Crowds and Transformations: On the Pious Crowds of the Hajj

In this chapter, the author focuses on the phenomenon of the crowd as he experienced it first in Medina and then in Mecca, during his participation in the hajj. His aim is to look closely at the passage from the organized to the spontaneous in order to describe the process of transformation. Documenting the passage from the organized to the spontaneous, the author reconsider a number of Canetti's assumptions, particularly his pendulum-like swing between individual separateness and crowd as liberation. There is a mechanical shifting that goes with his notion of "discharge." The author makes some brief remarks on the use of the concept of becoming in anthropology. Specifically he want to raise questions regarding rules and material strictures. The hajj bureaucracies, it is true, required that we form groups of six for manifold purposes, chief among them were lodging and supervision-both spiritual and managerial.