ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a status-power theory of how assembly and collective effervescence achieve at least some of their effects. It addresses the core question about collective effervescence, namely the lack of a mechanism by which it achieves its effects. Absent a better understanding of how assembly may evoke or combine with emotional arousal, Durkheim's theoretical results remain opaque. More generally, the initiating stage in Durkheim's theory, releases many relational interests that are distant from simple display of competence in technical performance. Guerin separately references status-linked social comparison theories and the fact of unvarnished status competition. De-differentiation although everyday life in Aborigine society is gerontocratically structured, during totemic and other rites, especially as these move into the stage of collective effervescence, ordinary status distinctions are abandoned. Ramp argues similarly about de-differentiation in the ceremonial setting, seeing it as resulting from 'a nostalgia for totality a lost unity before differentiation'.
