Effervescent Atheism

Autor: Cale Leslie Hubble
Rok vydání: 2015
Předmět:
Zdroj: Fieldwork in Religion. 9:124-146
ISSN: 1743-0623
1743-0615
DOI: 10.1558/firn.v9i2.17523
Popis: The Global Atheist Convention (GAC) held in Melbourne, Australia on 13-15 April 2012 gave participants an opportunity to instantiate their atheist identities in the context of embodied, shared activity. The existence of “experiential atheism” – the embodied, collective, physical realization of the ideological position – has been proposed but not widely studied. This article uses the interaction ritual model of Randall Collins to understand the Global Atheist Convention as an example of experiential atheism. Being surrounded by a crowd of like identifying bodies, sharing a mood, behaviours and a focus of attention with them and having a boundary to outsiders created the conditions for collective effervescence at the convention. This ratified attendees’ shared representations of the atheist collective and emotively affirmed their affiliation with those representations.
Databáze: OpenAIRE