The study of collective effervescence for the 21st century

Arthur Buehler, Victoria University

Introduction
Today we are assembled to honour Emile Durkheim, the putative co-founder – along with
Max Weber – of the modern discipline of sociology. Levi Strauss, Mary Douglas and Victor
Turner are some of Durkheim’s better-known successors and we stand on the shoulders of all
of them. General theory in the sociology of religion has not come all that far in the last
hundred years because no one in any discipline has put forth a general theory beyond the
nature versus nurture or innate versus acquired dimensions of being human. We know
about the power of culture and language to shape human subjectivity and experience. The
intersubjective community and the genetic constitution and history of the individual
obviously have mutual influences on each other. We have, however, very little idea how
these processes work together and influence each other.
This essay suggests how to move a step closer toward such a unified

integral understanding. The entry point will be what Durkheim called “collective
effervescence,” which occurred in “effervescent assemblies,” where social norms are
suspended and new concepts and beliefs emerge. Van Gennep’s and Victor Turner’s work has
enabled us to appreciate certain aspects of this process. Yet how these changes of
consciousness come about and what the participants actually experience in these rituals
is as unknown today as it was for the anthropologists of Durkheim’s day. Edith Turner
whose work will be discussed below, poses the question, “What is actually going on here?”
The short answer is that we do not know. One significant question, which this paper seeks
to answer, is why we do not know. Let’s start with Durkheim and collective effervescence.
Collective Effervescence
Durkheim mentioned collective effervescence five times in his Elementary Forms of
Religious Life. In his search for the origins of religion, Durkheim chose to use Spencer and
Gillen’s recent ethnography of Australian aboriginals, choosing the strongest passages to
make his point. Spencer and Gillen describe the Australian aboriginal ceremony as “a
genuinely wild and savage scene of which it is impossible to convey any adequate idea in
words.” It comes about through “collective action … [which] arouses the sensation of
sacredness.” “When one arrives at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself
any longer.” … “carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and
act differently than at normal times….” “At the same time all his companions feel themselves
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transformed in the same way and express this sentiment by their cries, their gestures, and their
general attitude, everything is as though he really were transported into a special world.” The
Australian thinks that these rituals’ “apparent function is to strengthen the bonds attaching the
believer to his god, they at the same time really [my emphasis] strengthen the bonds attaching
the individual to the society… since the god is only a figurative expression of the society.”
Durkheim used this concept of collective effervescence to explain how change occurred in
both religion and in society.
The concept of collective effervescence was hardly at all developed after
Durkheim. Indeed, subsequent anthropologists were strongly critical of Durkheim’s
formulation, e.g., Evans Pritchard and Levi-Strauss Unlike most other anthropologists, Mary
Douglas uses the concept of collective effervescence, differentiating between conditions
facilitating collective effervescence versus those favoring ritual. Collective effervescence did
not become a mainstream category in anthropology. Indeed, it is ironic that Durkheim
chose such an apparently “unscientific” term as “collective effervescence” given his
academic position at the Sorbonne, the center of French scientific-rationalist inquiry.
Subjective data from a scientific-materialist point of view are still considered “unscientific,”
but Durkheim considered collective forces/sentiments to be measurable and able to be
investigated scientifically. In this regard Durkheim was ahead of his time. He took
experiences of ecstasy seriously, saying that the “mental agitation” is evidence of their
reality.” “A very intense ritual [for Durkheim “social life”] interferes with the normal
functioning of the individual consciousness.” Yet, since Durkheim almost no anthropologist
has taken Durkheim’s challenge to measure in a serious manner – or even individual altered
states. This is in part due to armchair scholarship – it is still alive and well in the 21st
century.

A Brief History of Armchair Scholarship

According to my calculations, the study of “collective altered states” got stuck somewhere
between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Specifically, the date is 1890 when
George Frazer wrote the highly acclaimed (at the time) The Golden Bough. Amply
illustrated, among other things, it discussed various tribal peoples from all over the world,
none of whom Frazer had ever seen in person or talked to. In anthropology, this is called
armchair scholarship, which slowly became a taboo in the mainstream discipline of
anthropology. This change was in large part due to Bronislaw Malinowski, who in 1922
wrote his Argonauts of the Pacific. He included guidelines for proper anthropological
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fieldwork at the beginning of the book, which became normative for the discipline.
Anthropological armchairs quickly became obsolete as the principal methodology to
study others. For that time, Frazer’s work was for anthropology what the Encyclopedia of
Religion is for historians of religion today, and we rest on the shoulders of his work and those
he inspired (like Malinowski who became an anthropologist after reading the Golden Bough).
Durkheim’s use of Spencer and Gillen’s work was armchair scholarship.
Fieldwork in anthropology is a methodology that produces kinds of intersubjective
knowledge that is impossible to replicate in an armchair. To do fieldwork in the study of
collective altered states (which is what I am going to call Collective effervescence from now
on) is a methodology that produces kinds of subjective knowledge that requires an openness
to other states of consciousness. The armchair of everyday consciousness, which I will call
armchair consciousness, is temporarily put aside as one enters the domain of collective
altered states. That is another way of starting to know directly what is going on.
Mainstream anthropologists and religious studies scholars are comfortable discussing
participants’ reports of their experiences, but not in having these experiences themselves.
This is not to say that many anthropologists and scholars of religion do not have these
experiences, they simply cannot write about them because referees and publishers “usually
feel that this material is not suitable for inclusion in a serious anthropological publication.”
What I am discussing here is not new at all, which is why I can say that the study
of collective altered states is stuck. The need to investigate these alternative modes of
consciousness has been articulated for over a hundred years. It has been outlined
brilliantly in Varieties of Religious Experience, still a staple in current undergraduate
psychology of religion courses. Its author, William James, the western pioneer of psychology
and religion, said,
[O]ur normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one
special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of
screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go
through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at
a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which
probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the
universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness
quite disregarded.
There were two sentences preceding this quote that I omitted purposely to make a point.
James was already starting to use the kind of methodology that is lacking in our current
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study of collective altered states. He said, “Some years ago I myself made some
observations on [the effects of] nitrous oxide intoxication. . . . One conclusion was forced
upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken.
It is that…” James had experience and he is encouraging others to follow in his footsteps. But
few have followed him methodologically in the intervening century.
What happened? The field of psychology was hijacked very soon after James wrote
these statements. Seeking to make psychology a “hard science,” the American behaviorist
John B. Watson declared that the use of all subjective terms was to be avoided in the
discipline of psychology. Forty years later, B. F. Skinner asserted that mind as such does
not exist; there are just behavioral dispositions. It became increasingly obvious, after a
decade of experiments, that reducing mental processes to behavior did not work. Now the
same assumptions are guiding work in cognitive psychology as they desperately look for
consciousness in the brain (which is like tearing apart a television to find the television
program). B. Alan Wallace has detailed how this unfortunate situation came about in his
The Taboo of Subjectivity. The same situation exists in all mainstream humanities and social
studies disciplines. It is also a taboo in fundamentalist versions of some religions.
Going Beyond the Armchair
Being averse to investigating experience outside of armchair consciousness is not
academic in origin. It is deeply embedded in the underlying paradigm of scientific
materialism, one tenet of which is the “single-state fallacy.” You have a friend who just
bought a new Apple computer after using a Windows-only computer and you ask him why he
bought it. He tells you that he is going to play chess with it and you say “cool why not try out
the game, The Journey to the World Divine? It works better on a Mac.” He repeats that he is
going to play chess with it. You ask him for his email address to send him the details and he
says again that he is going to play chess with his new computer. But you do not get it and you
start to recommend all kinds of even more awesome software. He angrily shouts, “NO! NO! I
am going to play chess with my new computer.”
Most people who use computers understand that a modern computer has an ever-
expanding variety of uses, and to be using a computer for one use is to limit oneself
considerably. In a similar fashion, the single-state fallacy is assuming that all worthwhile
abilities reside within our normal waking consciousness. Over the last thirty years, the data
have been accumulating from a variety of disciplines to demonstrate the fallacy of a single-
state consciousness given almost limitless possibilities in the rainbow of human-
consciousness.
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Some anthropologists since James have urged their colleagues, by example and
through their publications, to experience the altered states offered to them in their fieldwork,
for example, Fritz Staal, Aghenanda Bharati, Michael Harner, Karen Brown, Edith Turner,
and Felicitas Goodman. These anthropologists lived in cultures where quite a range of
non-ordinary consciousness events was normal (if not central). Although most
anthropologists, ingrained with the taboo of “not going native,” tried hard to reduce these
events to “symbolic representations” and the like, these anthropologists could not ignore
the existence of altered states of consciousness. Edith Turner states this in no uncertain
terms, “It is time that we recognize the ability to experience different levels of reality as one
of the normal human abilities and place it where it belongs, central to the study of ritual.” In
the anthropological domain, Edith Turner has noticed the reductive move of using
hermeneutics to reduce spirit to a logical set of symbols or logical systems. She asks,
How is a student of the anthropology of consciousness, who participates during
fieldwork, expected to regard all the conflicting spirit systems in different cultures? Is
there not a fatal lack of logic inherent in this diversity? The reply: “Is this kind of
subject matter logical anyway?” We also need to ask, "Have we the right to force it
into logical frameworks?”

In this manner, there are precedents of honoring collective altered states as valid data,
ones that we should be encouraging our students to explore. It is time to bring anthropology
and religious studies into the 21st century. The supreme way of honouring Emile Durkheim
is to investigate collective effervescence from the inside out and the outside in. Ignoring
data is fudging. Let’s move beyond the single state fallacy and move beyond the
reductive scientific materialistic assumptions that have been hampering open inquiry.
PS I do not experience anything in my work but I work with the people who do in a
collaborative manner. There is a subtle Orientalism in creating “the other.” In this university
my colleagues are very clear about the borderline between working with “academics” read us
with Ph.D.s and “ doing research” – read them as the other. So conferences involving 50% so-
called participants and 50% academics are non-academic, as if the “participants” are not an
integral part of the knowledge process because they do not have Ph.D.s.
But the way methodology in Religious Studies is often taught, Durkheim is put alongside late 20 th century
methodologies as if all were equal. If medical practice were taught like Religious Studies the first year would be
on trepanation and leeches the second year would cover frontal lobotomies, microscopes would be incorporated
the third year and so on.Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed
from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman.