Individuals who participate in interaction rituals are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim call… - Randall Collins

What we call structure is a shorthand way of describing repetitive patterns, encounters that people keep coming back to, a recycling of rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like, compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive interaction rituals, which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. It is characteristic of these intensely produced membership symbols that people reify them, treat them as things, as “sacred objects” in Durkheim’s sense. Organizations, states, as well as positions and roles within them, are sacred objects in just this sense: reified patterns of real-life interaction, cognitively raised above the level of the merely enacted, and treated as if they were self-subsistent entities to which individuals must conform. This symbolic social structuring of the world extends even to physical objects by making them into property appropriated under the sanction of social groups.

An India driven by conflicts goes counter to the image prevalent not only among Westerners but among Indian thinkers themselves. We have been taught to think of India as essentially static, even “timeless,” under a perennial otherworldly mysticism. The image had to be created. It came about through a series of events: the destruction of medieval Buddhism, which had anchored the first great round of debates; the tactic of archaizing one’s own tradition to elevate its prestige over that of factional rivals; and the predominance, in the centuries since 1500, of popular devotional cults of an anti-intellectual bent at just the time when Hindu scholars were in a syncretizing and scholasticizing mode in defense against alien conquerors.

“Truth” is the reigning sacred object of the scholarly community, as “art” is for literary/artistic communities; these are simultaneously their highest cognitive and moral categories, the locus of highest value, by which all else is judged.