and outward: inward because what we mean by an intellectual group
is just that its members assemble face-to-face often enough to build up intense
exchanges of ritual interaction, forging idea-emblems, identities, emotional
energies that persist and sometimes dominate others; outward because chains
are a way of referring to long-distance links across situations. How is this
linking done? The impacts of situations both inward and outward are parts of
the same process. Intensely focused situations penetrate the individual, forming
symbols and emotions which are both the medium and the energy of individual
thought and the capital which makes it possible to construct yet further
situations in an ongoing chain.
“Interaction ritual” is Goffman’s (1967) term, by which he calls attention
to the fact that the formal religious rituals which Durkheim ([1912] 1961)
analyzed are the same type of event which happens ubiquitously in everyday
life. Religious rituals are archetypes of interactions which bind members into
Coalitions in the Mind • 21