Spaghetti, Syrup, and Escalators: Interpreting Culture Shock in "Elf"

The movie Elf wouldn't be so funny if it didn't contain a surprising element of truth, a strange plausibility. I mean, pouring maple syrup on spaghetti is funny, but is it really that crazy? Americans eat waffles and syrup, sweet and sour pork, and other combinations of sweetness and carbohydrates, so why not syrup and spaghetti?

 

 OK, I admit it's still gross to imagine putting syrup on spaghetti, so perhaps a better example of the power of social convention—and its relative arbitrariness—is the lesson Buddy (Will Ferrell) gets from his human brother about proper dating etiquette. The brother tells Buddy that he should take his female co-worker on a date by asking her "to eat food," but it has to be "real food, not candy." The movie is again making a joke by pointing out that a custom Americans take for granted seems arbitrary and strange from a kid or elf's perspective—yet that kid/elf perspective contains a kernel of truth, a wisp of plausibility. After all, attraction to sweet tastes is one of the biological universals we humans (raised by humans) share, and Americans consume nothing but candy on other special occasions, such as Valentine's Day. It would actually make sense for Americans to go on dates and just eat sweets.

But there's an even better authority here than mere biological science: Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. In the Harvard bar scene in this movie, after Skylar (Minnie Driver) gives Will (Damon) her phone number, she says, "Maybe we could go out for a cup of coffee sometime?"

"Great," Will says, "Or maybe we could go somewhere and just eat a bunch of caramels."Skylar is baffled, so Will explains, "When you think about it, it's just as arbitrary as drinking coffee."

Will is making a reasonable anthropological point about American culture's skewed rules for the ritual consumption of food and drink (a point that would apply to other cultures as well).

I'm not trying to convince readers to run out and eat caramels or put syrup on their spaghetti, I'm just saying that Elf exposes the social construction of taken-for-granted American customs, from food habits to escalators. Buddy reminds us that an escalator really is a scary machine with gnashing metal teeth, a modern contraption that is literally and metaphorically "earth-shattering." His escalator ride  creates a perfect body metaphor for the disorientation caused by culture shock throughout this entire movie.

 

That’s what culture shock does at its best: it moves the ground beneath our feet, it gives us a fresh way to see things, including escalators and advertisements about “world’s best cup of coffee.”

At least that’s the way I see it, and not just because, as an anthropologist, I've dedicated my career to culture shock. The popularity of movies like Elf shows that people all over enjoy culture shock for the sheer joy of surprise and illumination. Even neuroscience research proves comedy and cognition are linked: on fMRI tests, the same parts of research subjects’ brains light up when they solve word puzzles and when they watch videos of stand-up comedy. In the best cases, such as Elf, we're laughing, thinking, and being entertained at the same time.

Now here’s a more personal take on culture and escalators. About 7 years ago, I was flying out of Newark Airport, not far from New York City. I always love airports—the intersection of cultures, the many lives on the cusp of change, the liminal betwixt-and-between atmosphere—but the Newark Airport is fairly large and impersonal, and on this particular morning, it was filled with long lines and grumpy people. I overheard one passenger say to a counter attendant, "How friggin' rude."  I myself was low on sleep and rushing to catch a flight back to Oregon, so I tried to keep my head down and not interact with anyone.

Newark Airport, Manhattan in background. Credit Ramriot, Flckr.

When I got to the foot of an escalator, though, a South Asian woman in a sari tapped me on the shoulder and got me to stop. She couldn’t speak English, but she smiled broadly and then started to guide the hand of her small son, about 4 years old, toward me. I was confused, but couldn't just walk away, so I stepped aside to let the people behind me rush onto the escalator. A couple possibilities raced through my mind: Was this a trick to get money by exploiting my sympathy for a mother and her little kid, who was, in fact, adorable? Did she lose something inside the escalator? Did she not know how to find her gate?

She just kept smiling, offering me the little boy’s hand, and speaking in an incomprehensible foreign language. Then I figured out what the problem was. She literally had too much to handle: two little boys (her other son was even younger) and a large suitcase. She couldn’t hold onto her two sons' hands and the suitcase while riding the escalator. She was forced to do what no mother should ever have to do: ask a stranger to take her little boy's hand in a crowded public place.

That killed me.

Of course I smiled and agreed. When the boy put his small hand in mine, the harsh airport melted away and I felt it—that pure human connection to the world.

Riding up the escalator, the little boy held my hand and looked back and forth between me, the moving stairs, and his mother, who was right behind him whispering words of assurance. Near the top, as the stairs disappeared into thin air, he showed no signs of stepping off, so I picked him up high in the air and set him back down on solid ground, as if this were a fun game. Undoubtedly, when the boy got a couple years older, he'd easily master the escalator and treat it like a joyride, but for now he just seemed confused. I wanted to make sure they made it to their gate safely, even wished I could find out all about them and their trip, but the mother just mumbled a thank you, took her boy’s hand, and sped off in the opposite direction, and I never saw them again.

I haven’t travelled much in India, just a couple weeks back in the mid-80s’, but in every part of the world where I’ve travelled and lived, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, I’ve been overwhelmed by people’s generosity and hospitality. I’ve also been reduced to a child-like state of helplessness, sometimes unable to speak the language and often perplexed by unfamiliar customs. I’ve surely looked sillier than Buddy straddling the escalator stairs or putting syrup on his spaghetti. But I keep going back into the revolving door for the thrill of another spin, for more culture.

Maybe Christmas should be more like my escalator moment, if not Buddy’s: spontaneous moments that bring us together and move the ground beneath our feet. In the meantime, I’m glad we’ve got movies like Elf to keep us in touch with our sense of wonder, awe, and togetherness.

Related materials:

My post on culture contact in film and radio (Focus on Mike Daisey monologue on China labor)

Peter Wogan, “What’s So Funny about First Contact?” Visual Anthropology Review 22:14-33, 2006. (In this journal article, I analyze a documentary about first contact in the 1930s between Australian goldminers and aboriginal peoples in Papua New Guinea. I analyze Westerners’ fascination with technology as a ritual of supremacy, but also as a source of “wonder,” and I place the discussion within the Obeyesekere-Sahlins debate over rationality.)

The Terminal (Great comedy movie about a Russian passenger (Tom Hanks) who lives in JFK Airport for weeks.)

Occupy North Pole Video (Warning: This clip could ruin your Christmas. Proceed at your own risk.)

What would George Carlin say about Basketball vs. Baseball?

Here's what comedian George Carlin might have said...

                                BASEBALL vs. BASKETBALL

The baseball uniform looks like a formal outfit, something you wear to church. 

The basketball uniform looks like a bathing suit, something you wear to the pool.

Baseball looks like a battlefield, with a few soldiers trying to pass through enemy territory. 

Basketball looks like a dance floor, with couples trying to decide who they should dance with next.

Baseball is played on green grass.

Basketball is played on a beige hardwood floor.

In short, baseball comes out of 19th-century pastoral America. Basketball comes out of 20th-century office culture: fast-paced, lots of teamwork and immediate, visible rewards, all played out under florescent lights and clean indoor spaces. Both are beautiful social dramas.

Sometimes I think I'm getting closer to understanding the cultural meaning of baseball and basketball, and other times I feel like I'm just staring at crop circles and I'm not sure what any of it means. As Carlin said, "I just want to go home! I hope I'll be safe at home!"

__________

Related Posts:
Basketball vs. football, with Carlin-style contrasts and analysis

All posts about baseball, including posts on sliding and rebellion, the foul ball,  the catch and sharing, and feeling good in crowds.

All posts about Field of Dreams (and baseball), including posts on baseball connections with ALS and moonlight. 

PS: If you're not ready to go home just yet, here's another thought about baseball:

I see George Carlin as a great comedian (and anthropologist), but I don't buy his famous riff's depiction of baseball as wimpy. As former Commissioner Giamatti once said, baseball consists of a man standing on a hill throwing a rock at a man below him holding a club.

Lately I'm even thinking that baseball might have gained popularity in 19th-century America due to its emotional resonance with the pistol duels and line warfare of the American Civil War. Like a batter standing there while someone throws a hard object at him at 90mph, the central challenge of duels and the Civil War was to have the courage to stand there while someone shot at you from close range. All these things have the same combat structure and sense of honor.

Regardless of historical origins, baseball clearly has violence at its core, but the violence has been ritualized and made into art—like a movie fight scene with gentle, ethereal music in the background that makes you feel something beautiful is transpiring, despite the violence.

What Do the "Jaws" Movie and WWII Have in Common?

WWII, American Marines in Okinawa. Flickr, "England."

Or put differently, what does the Jaws shark symbolize?

At least for some Americans, I think the Jaws shark symbolizes the Japanese in World War II. What Quint said in the movie about sharks would have applied to the stereotypical Japanese soldier as well: "He's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye." Both the shark and the Japanese soldier were made out to be a relentless enemy that hides in the water (a Japanese submarine), and an enemy that suddenly attacks the nation on its own soil (the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor, like Amityville being attacked on the 4th of July).

Japanese Submarine. Credit: Flickr, Marion Doss.

Shark fin. Credit: Flickr, Anita363.

But there's even more going on here. Jaws taps into vexing, ongoing questions about stereotypes, war, and intercultural understanding.

The best place to start is the scene where Quint, the fisherman, describes the shark attacks that followed the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis by a Japanese submarine.


(Video clip of Quint's speech here.)

Quint says, "Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. It was comin' back from the island of Tinian Delady. Just delivered the bomb—the Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour."

Quint's speech not only refers to real WWII events, but his description of the shark's eyes is very similar to American stereotypes at the time of the Japanese soldier. Here's what Quint says: "You know the thing about a shark? He's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ‘ya, doesn't seem to be livin'." Quint could just as well have been describing the WWII American stereotype of the "inscrutable" Japanese soldier with lifeless eyes.

Part of the power of Jaws, then, is that it allows Americans to explore their complicated feelings about WWII. When the shark gets blown to pieces at the end of the movie, viewers are encouraged to feel that such destruction was fully justified. In real life, though, Americans have felt increasingly regretful, or at least conflicted, about dropping the atomic bomb on the Japanese. Even many of those who thought the atomic bombings were justified because they saved thousands of American lives later felt misgivings about killing women and children. Jaws plays with these ambivalences and vexing ethical issues, always in a non-obvious way.

Hiroshima bomb cloud.

Jaws ending.

Jaws in Germany
To a certain extent, this analysis also applies to American attitudes toward German soldiers in WWII. For example, here's what one American soldier remembered about a battle on the front lines near Cologne, Germany:

"We were passing the Germans we killed. Looking at the individual German dead, each took on a personality. These were no longer an abstraction. These were no longer the Germans of the brutish faces and the helmets we saw in the newsreels. They were exactly our age. These were boys like us. ...Once the helmet is off, you're looking at a teenager, another kid." —Robert Rasmus, interview reprinted in Studs Terkel's book The Good War: An Oral History of WWII.

This soldier's story sounds like Quint's points about the shark's eyes—how they seem "lifeless," or as this soldier put it, like "an abstraction." German soldiers with helmets that hide their eyes also fit Quint's image of the shark, which is the underlying stereotype of all enemies in modern Western warfare: lifeless, inhuman, animalistic.

U.S. wartime poster, 1942, Office of Emergency Management..

But as noted by the American soldier, all this changes when the enemy helmet comes off, when you get up close and see that the supposed monsters are just teenage boys like you. (This was more likely to happen with German than Japanese soldiers.) Quint notes this same type of sudden switch in perspective when he says, "Until he [the shark] bites 'ya and those black eyes roll over white..."

In other words, Jaws and WWII both create strange oscillations between media stereotypes and individual personalities, abstract concepts and real beings. The shark seems dead but then you realize how alive he is...just before he kills you; WWII enemy soldiers seem like abstractions, but then you realize they're humans...just before you kill them.

21st Century
But what does any of this have to do with 21st-century viewers, most of whom have no experience with World War II or shark attacks?

These days, many Westerners are trying to see the positive aspects of other cultures...but we still do so through mass-media abstractions, and struggle with jarring contrasts between cultural stereotypes and real people that we meet in our travels or workplace or corner grocery store. Quint's war references and the shark imagery dramatize these intercultural challenges in a visceral yet non-obvious way, which presumably helps explain why Jaws has continued to fascinate new generations of viewers, not just WWII veterans.

I find it comforting to hear the American soldier (Rasmus) say he eventually recognized the humanity of the German soldiers, and I gather other WWII soldiers did the same thing. For example, you can listen here to a strangely beautiful, 2-minute Story Corps interview with an American talking about his deep feelings for a German soldier.

American helping wounded German soldier, 1944. Army Surgeon General, National Archives and Records Administration.

Anyone want to suggest other stories of soldiers, on any side of any conflict, who have transcended stereotypes and recognized the enemy's humanity in a sudden, dramatic moment? I like those stories.

Further Reading:
My post about USS Indianapolis Survivors and Their Tears

Does the Jaws shark have the eyes of God?

Robert Willson Jump Cut journal article, where he shows the resonance between Jaws and submarine movies.

What's the Cultural Meaning of the Slide in Baseball? (Peter Wogan)

Sports are like religious rituals: they reflect and instill cultural beliefs and practices. For example, the 24-second shot clock in basketball clearly reflects the fast pace of our era. So what about the slide in baseball? How does it resonate with contemporary American culture?

I think sliding reflects American ambivalence about social authority. Baseball players dress up in formal clothes, as if they're going to church or court—and then they throw themselves in the dirt.

That's the tension at the heart of both baseball and American society: respect vs. disdain for authority. Respect the rules, but kill the ump. Get dressed up, but throw yourself in the mud. Sliding is controlled social rebellion.

This social symbolism becomes more obvious when you think about the formality of the baseball uniform: white pants, a belt, a shirt with buttons all the way up the front. The impracticality of this uniform, and its extreme formality by comparison with most other sports uniforms, throws into relief baseball's social meaning.  

Flickr, Ewen and Donabel.

Most other sports won't even permit you to wear a belt (draw strings hold up pants just fine, actually better than most belts), yet baseball requires a belt. And as Paul Lukas noted on ESPN, "Once you stop and think about it...a button-front format doesn't make much sense for a sports uniform. For starters, a button-up shirt is more awkward to move around in, plus it's more formal, less sporty. That's why you wear a button-front shirt to work and some sort of pullover (T-shirt, sweatshirt, tank top, whatever) at home and on the weekend." Lukas also notes that button-up designs lead to weird problems like billowing and unaligned lettering on the front of jerseys, yet despite these problems and the viability of good alternatives, such as pull-overs, zippers, or laces, the major leagues have almost always used buttoned jerseys since the 19th century.

I would add that the persistence of formal uniforms and sliding in baseball can't be due to mere tradition. Over the years, baseball has made plenty of innovations, from the advent of batting helmets and night games to adjusting the pitcher's mound height and so on; yet the baseball uniform never lost its basic formality, and players never stopped sliding. If getting dirty in nice clothes hadn't felt right—if it hadn't continued to resonate with American ambivalence about authority—sliding probably would have been phased out a long time ago. 


Instead, sliding in a uniform still feels so right that it's hard to imagine baseball without it. As Rickey Henderson of the Oakland Athletics once said, "If my uniform doesn't get dirty, I haven't done anything in the baseball game" (quoted in Diamonds Forever, W.P. Kinsella editor, p. 121).

In fact, the slide was a novelty when first introduced in the mid-1800s and many people opposed it, arguing that players should be allowed to overrun every base rather than sliding. This is how the crowd reacted to one of the first recorded slides, during an 1859 game in Portland, Maine: "the feat fairly astonished the natives, who at first roared with laughter, but Chandler scored the run, and they then woke up to the fact that a large, new and valuable 'wrinkle' had been handed out to them" (quoted in Peter Morris's excellent book, A Game of Inches: The Stories That Shaped Baseball, p. 265).

This early phase in baseball history reminds us that there are alternative ways to reach the bases without sliding, just as basketball could be played without a shot clock. Not every sports rule or practice has social significance, but it seems fair to say sliding does.

Related Posts about Baseball:

All posts about baseball, including posts on the foul ball,  the catch and sharing,  feeling good in crowds, and basketball vs. baseball.


All posts about Field of Dreams (and baseball), including posts on ALS, moonlight, and Jackie Robinson.
 

10-Second Video of a Little League Player Stealing 2nd Base While the Pitcher's Not Looking:

Why is Catching a Foul Ball So Exciting?

Credit: Flickr, SethSquatch.

 I think the excitement is related to the crowd. When you catch a foul ball, suddenly you rise out of the anonymous masses. Out of thousands of fans and against all the odds, you get chosen. The universe loves you, and you have the gift to prove it.

Credit: Flickr, Dizzy-eyed. (Check out the arms reaching upward, to the heavens.)

Of course, there are other, less mystical reasons why catching a foul ball is so exciting: the indirect contact with famous players, the thrill of an athletic achievement, the danger. But being loved by the universe—that has to count for something.

Credit: Flickr, Malingering.

Related Posts about Baseball:

All posts about baseball, including posts on sliding and rebellion,  the catch and sharing,  feeling good in crowds, and basketball vs. baseball.

All posts about Field of Dreams (and baseball), including posts on ALS and moonlight.

Vet with One Arm Makes Amazing Foul-Ball Catch (Video) 

I also love this comparative, historical detail: during WWII, foul balls caught in the stands by fans were sent to the troops. See Richard Crepeau, “Baseball and War,” in The Cambridge Companion to Baseball, p. 87.

What Would Seinfeld Say About Potluck Dinners?

I can imagine an entire "Seinfeld" episode focused on potlucks, yet, strangely, the show never addressed this topic, one of the only aspects of American culture it left uncovered. Nonetheless, "Seinfeld" had a lot to say about gift-giving, so it's a perfect resource to help us understand the bizarre American custom known as the potluck dinner.

Jerry Seinfeld, making the mistake of accepting an astronaut pen from his parents' friend ("The Pen," Season 3).

We need Jerry's help because the potluck presents a genuine anthropological riddle. You may be surprised to learn that many newcomers to the United States experience a sudden intimation of American cold-heartedness when they attend their first potluck dinner. That’s right: some people see the potluck as cold-hearted.

This reaction is hard for Americans to understand, since we usually see the potluck as not only harmless, but downright lovely, an example of community at its best. We have to ask ourselves, How could anyone resist a potluck? What would Seinfeld say?

Potluck Dinner, Flckr Mackarus

The answer is found in the way Jerry consistently messes up gift-giving because he doesn't want to get too committed to relationships with other people. For example, when he was dating Elaine, he didn't want to get her anything too "relationshipy" (his word) for her birthday, so he gave her 182 dollars in cash:

Elaine: You got me cash?!

Jerry: Well, this way I figured you can go out and get whatever you want. No good?

Elaine opening birthday box with $182, in "The Deal," Season 2.

Obviously his gift was not good. Shortly afterward, he and Elaine broke up.

Then there was the time Jerry got annoyed because he couldn't get rid of the comedian Kenny, who had given him an Armani suit. Jerry tried to take Kenny out to lunch, to pay off the debt and end the relationship, but Kenny wanted to stay friends, so he would show up at the restaurant, say he wasn't that hungry, just order soup or a sandwich, then say this didn't count as a meal and they should go out again later.  After a couple of these meals that "don't count" (according to Kenny), Jerry gets fed up and says, "You’ve had a sandwich and two bowls of soup. And that's it. Goodbye."

Kenny, in "The Soup" episode, Season 6.

Now here's the connection to the potluck. From non-American cultural perspectives, the potluck seems to say what Jerry said to Kenny: "You’ve had a sandwich and two bowls of soup. And that's it. Goodbye."

In other words, the potluck orchestrates gift giving so that everyone is perfectly paid up at the end of the day, making them free to end the relationship. Everybody has contributed equally, so nobody is left in anybody else’s debt. The ledgers are perfectly balanced and clear. Like Jerry after he gives Kenny the sandwich and two bowls of soup, we’re free agents once the potluck is over.

At least it seems that way when you compare the potluck with food customs, found in many other cultures of the world,  in which I host you for a large meal (even if there are twenty three of “you”), and then you do the same for me many months or years later. The potluck removes this hosting and time dimension in “delayed reciprocity,” thereby reducing the commitment to a long-term relationship. When you’re in someone’s debt, you know you’ll see each other at least once more, when the initial gift gets repaid, and you maintain your relationship in the interim. After a potluck, by contrast, we can all leave without reciprocal obligations holding us together.

Of course this is not the way Americans like to think of the potluck. To the contrary, we see potlucks as a great community event, one designed to enhance social relationships and overcome isolation, yet without letting the burden of all the cooking fall on a single host. So, as usual, it depends on your cultural perspective.

Potluck, anyone?

Acknowledgement:
This is a condensed and revised version of an essay that David Sutton and I wrote a couple years ago,
"Seinfeld, Potluck Dinners, and Problematic Gifts," Popular Anthropology Magazine1(1):8-10, March 2010. That essay can be found here.

 

Why Do Crowds Feel So Good?

You can actually feel a crowd in your body. Just being surrounded by all those other people, you feel different—lighter, ebullient, slightly buzzed. Where does this feeling—which Emile Durkheim long ago called "collective effervescence"—come from?

Credit: Flickr, Ian Broyles.

The thrill of the crowd derives from our basic social nature, the group-centeredness that got us hominids through the long, long Pleistocene and into the modern era. Ritual heightens this thrill, and a sports game is ritual in the best sense of the term: communal, sensual, exciting, structured yet creative, meaningful. The stadium itself is part of the ritual, a sacred space outside ordinary life. What happens inside is so intimate—people sitting close together, eating, talking, focusing on the same things—that it feels like a giant house, hence, terms like "home team" playing a "home game" in "our" stadium. The whole experience can be transcendent, connecting us with something larger and greater than ourselves. We will never sit in the same room with the millions of people in our culture or nation, but we can get close by going to a game together.

Collective effervescence also has a physiological basis. Scientists have explained how typical ritual elements like repetitive motion and rhythmic music alter the autonomic nervous system, biochemicals, and brain waves. Recent research on mirror neurons, which fire in observers as if they were doing the same action they're watching someone else perform, seems to explain why sports spectators get so caught up in the game. "When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain," said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons (quoted in the New York Times, 2006). I would even speculate that the density of all those human bodies—which primarily consist of water, plus mild electrical activity—creates a sea of electrical conductivity in the stadium. If true, Durkheim would have been more literally correct than he intended when he wrote, "When they are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation" (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Chapter 7; cf. Needham citation below). 

Wrigley Field, Credit: Ttarasiuk, Flckr.

Critiques of sports crowds are common—and usually wrong. It's unfair, for example, to criticize people for watching sports rather than playing them. Nobody makes the same complaint about museums. Nobody says, "C'mon, why don't these museum-goers paint like Picasso instead of just standing around looking at his paintings?" And, in point of fact, people who actively participate in sports are 10 times more likely to watch sports than inactive people (Allen Guttmann, Sports Spectators, 1986, p. 150).

It's also wrong to assume that every sports crowd is, ipso facto, a dangerous mob. In certain sports, obviously things sometimes get out of hand, but most sports crowds are remarkably well-behaved. Disdaining all sports crowds is not just a failure to make distinctions, it's a misanthropic rejection of collective joy.

Sports crowds, in short, put us in touch with humanity. And that feels good.

Doing the (original) wave. Credit: Flickr, Roberta WB.

Related Posts about Baseball:

All posts about baseball, including posts on sliding and rebellion, the foul ball,  the catch and sharing,  and basketball vs. baseball.

Further Reading on Ritual:
Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (originally published in French in 1912). This is a foundational, classic text in social theory. On "collective effervescence," see Chapter 7,  "The Origins of These Beliefs."


Needham, Rodney, "Skulls and Causality."  In this 1976 journal article (abstract here), Needham argued that late 19th-century, Western notions of electromagnetism unduly influenced anthropological understanding of headhunting, as well as sociological theory in general, including Durkheim's notions of force and causality. Needham offers a useful warning about imposing Western scientific models onto rituals and other cultural systems.


Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process. In this influential, 1969 book, anthropologist Turner develops his notion of "communitas," i.e., egalitarian solidarity during liminal phases in rites of passage. Turner's "communitas" has a lot in common with Durkheim's "collective effervescence."