BUILDING COMMUNITY THROUGH RITUAL :

From Weddings to Football, the Value of Communal Activities (VIRGINIA POSTREL, April 25, 2002, NY Times)

What do weddings, the Super Bowl, presidential inaugurations, graduation ceremonies and political rallies like those that took place in Washington last week have in common?

They're all communal activities, with lots of emotional and symbolic content. But they can also serve a rational purpose, argues Michael Suk-Young Chwe, an economist in the political science department at the University of California at Los Angeles.

These activities help solve "coordination problems," in which taking action requires knowing that other people know what you know and that you know that they know that you know.

When a president is inaugurated, for instance, the content of the ceremony itself is important, but not as important as the fact that everyone present or watching on television knows everyone else is seeing the same inauguration. Everyone knows who the president is, and knows that everyone else also knows. That common knowledge is essential to the legitimacy of the office.

"I am more likely to support an authority or social system, either existing or insurgent, the more others support it," Professor Chwe writes in "Rational Ritual" (Princeton University Press, 2001). "Public rituals, rallies and ceremonies generate the necessary common knowledge. A public ritual is not just about the transmission of meaning from a central source to each member of an audience; it is also about letting audience members know what other audience members know."

It's for reasons like these that it seems like it would be useful to have more public ceremonies--specifically things like : the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer in schools; some kind of large public celebration of the 4th of July; annual political party conventions (as the British have); etc.--events and rituals in which we would not merely be relating to a central authority but coming together as a community, sharing common beliefs. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 29, 2002 8:35 AM