International Sociology Review of Books Vol. 23 No.

developments as they are, not what the researchers expect them to be. Ibn
Khaldun also took the lead in this regard before sociology was known in the
West.
4. Sociology or political science: Throughout the book, Dr Dhaouadi points out that
Ibn Khaldun was a social theorist, yet, by analysing Ibn Khaldun’s writings
using modern methodologies, he fails to emphasize that Ibn Khaldun was a
political scientist as well as a sociologist. Ibn Khaldun was a political theorist
who tackled issues related to the state, to authority and its use in a political
plurality, as well as to governance and its relation with its subjects (citizens
and others). All of these topics shed new light on Ibn Khaldun’s legacy, a
legacy that should be analysed for its implications for Arab and international
political thought.

In conclusion, it is important to stress the need to study the heritage of the Arabs
and the Muslims to benefit from and use it in practical and scientific applications.
When contemporary Arab researchers recognize their rich heritage and analyse it as
Dr Dhaouadi has done, we can hope to see more contributions to Islamic thought.

Biographical Note: As’ad Ghanem is the head of the Department of Government

and Political Philosophy and a senior lecturer in the School of Political Sciences
at the University of Haifa. Ghanem’s theoretical work has explored legal, insti-
tutional and political conditions in ethnic states. In the context of
Israel/Palestine, Ghanem’s work has covered issues such as Palestinian politi-
cal orientations, the establishment and political structure of the Palestinian
Authority and majority–minority politics in a comparative perspective.
Address: School of Political Science, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel.
[email: [email protected]]

Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ and Oxford:

Princeton University Press, 2004, 439 pp., ISBN 0691090270, US$29.95.

keywords: emotional energy ✦ healing ✦ micro-sociology ✦ rituals ✦ social

solidarity

Participation in a ritual gives the individual a special kind of energy, which

I will call emotional energy. (p. 38)

Randall Collins’s book should not be read just once, unless the reader wishes but
to have a glimpse of the richness of a great work. This is not a text to be ‘browsed’,
but one to be read and reread with care, to allow the reader the emotional intensity
of a ritual. The author invites us on a journey into the intricate meanings of socio-
logical theories. This book is a monument to human rituals, thus far considered to
be preferentially, if not exclusively, the focus of anthropologists and historians. As

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the author of The Credential Society, a classic in the historical sociology of profes-
sions and a powerful critique of the excessive role of ‘credentialism’ in markets of
all sorts, Collins knows that sociologists are not generally praised for their knowl-
edge about rituals. Indeed, anthropology and sociology college students, as well as
many ‘professional’ social scientists, will probably distinguish between a
Durkheim ‘sociologist’ (focusing on the division of labour and on methodology)
and a Durkheim ‘anthropologist’ (focusing on religious rites and sacred values),
thus creating a crude dividing line in a seamless intellectual fabric. Randall Collins
defies such simple schemes, by doing justice to the integrity of Durkheimian social
thought. The author goes even further, integrating the intellectual heritage of
George Herbert Mead and the work of Erving Goffman in his own attempt to
propose a radical micro-sociology of human action, especially of ritualized action.
His proposal is radical, because it seeks the roots of emotions, of ‘emotional
energy’ (see Chapter 3), and interaction rituals (Chapter 4), in order to establish a
démarche for a micro-sociology of emotions and behaviour. Individualism is a
social product, but Collins claims that self-solidarity (a ‘dialogue among parts of
the self’ [pp. 203–5], recalling George Herbert Mead’s concepts), ritual solidarity
and altruism are all instances of chains of motivation that pull and push individ-
uals from situation to situation. This is a bold attempt to link the motives of social
action to the inner workings of emotions and internalized symbols.
The book is also a tribute to micro-sociology. If historical sociologists tend
towards broad structural scenarios of human behaviour, Collins shows here an
epistemological break with grand structures. He claims that the sociological gaze
should fasten on the world of emotions, morality, ritual intensity, central/periph-
eral participation, situational social density and social diversity, the intensification
of shared experience (recalling Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence)
and several other concepts that have central relevance throughout the book.
The relevance and the possible applications of Collins’s concepts obviously
depend on the social scientist’s own conduct of enquiry, which results, in turn,
from his or her research questions; but any search for sociological explanation –
even in macro-theories – will have much to learn from Collins’s micro-sociological
stance. For example, the reader will quickly grasp the uses of the concepts of
‘failed rituals’, ‘empty rituals’ and ‘forced rituals’ for the analysis of political
processes and the relation between political actors and the public sphere.1 Chapter 6
should be stressed for its importance to psychologists, including clinical and sex-
ual therapists. There he discusses sex as interaction ritual, bringing out ‘a special
kind of intimate solidarity’. It is not only a sociological challenge to therapists of
all sorts; it is also an insightful, sophisticated theory of sexual interaction. In Part
II, dedicated to ‘Applications’, Chapter 8, on ‘Tobacco Ritual and Anti-Ritual:
Substance Ingestion as a History of Social Boundaries’, reveals Collins’s taste for
historical overviews, and in this sense adds to, or departs a little from, the micro-
sociological emphasis of the book as a whole. This chapter is particularly impor-
tant as a lesson in the history of manners and morals. It is echoed in the jacket
photo, which highlights ‘self-consciously daring women’, sharing a ‘cigarette-
lighting ritual’ in the late 1920s. The jacket is perfectly in synchrony with the basic
ideas and analyses of the author. Collins shows how temperance societies and
anti-carousing movements in the US, going back to the 16th century, have

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succeeded – temporarily? – in banning cigarette-smoking from public and even

from private spaces. ‘Rituals mark boundaries of inclusion and exclusion’, the
author reminds us (p. 297). Collins warns the medical professions against their
neglect of the effects of tobacco usage ‘as socially experienced’ (p. xix); originally,
smoking expanded ‘as a social movement propagating lifestyle rituals, with its
focus of attention, its emotional energies, and its feelings of membership’ (p. 302).
Reformers want smokers to feel excluded; no longer sharing membership rituals.
The new Prohibition seeks to ban all kinds of noxious substance ingestion from
social interaction. However, the apparent success of the anti-smoking campaign
may simply hide the evident failure of the control of heavy drug abuse in the US.
All the chapters on ‘Applications’ are required reading for policy-makers, par-
ticularly for those responsible for family social and preventive programmes, such
as educational campaigns against ‘premature sex’ or cigarette-smoking among
teenagers. For the first time in the history of the World Health Organization, epi-
demiologists and the ‘new sanitarians’ have jumped on the bandwagon of moral
crusades, setting too much emphasis on morals and leaving aside the worst causes
of human suffering and violence in the great metropolises today – heavy drug
abuse and uncontrolled gun possession. Collins is not willing to preach addiction
in lieu of attacking the causes of pulmonary diseases or irresponsible adolescent
behaviour. He discusses interaction ritual chains, not chain smoking or unpro-
tected sexual intercourse. A related policy implication: light substance ingestion
may be accepted within social boundaries, such as coffee houses, pubs and the
like. What a reasonable reader – not a rabid prohibitionist 2 – will conclude from
his book is that having a puff at a pipe or a cigarette or drinking a few glasses of
red wine in a restaurant may help women and men to increase the space of ‘shared
emotional energies’ and improve social interaction. This is the antithesis of ‘the
modern cult of the individual’, discussed in Chapter 9.
Publishers and authors always expect to reach a wide public, but this time there
is an additional and compelling reason for reading this book, i.e. a radical socio-
logical view on the importance of not merely maintaining, but of cultivating ritu-
als in social life. This is especially true for the cultivation of social solidarity and
interaction. ‘Self-confidence and self-trust are qualities of relationships’, argues
sociologist and social planner Peter Marris (1996: 170). Completely banning cigarette-
smoking from the spaces of interaction is a deplorable autocratic measure – the
more despotic because the renewed temperance programmes of our days, recall-
ing the Prohibition of a century ago, is now backed by the sacred professions of
medicine and the scientific word of epidemiologists.
A final word on the making of this extraordinary book: Collins has a power-
ful and convincing interpretation of rituals. But the book reveals some excesses
and overtones that remind us of the overacting of artists in a play. In the first
place, there are too many charts and arrows. Classics in the social sciences
rarely display these methodological nuts and bolts. These are the acclaimed
choice of social epidemiology models, full of arrows and devoid of sociological
imagination. Another problem of the book lies in the sort of positivist heritage
revealed in Part I. Collins believes he has to ‘deconstruct’ and challenge the
narratives of anthropologists on rituals, before announcing his theoretical
model and his interpretations. He offers criticisms of what anthropologists

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‘failed’ to achieve. In fact, ‘failing to’ are the preferred terms for critical book
reviews in the US, as if social scientists should go through a checklist of method-
ological procedures before writing a book. Great works are great for what they
accomplish, despite what they ‘fail’ to bring to light. Collins’s attempt to challenge
Claude Lévi-Strauss is illustrative. As in graduate students’ term papers, Chapter 1
(on interaction ritual theory) contains embarrassing references to the French
anthropologist’s ‘inconsistencies’, his ‘vacillation’ between timeless analysis and
historical interpretation, etc. (pp. 26–30). English-speaking students of French
structuralism should not be misled by Collins’s dry, uninteresting, criticism of
Lévi-Strauss. However, when Collins enthusiastically endorses the perspec-
tives of an author – as he does with George Herbert Mead and Émile Durkheim
– he seems to be guided by the sort of emotional energy that he attributes to
social rituals, and provides the reader with an intellectually stimulating
exchange. Here we have Randall Collins at his best.
The allusion to French authors calls for a further comment. An acclaimed
social thinker should establish a true dialogue with foreign cultural territories.
If we look at the hundreds of bibliographical references (pp. 417–34), the
absence of titles in languages other than English is puzzling (only six in
French). Even Durkheim’s œuvre is listed in English. The same criticism may
be levelled against the lack of dialogue (in English!) with India’s important lin-
eages of social thought on rituals. The issue of international dialogue is all the
more important in our days, because events called ‘international’ may in fact
involve no more than two or three intellectual heritages. A few years ago, the
University of Campinas, one of the most prestigious universities in Latin
America, held an international conference on the theme of humiliation. The
roundtable programme revealed a clear-cut division of intellectual work
between the periphery and some selected centres: Brazilian, French and
German panelists plainly ignored the work of Erving Goffman, whose power-
ful insights on the presentation of ‘fractured selves’ and ‘backstage and front
stage personalities’ (see pp. 112–15 of Collins’s book) would surely deserve
discussion and debate. In the years to come, truly international conferences on
related themes, in Rio de Janeiro or in Haifa, in Cairo or in New Delhi, should
also invite Randall Collins or address his book on rituals. Then, the conference
organizers would not only do justice to the marvellous contribution of
Interaction Ritual Chains, but would also have an opportunity to raise other rich
perspectives to light.

Notes
1. In another vein, Brazilian anthropologist Mariza Peirano (2003) adds her own
work to the understanding of mass political rallies and their ritualized mean-
ings, and invites us to think that the ‘ritualized’ distinctions within the social
science field are often misleading.
2. For a discussion of the Temperance movements in the late 1890s and the first
decades of the 20th century in the US, see Wiebe (1998). The reference to
‘Protestant’ and ‘urban respectability’, and the attacks on liquor by ‘rabid pro-
hibitionists’, are on pp. 56–7 and 290–92.

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References
Marris, Peter (1996) The Politics of Uncertainty: Attachment in Private and Public Life.
London and New York: Routledge.
Peirano, Mariza (2003) Rituais, ontem e hoje [Rituals Past and Present]. Rio de
Janeiro: Jorge Zahar.
Wiebe, Robert, H. (1998) The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang.

Biographical Note: Luiz A. Castro-Santos is Professor of Sociology of Health at the

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he teaches sociology
and social studies of health. In addition to articles in social science journals such
as Dados: Revista de Ciências Sociais, he has recently published O pensamento social
no Brasil [Social Thought in Brazil] and co-authored A reforma sanitária no Brasil:
ecos da primeira república [Brazil’s Sanitary Reform: Echoes from the First
Republic, 1889–1930].
Address: Institute of Social Medicine, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro,
Rua São Francisco Xavier, 524, 7th floor, Bl. E, Brazil. [email: [email protected]]

Vittorio Cotesta, Images du monde et société globale: grandes

interprétations et débats actuels [Visions of the World and Global
Society: Grand Interpretations and Current Debates], trans. Yves
Zugmeyer, with Anny Mochel. Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université
Laval, 2006, 222 pp., ISBN 276378271X, CA$47.95.

keywords: civilizations ✦ cultural pluralism ✦ empire ✦ globalization ✦ world

systems

This balanced volume presents a critical analysis of different theories of global soci-
ety. After a brief overview of globalization as a many-faceted phenomenon, Cotesta
divides his attention between historical views of global society and contemporary
theorizing. Through this format, Cotesta seeks to prove his view that ‘global
processes are traceable back to an earlier modernity’, even that ‘in certain aspects
they are already present in the Greco-Roman and Islamic world or, at least, that the
authors under consideration had a strong awareness of the unity of the world’ (p. 3).
That ‘strong awareness’ is a far cry, however, from contemporary theorizing
about globalization, or the processes associated with this phenomenon. Indeed, the
ideas of Herodotus and Ptolemy appear simply as early conceptualizations of
the known world. These thinkers display an eagerness to relate geography (and, in
the case of Ptolemy, the influence of the planets and stars) to social patterns and
character stereotypes. With Ibn Khaldun, we find a somewhat more complex expla-
nation of the emergence of society and social differences, with prime importance
placed on the spirit of the clan and on particularistic ties, as well as an argument
for the universalistic claims of Islam. However, his image of Islamic civilization

228