Keeping Time, Keeping Together

Keeping Time, Keeping Together July 30, 2015

William H. McNeill’s Keeping Together in Time explores the role of “emotional bonding through rhythmic muscular movement” in history (52). The significance of the phenomenon occurred to him during military training in 1941: “A sense of pervasive movement in unison is what I recall; more specifically, strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual” (2).

It was not only the military that used these techniques: McNeill writes that marginalized persons “often responded to unhappy circumstances by inventing new communities for themselves. Such communities were tied together partly by ideas about future redress of grievances (often by supernatural agency), and partly by practical mutual support. And, as innumerable such groups discovered, at the practical level, keeping together in time was the most efficacious way to establish warm emotional bonds.”

And he suggests that “in big, anonymous cities, the need is acute. It follows that in an age when more and more persons find themselves adrift in such cities, muscular bonding is likely to become more rather than less important in defining and redefining who we are and with whom we share a common identity” (150). 

Religions have long exploited the potential of bodily actions in unison. The “muscular side [of] Moslem worship, . . . the prescribed ritual of prayer which required assembled believers to bow before God” played a role in the cross-cultural spread of Islam: “Performed together five times a day, in a rhythm defined by the summons and example of the prayer leader . . . and lasting for several minutes each time, this sort of prayer obviously required Moslems to move rhythmically and in unison. It is possible . . . that public demon- stration of membership in the Community of the Faithful in this fashion may have had the incidental effect of arousing emotional warmth and solidarity. . . . This is an attractive hypothesis, because what made the Moslems so surprisingly successful in the first decades of their history was the extraordinary way the new faith proved capable of transcending ancient tribal rivalries” (57).

(These quotations assembled from Warner, “Religion, Boundaries, and Bridge,” Sociology of Religion 58 [1997] 217-38, at 231-2.)


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