For two decades, Sebastien Tutenges has conducted research in bars, nightclubs, festivals, drug dens, nightlife resorts, and underground dance parties in a quest to answer a fundamental question: Why do people across cultures gather regularly to intoxicate themselves?
Vivid and at times deeply personal, this book offers new insights into a wide variety of intoxicating experiences, from the intimate feeling of connection among concertgoers to the adrenaline-fueled rush of a fight, to the thrill of jumping off a balcony into a swimming pool. Tutenges shows what it means and feels to move beyond the ordinary into altered states in which the transgressive, spectacular, and unexpected take place.
He argues that the primary aim of group intoxication is the religious experience that Emile Durkheim calls collective effervescence, the essence of which is a sense of connecting with other people and being part of a larger whole. This experience is empowering and emboldening and may lead to crime and deviance, but it is at the same time vital to our humanity because it strengthens social bonds and solidarity.
The book fills important gaps in Durkheim's social theory and contributes to current debates in micro-sociology as well as cultural criminology and cultural sociology. Here, for the first time, readers will discover a detailed account of collective effervescence in contemporary society that includes: an explanation of what collective effervescence is; a description of the conditions that generate collective effervescence; a typology of the varieties of collective effervescence; a discussion of how collective effervescence manifests in the realm of nightlife, politics, sports, and religion; and an analysis of how commercial forces amplify and capitalize on the universal human need for intoxication.
This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.
Download the open access ebook here.
Industry Reviews
"Intoxication is a remarkable and ambitious book. Rarely is ethnography connected to classical social theory with such productive results. Tutenges offers a significant extension of the concept of collective effervescence. We learn that Durkheim, Mauss, and Bataille are essential resources for understanding the self, the sacred, and the collectivity in modernity." -- Philip Smith * Professor of Sociology, Yale University *
"Tutenges's study of collective effervescence is commanding, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Intoxication is a stunning example of ethnographically informed social theory." -- Lois Presser * author of Why We Harm *
"From sports to religion to party venues, effervescence is as much a blind spot of research as it is a phenomenon fundamental to society's very make-up. Intoxication introduces us to the party practices of today's youth in vivid fashion and with a remarkable interpretative sensitivity. Far from being the wastelands of meaning they appear to be, these drunken landscapes are existential theaters for the abandonment of the self to social forces and the experience of other ways of being and feeling. A long-awaited book which could well become a campus classic." -- Francois Gauthier * author of Religion, Modernity, Globalisation. Nation-State to Market *
"Intoxication is a remarkable and ambitious book. Rarely is ethnography connected to classical social theory with such productive results. Tutenges offers a significant extension of the concept of collective effervescence. We learn that Durkheim, Mauss, and Bataille are essential resources for understanding the self, the sacred, and the collectivity in modernity." -- Philip Smith * professor of sociology, Yale University *
"Tutenges's study of collective effervescence is commanding, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Intoxication is a stunning example of ethnographically informed social theory." -- Lois Presser * author of Why We Harm *
"From sports to religion to party venues, effervescence is as much a blind spot of research as it is a phenomenon fundamental to society's very make-up. Intoxication introduces us to the party practices of today's youth in vivid fashion and with a remarkable interpretative sensitivity. Far from being the wastelands of meaning they appear to be, these drunken landscapes are existential theaters for the abandonment of the self to social forces and the experience of other ways of being and feeling. A long-awaited book which could well become a campus classic." -- Francois Gauthier * author of Religion, Modernity, Globalisation. Nation-State to Market *
