into a shared rhythm. As micro-coordination becomes intense, participants are
temporarily united in a shared reality, and experience a boundary or membrane
between that situation and whoever is outside it.
- As a result, the participants feel they are members of a group, with moral
obligations to one another. Their relationship becomes symbolized by whatever
they focused on during their ritual interaction. Subsequently, when persons use
these symbols in discourse or thought, they are tacitly reminded of their group
membership. Symbols are charged with social meaning by the experience of
interaction rituals; and symbols run down and lose their compelling sig-
nificance if such encounters are not reenacted within a period of time. Hence
there is a fluctuation in the daily relevance of symbols. Symbols remind
members to reassemble the group, whether by having another church service,
another tribal ceremony, another birthday party, another conversation with a
friend, another scholarly conference. The survival of symbols, and the creation
of new ones, depends on the extent to which groups reassemble periodically.^1
Symbols which are sufficiently charged with feelings of membership carry the
individual along certain courses of action even when the group is not present.
Well-charged symbols become emblems to be defended against desecrators and
outsiders; they are boundary markers of what is proper, and battle flags for
the precedence of groups. - Individuals who participate in IRs are filled with emotional energy, in
proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy
“moral force,” the flow of enthusiasm that allows individuals in the throes of
ritual participation to carry out heroic acts of fervor or self-sacrifice. I would
emphasize another result of group-generated emotional energy: it charges up
individuals like an electric battery, giving them a corresponding degree of
enthusiasm toward ritually created symbolic goals when they are out of the
presence of the group. Much of what we consider individual personality
consists of the extent to which persons carry the energy of intense IRs; at the
high end, such persons are charismatic; a little less intensely, they are forceful
leaders and the stars of sociability; modest charges of emotional energy make
passive individuals; and those whose IR participation is meager and unsuccess-
ful are withdrawn and depressed. Emotional energy (abbreviated EE) flows
from situations when individuals participate in IRs to situations when they are
alone. Encounters have an emotional aftermath; it is by this route that persons
can pursue their interior lives and their individual trajectories, and yet be
shaped by the nodes of social interaction. EE ebbs away after a period of time;
to renew it, individuals are drawn back into ritual participation to recharge
themselves.
All social life is an ecology of human bodies, coming together and moving
apart across the landscape. Where individuals meet, their encounters have in
Coalitions in the Mind • 23