Contemporary articles citing Lukes S (1975) Sociology

collective, rituals, ritual, contemporary, religious, issues, participants, french, action, tool

West, Brad. 2008. "Enchanting Pasts: the Role of International Civil Religious Pilgrimage in Reimagining National Collective Memory." Sociological Theory. 26:3 258-270. Link
The burgeoning activity of Australian backpacker tourists visiting the WWI Gallipoli battlefields is analyzed to explore the rite of international civil religious pilgrimage. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs, it is argued that this ritual form plays an important role in reimagining and enchanting established national mythologies. At Gallipoli, this occurred through the development of a dialogical historical narrative combining Australian and Turkish understandings of the past. The broader influence of this narrative on Australian historical understanding illustrates how global forces can be integrated within the study of national collective memory.

Etzioni, A. 2000. "Toward a Theory of Public Ritual." Sociological Theory. 18:1 44-59. Link
Given that holidays both reflect a society's attributes and serve to modify, these attributes, they are a valuable tool for a macro-sociological analysis. This paper proceeds by examining Durkheim's,well-known contributions on rituals and advancing theoretical ideas on how these might be modified seeking to develop a theory of holidays. The article concerns the role of holidays in managing tensions and recommitment to values; their role in relating communities to the society at large; their effect on gender roles, and the theoretical issues concerning holiday cycles and holiday-engineering efforts by religious authorities and states that have endeavored to adapt holidays for their own purpose. The article relies on public accounts, personal observations, and findings culled from a few studies by contemporary social scientists.

Roth, AL. 1995. "`'men Wearing Masks'': Issues of Description in the Analysis of Ritual." Sociological Theory. 13:3 301-327. Link
Since Durkheim ([1912] 1965), the concept of ritual has held a privileged position in studies of social life because investigators recurrently have treated it as a source of insight into core issues of human sociality, such as the maintenance of social order Consequently, studies of ritual have typically focused on rituals' function(s), and, specifically whether ritual begets social integration or fragmentation. In this frame, students of ritual have tended to ignore other equally fundamental issues, including (1) how actions, or courses of action, constitute a ritual, and (2) whether ritual is best understood as an aspect of all social action or a specific type of it. Drawing on Durkheim's overlooked contemporary, Van Gennep ([1908] 1960), I argue that analyses of ritual must describe how participants enact an occasion as ritual through distinctive activities and sequences of these. Analysts of ritual must attempt to ground the relevance of their descriptions in the participants' demonstrable orientations, an undertaking with move general implications for the study of social action.

BENAMOS, A & E BENARI. 1995. "Resonance and Reverberation - Ritual and Bureaucracy in the State Funerals of the French Third-republic." Theory and Society. 24:2 163-191. Link

Pfaff, S & G Yang. 2001. "Double-edged Rituals and the Symbolic Resources of Collective Action: Political Commemorations and the Mobilization of Protest in 1989." Theory and Society. 30:4 539-589. Link

Mariot, Nicolas. 2011. "Does Acclamation Equal Agreement? Rethinking Collective Effervescence Through the Case of the Presidential ``tour De France'' During the Twentieth Century." Theory and Society. 40:2 191-221. Link
This article discusses the integrative function frequently assigned to festive events by scholars. This function can be summed up in a proposition: experiencing similar emotions during collective gatherings is a powerful element of socialization. The article rejects this oft-developed idea according to which popular fervor could be an efficient tool to measure civic engagement. It raises the following question: what makes enthusiasm ``civic'', ``patriotic'', ``republican'' or simply ``political''? Based on a study of French presidential tours in France from 1888 to 2007, this article casts a different light on the topic. The enthusiasm of the crowds interacting with the successive French presidents is not civic because an inquiry may find ``patriotism'' into participants' minds. It can be called civic simply because the forms and meaning of the festive jubilation, which may be summarized into the formula: ``if spectators applaud, it means they support,'' necessarily preexist its multiple manifestations.