Mobility and Its Limits in Communal Ritual and Myth

The collective bias of many twentieth-century views of society and religion was challenged, as we have seen, by such thinkers as Weber, Mead, Turner, and Berger. Karl Mannheim, too, asked (206), “From what should the new be expected to originate, if not from the novel and uniquely personal mind of the individual who breaks beyond the bounds of the existing order?” To break beyond the given toward exploration of the unknown is the essence of the spiritual quest, which is only conceivable when the individual no longer sees her existence as wholly defined by the collectivity. For Firth, too (1964,