Performing the sacred: a Durkheimian perspective on the performative turn in the social sciences

Re-enchanting Nationalisms

“…No matter what the particular symbol, the power of the sacred comes via its ability to represent collective identity (such as national character), embodying abstract notions and beliefs that can never be fully conceived and articulated in a rational way. In national societies the sacred often takes the form of tradition involving an "iteration of events" (Giesen 2006) over time with these symbols having an air of primordial significance. However, as argues, their power ultimately rests on enactment through rituals and the social effervescence which this symbolic action creates.…”

Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy

“…It might even be said that, in a differentiated, stratified, and reflexive society, a strategy's success depends on belief in the validity of the cultural contents of the strategist's symbolic communication and on accepting the authenticity and even the sincerity of another's strategic intentions. Virtually every kind of modern collectivity, moreover, seems to depend at one time or another on integrative processes that create some sense of shared identity (Giesen 1998;Spillman 1997;Ringmar 1996), even if these are forged, as they all too often are, in opposition to simplistic constructions of those who are putatively on the other side (Jacobs 2000;Ku 1999;Chan 1999).…”

‘Singing oneself into a nation’? Estonian song festivals as rituals of political mobilisation

“…Moscow obviously hoped that time would change the attitude of the Balts (Zubkova ). For the time being, however, to quote Giesen again, the ritual of the song festival managed to ‘shield social reality from facing the unspeakable – […] from the crisis of absurdity, disorientation, and uncertainty’ (Giesen : 342).…”

“…According to Bernhard Giesen, ‘[R]ituals are the performative counterpart to myth’ and they ‘provide the ultimate anchor for connecting actions, they refer to the construction of meaning itself’. Therefore the song festivals not only followed and shaped Estonian political developments, ethnic consolidation, national consciousness and self‐image but also became a ‘real’ counterpart to the ‘myth’ of the national narrative (Giesen : 342). At the same time, the song festivals became gradually institutionalised in ‘a process of formalisation and ritualisation, characterised by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition’ (Hobsbawm [1980]: 4–5).…”

“…‘Rituals do not exist like texts or institutions as structures of signification or dispositions of power and control. Instead, they exist as embodied performances, as events produced and experienced bodily by actors in a shared situation and in a local site’ (Connerton ; Giesen : 342). Svetlana Boym (: 112) observes that mass songs ‘function collectively as a magic force that programmatically arouses a certain predictable emotional […] response’.…”