state a sociological theory of very wide scope, which tells us the conditions
under which symbols are generated and are felt to be morally and cognitively
binding. This is the theory of interaction rituals. It connects symbols to social
membership, and hence both to emotions of solidarity and to the structure of
social groups. Such a theory, I will attempt to show, accounts for variations in
solidarity and belief found across different social structures, and for the dy-
namics of individual lives. A specific form of this emotional energy is what we
call creativity.
Our first theoretical problem is to show why intellectual products have their
own kind of sacred status, different from the more ordinary sacred objects
with which everyday life is also permeated and which hold together personal
friendships, property relations, and authority structures. I must also show why
the sacred objects of intellectuals under the guiding category of “truth” are
different from the sacredness of religion proper in its moral community of
faith. After this, I consider how intellectuals produce and circulate symbols in
their own highly stratified communities.General Theory of Interaction Rituals
Let us begin at the site of all action: the local situation. All events take place
in a here-and-now as concrete and particular. The perspective of micro-sociol-
ogy, which analyzes the structures and dynamics of situations, is all too easily
interpreted as a focus on the individual actor or agent. But a situation is just
the interaction of conscious human bodies, for a few hours, minutes, or even
micro-seconds; the actor is both less than the whole situation and larger, as a
unit in time which stretches across situations. The detached agent who makes
events happen is as artificial a construction as the detached non-social observer,
who represents the idealized vantage point of classical epistemology. The self,
the person, is more macro than the situation (strictly speaking, the person is
meso); and it is analytically derivative because the self or agent is constructed
by the dynamics of social situations.
The local situation is the starting point of analysis, not the ending point.
The micro-situation is not the individual, but it penetrates the individual, and
its consequences extend outward through social networks to as macro a scale
as one might wish. The whole of human history is made up of situations. No
one has ever been outside of a local situation; and all our views of the world,
all our gathering of data, come from here. Philosophical problems of the reality
of the world, of universals, of other minds, of meaning, implicitly start with
this situatedness. I will not pursue these epistemological problems here, except
to note that if one refuses to admit anything beyond the local, one arrives at
some version of skepticism or relativism; if one idealizes what happens in20 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory