ABSTRACT
In a generous act of evaluation, Randall Collins nominated his teacher and intellectual muse Erving Goffman as the 'greatest sociologist of the latter half of the twentieth century'. This chapter deals with Collins's concept of ritual. As it was for Goffman, ritual is the key idea in Collins's theory of interaction, although Goffman might not exactly have recognized Collins's version of it, which, as will be seen, has more of a Durkheimian flavor. Collins's truncated version of assembly omits the relational conditions that make sense of why assembly occurs in the first place and, hence, the grounds for why a mutual focus and common mood may emerge. In emotional contagion each participant simply becomes attuned to the emotion of the other participants; the relational why-and-what of the original emotion is neither given nor considered important.
