Just as belief is a step beyond knowledge, belonging is a step beyond membership. Group memberships arise via some combination of chance and choice, but in every case they are an external fact, a status that one may not be committed to or desirous of. Human social interdependence necessitates that at least some of these memberships become solidified into something potent and secure—in short, belonging. The role of rituals in the creation of belonging is suggested by the fact that social integration and a sense of unity are among the most noted outcomes and functions of ritual.
Co-PresenceThe Direct Effects of Co-Presence on Belonging. ( particularly useful to also think about in terms of the identity of the audience within the space and their feelings if they're isolated, thrown together in a pair or in a larger collected group)
As Durkheim noted and others have subsequently confirmed under “great collective shock . . . social interactions become much more frequent and active . . . individuals seek one another out and come together more". This impulse to assemble is independent of any intention to engage in ritual practice, and even apart from the larger ritual process, it has a profound influence over those assembled.
At the same time that it has direct effects on belief, co-presence also has powerful and direct effects on belonging. Simple contact between individuals is a powerful source of liking and cohesion playing as it does upon multiple mechanisms of attachment, including mere exposure, propinquity, similarity, and mere categorization. Moreover, both the developmental and ethological evidence indicate that such proximity attachment linkages have strong biological underpinnings...Deindividuation and ritual practice converge in terms of both cause and effect. As the name implies, the gist of deindividuation has to do with the loss of a sense of self, resulting in three important effects: 1) a strong sense of unity with and liking for the group and its members, thus contributing directly to belonging; 2) behavior that is disinhibited and free from the normative and moral constraints that usually constrain it; and 3) a direct and positive impact on the participant’s subjective state via its ability to reduce self-awareness.From Behavior to Belief and Belonging
Contrary to the modern Western conception of human action as considered, purposive, and conscious, empirical evidence makes it clear that much of the time people act mindlessly or automatically, under the influence of preconscious social and emotional forces of which they are unaware and that they are unable to control anger. Consequently, though very much affected by the ritual experience, the participant is unlikely to correctly attribute these changes to the causes traced above. Durkheim puts it this way: "The ordinary observer cannot see where the influence of society comes from. It moves along channels that are too obscure and circuitous, and uses psychic mechanisms that are too complex, to be easily traced to the source"
The ironic counterpoint to our lack of accurate knowledge about the causes of our states and behaviors is our insistence on seeking explanations for them.We try to understand the causal relationships that populate our world in order to make it seem predictable and controllable, especially when faced with atypical behavior, states, or events. When this need to understand collides with our lack of insight, we attempt to locate the cause of our experience via some combination of three heuristics:Self–Perception.
- Cultural causal theories. Actors and observers both draw upon preexisting, socially shared, and culturally diffused schema and expectations in making causal attributions about actions. In short, we tend to make the causal connections that our socialization predisposes us to see.
- Social comparison. Actors look to co-present others for information and validation concerning the definition and attribution of ambiguous affect and behavior.
- Perceptual salience. Attribution follows attention in that salient elements of the environment are more likely to be integrated into causal models than less salient but potentially causal factors.This returns us once again to the second way in which attention is of primary importance: it not only affects subjective states, but also channels attribution toward the totem.
Between the lack of accurate causal introspection and the need to account for affect and behavior, we can conclude that ritual participants will probably not attribute the effects of participation to their actual causes, and probably will ascribe their experiences to a source that is primed by their culture, is shared with their co-participants, and is the focus of ritual attention. This lack of insight, and consequent misattribution, is the hinge around which the four core mechanisms of belief and belonging creation swing.
Texts & LinksSelf-perception theory assumes that actors have little actual insight about the causes of their own behavior, and that our self-images are largely constructed in the same ways our images of others are: by observing our behavior and using our implicit personality theories to interpret them and discover who we are. From this perspective, the ritual participant would be induced by the ritual situation to enact behaviors that she would later incorporate into her self-schema along the lines of “Well, I was speaking in tongues, so I must be a believer,” thereby fortifying belonging by bolstering her identification as such and by increasing her sense that she is, in important ways, even more similar to those around her.
- Marshall, Douglas A, Behaviour, Belonging and Belief: A Theory of Ritual Practice, 'Sociological Theory', Volume 20 Issue 3, Pages 360 - 380, 17 Dec 2002, 2010 American Sociological Association, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118953492/PDFSTART
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