Severe cultural stress can produce a deliberate, organised attempt to build a more satisfying social order, usually around a prophetic figure and a new code.
Wallace's 1956 paper drew a common structure from cases as different as the Handsome Lake religion among the Seneca, early Christianity and Methodism: a steady state, increasing individual stress, cultural distortion, then a revitalisation phase with a formulated code, communication, organisation and either routinisation or collapse. The claim is that these are one process, not a family of unrelated episodes.
In practice
- A firm in sustained decline produces a charismatic internal movement with its own vocabulary, which either becomes the new operating model or burns out in a year.
- A profession that has lost confidence in its methods generates a reform faction with a manifesto and a founder.
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- Sociology & Culture
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- How societies hold together, sort people, and change