Crowds

C’est en supposant l’existence de la richesse interactionnelle des espaces
publics que nous analysons, dans cet article, les flux de circulation
contemporains des centres commerciaux comme étant l’expression
d’une certaine socialité. Bien loin d’être un phénomène propre d’une
foule amorphe ou un simple procédé de déplacements individuels, ces
marches montrent un besoin de grégarité assumant une forme nomade
ou itinérante. Nous soutenons que les centres commerciaux rendent
actuels une structure anthropologique faisant de l’agrégation autour de
l’espace une base pour la socialité. Ce qui distingue la socialité itinérante
est la traversée de l’espace et de la matérialité physique dans le seul but
de la transcender. Bien plus que simplement consommer ou se déplacer
fonctionnellement, ces flux semblent répondre à l’exigence, face à une
austérité urbaine, des formes communautaires du lien social.

Crowds are a feature of large cities, occurring not only at mass gatherings but also at routine events such as the journey to work, schools, churches, mosques, campaign events, carnivals and lots more. Bringing people together has many positive social and economic benefits. Some environments for mass gatherings are so crowded
that the risk of a disaster is ever present. The Olympic Games, the Hajj, the Christian pilgrimage and other major sporting, religious and cultural events are some example
of such a crowded environment. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Events involving large crowds have been cancelled
or postponed worldwide; access to public buildings has been restricted as different mitigation measures have been adopted around the world to decrease physical interactions among people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Strategies for containing an emerging infectious disease outbreak must be non-pharmaceutical when drugs or
vaccines for the pathogen do not yet exist or are unavailable. The success of these non-pharmaceutical strategies will depend on not only the effectiveness of isolation measures but also the epidemiological characteristics of the infection. Infectious diseases are commonly controlled by minimizing contact between infectious and susceptible individuals. Personal measures to reduce potentially infectious contacts are sometimes referred to as ‘social distancing’. It has been suggested that policies encouraging social distancing may be effective against pandemic influenza (Bell et al.
2006; Glass et al. 2006). An examination of levels of social distancing actually achieved during previous epidemics can provide useful guidance as to the effectiveness of social distancing interventions during future influenza pandemics.

Football crowd disorder and violence continues to pose challenges to police, security personnel, and football organisations globally. However the football crowd is often misunderstood and in much of the world the emphasis on crowd control, zero-tolerance, and ‘show-of-force’ policing has not only failed to control the problem, but in many cases has exacerbated it. This chapter seeks to challenge some of the traditional views about football crowds and their behaviour and the best ways to manage them. Based on a substantial base of qualitative European research, it proposes that in order to reduce the risk of serious violence and disorder, police and security bodies should seek to engage in positive interaction and dialogue with supporters to increase their legitimacy amongst crowd members and ensure that their own interventions do not lead to an escalation of incidents. Furthermore, police, security organisations and football bodies need to work with existing crowd science to ensure that the most effective methods of football crowd management are employed, measured and rigorously re-tested.

A representação ficcional da greve geral no Porto em 1903 e da «questão social» do operariado no romance Os Famintos, de João Grave (1903), permite concretizar duas das principais vias de investigação da sociologia da literatura: «restituir o universo social apresentado» pela obra literária, aproximação particularmente adequada ao romance realista e naturalista que «faz da obra um documento significativo do ponto de vista sociológico»; e «tentar responder à questão principal (…) das relações entre as realidades sociais (…) e as expressões literárias» (Ansart, 1999: 309).  Analisamos o romance numa perspectiva sociológica, destacando as representações dos operários e em especial da greve e da multidão, verificando onde se cruza a recriação literária do acontecido no Porto com a ideologia expressa no romance.

A partir de 1956, momento en que abandona el surrealismo en busca de otras estructuras en la imagen pictórica, Antonio Saura sólo pintará cabezas. Esa cabeza será su seña de identidad a partir de entonces, y la fundación del grupo “El Paso” por él mismo, en 1957, supuso la confirmación de esa tendencia y ese impulso imparable de explorar nuevas vías en su obra, que le llevarían a crear un universo propio lleno de ojos, cabezas, signos, trazos y referencias múltiples a todo lo que le rodeaba, le fascinaba y le obsesionaba. A lo largo de su carrera, volvió una y otra vez a los mismos temas que, en el fondo —como él mismo dice—, son variaciones de una misma estructura: un rostro, una cara, una cabeza, más o menos deformada, más o menos deconstruida y reconstruida. Eso le lleva a crear un universo poblado de retratos, de “monstruos pintados”, de autorretratos y de Perros de Goya. Pero una multitud es también una acumulación de cabezas.
En la evolución de una esquemática y fragmentaria manera de representar las Multitudes que se dan en el arte español desde Goya hasta Antonio Saura, ya sea pictórica o gráficamente,
se cuela un visitante nórdico a primera vista inesperado: Edvard Munch. Si bien causa algo de sorpresa inicial, el artista noruego es uno de los pilares fundamentales para Antonio Saura en su culminación de la expresión a través de multitudes indefinidas, es decir, tratadas como una masa compacta que se rebela actuando como un todo, una idea que ya había desarrollado Ortega y Gasset en 1930 en su obra La rebelión de las masas. Munch se convierte, pues, en un paso necesario entre la obra de Goya y Saura, un paso en un camino que toma prestadas ideas e imágenes de artistas como Ensor, de Kooning, Bacon o Jorn: la multitud en movimiento, la masa que grita silenciosamente.

This article uses a salient case study (flailing women in ninth-century Dijon) to make two related arguments about the unusual nature of crowds in early medieval western Europe:

    (1) When gatherings involving marginal social groups (non-elites, women) threatened elite power in eighth- and ninth-century Europe, they did so not by directly confronting elite authority (e.g. mobs attacking bishops), but indirectly, in what anthropologists have called a “slantwise” fashion: by gathering in the wrong way, place, or time (e.g. crowds neglecting their parish church in favour of new relics, depriving church leaders of income through tithes). This is because early medieval governance, lacking strong institutions, relied on predictable, face-to-face gatherings for social order and resource extraction.

    (2) Because the crowd in early medieval discourse normally evoked hierarchy and order (Roman words for “riots” now referred to “assemblies” of monks and angels), elite polemics against “slantwise” crowds were also indirect. Like crowd critics later in European history, early medieval elites condemned dangerous crowds using gendered language. But unlike modern theorists who gendered the crowd itself as essentially female, ninth-century ecclesiastical writers used tropes of female (and rustic) manipulability to paint otherwise permissible behaviours (collective worship, almsgiving, penance) as illegitimate.

The article thus questions a widely-held view that the crowd disappeared in the early medieval West, compared both to earlier and later periods of European history and to the contemporary Byzantine and Islamic worlds. That view depends on historiographical assumptions about what counts as a crowd. Early medieval crowds, both as a subject of discourse and a group of practices, were indeed unusual, but they were no less socially central.

What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policymaking? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative trade-offs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature.

This article uses a salient case study (flailing women in ninth-century Dijon) to make two related arguments about the unusual nature of crowds in early medieval western Europe:

    (1) When gatherings involving marginal social groups (non-elites, women) threatened elite power in eighth- and ninth-century Europe, they did so not by directly confronting elite authority (e.g. mobs attacking bishops), but indirectly, in what anthropologists have called a “slantwise” fashion: by gathering in the wrong way, place, or time (e.g. crowds neglecting their parish church in favour of new relics, depriving church leaders of income through tithes). This is because early medieval governance, lacking strong institutions, relied on predictable, face-to-face gatherings for social order and resource extraction.

    (2) Because the crowd in early medieval discourse normally evoked hierarchy and order (Roman words for “riots” now referred to “assemblies” of monks and angels), elite polemics against “slantwise” crowds were also indirect. Like crowd critics later in European history, early medieval elites condemned dangerous crowds using gendered language. But unlike modern theorists who gendered the crowd itself as essentially female, ninth-century ecclesiastical writers used tropes of female (and rustic) manipulability to paint otherwise permissible behaviours (collective worship, almsgiving, penance) as illegitimate.

The article thus questions a widely-held view that the crowd disappeared in the early medieval West, compared both to earlier and later periods of European history and to the contemporary Byzantine and Islamic worlds. That view depends on historiographical assumptions about what counts as a crowd. Early medieval crowds, both as a subject of discourse and a group of practices, were indeed unusual, but they were no less socially central.

The paper provides a conceptual framework for understanding collectively shared political agency in public space. By using a phenomenological approach, it explores the spaces of protest movements by deploying Elias Canetti’s perspective on crowds and links this to an affectively embodied spatiality of protesting crowds, which is conceptually framed as atmosphere. This endeavour is substantiated with the differentiation between atmospheres and situations as in the neo-phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz on the one hand and the social theory of imitation by Gabriel Tarde on the other. The key argument of the paper is that the rhythmic appearance of imitative waves of sentiments and ideas within protest movements spatially manifests itself in an overarching atmosphere of protesting crowds. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the links between social movements, emotional crowd dynamics and the emergence of communal atmospheres of protest. It concludes with the argument that such atmospheres and techniques that facilitate them are of major importance for the understanding of the stability and sustainability of protest movements.

De 1797 a 1997, en la evolución de una esquemática y fragmentaria manera de representar las multitudes que se dan en el arte español desde Goya hasta Antonio Saura, ya sea pictórica o gráficamente, se cuela un visitante nórdico a primera vista inesperado: Edvard Munch. Este artículo quiere demostrar que, si bien causa algo de sorpresa inicial, el artista noruego es uno de los pilares fundamentales para Antonio Saura en su culminación de la expresión a través de multitudes indefinidas, es decir, tratadas como una masa compacta que actúa como un todo, una idea que ya habían desarrollado Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Ortega (en 1930 en su obra La rebelión de las masas) o Benjamin. Munch se convierte, pues, en un paso necesario entre la obra de Goya y Saura, un paso en un camino que toma prestadas ideas e imágenes de artistas como Ensor, Monet, Pollock, Bacon o Jorn: la multitud en movimiento, la masa que grita silenciosamente.

This is a brief discussion of different categorizations of emotions and feelings, in particular comparing my own typology (urges, reflex emotions, moods, affective commitments, and moral emotions) with the distinctions made by several well-known figures in the study of emotions.

This chapter takes crowd politics as symptomatic rather than representative of some of the ambivalences of mass democracy.  Its ethnographic site is the virtual medium, more specifically, the digital footage of two incidents of sexual and vigilante violence in Bangladesh. The scenes of violence, at times as raw footage and at other times as digitally modified journalistic expose, went viral on social media in 2015. The medicalized metaphor of contagion in the expression "viral" is also emblematic of crowds, or at least, the way it has long been discussed in canonical social theory. The visual evidence I write about caused public uproar in Bangladesh and invoked curious responses from the government. These examples help me explore the expansion and retreat of the spaces of critical dissent, what I call the double bind of digital activism in Bangladesh. The visual material brings to the fore the links between crowd behavior (public shaming of alleged molesters, calls for vigilante justice, etc.) and mechanisms of surveillance and sociality, like close-circuit television and cellular phone camera. I ultimately argue that social media activism, and surveillance technology more broadly, mimics the kind of crowd mentality it incriminates, and in so doing, reproduces certain immanence associated with crowds.

What are the similarities and differences between crowdsourcing and sharing economy? What factors influence their use in developing countries? In light of recent developments in the use of IT-mediated technologies, such as crowdsourcing and the sharing economy, this manuscript examines their similarities and differences, and the challenges regarding their effective use in developing countries. We first examine each individually and highlight different forms of each IT-mediated technology. Given that crowdsourcing and sharing economy share aspects such as the use of IT, a reliance on crowds, monetary exchange, and the use of reputation systems, we systematically compare the similarities and differences of different types of crowdsourcing with the sharing economy, thus addressing a gap in the current literature. Using this knowledge, we examine the different challenges faced by developing countries when using crowdsourcing and the sharing economy, and highlight the differences in the applicability of these IT-mediated technologies when faced with specific development issues.

Scipio Sighele, _The Criminal Crowd And Other Writings on Mass Society_
Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Nicoletta Pireddu
Translated by Nicoletta Pireddu and Andrew Robbins
Foreword by Tom Huhn

The so-called “age of crowds” still evokes primarily the late nineteenth-century French context, with the fearful popular uprising leading to the Paris Commune, the numerous disturbing images of masses in novels by Balzac, Sue, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, and Adam among others, and Gustave Le Bon’s renowned volume The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895).
Yet, four years before Le Bon, Italian jurist, sociologist, cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) had published La folla delinquente. Saggio di psicologia collettiva [The Criminal Crowd. An Essay on Collective Psychology], to be followed by other pioneering explorations of group behavior and of the power of suggestion upon collective crime.
This volume offers the first English translation of Sighele’s seminal book and of excerpts from his subsequent works in the domains of sociology, psychology, law, politics, and literary criticism: La coppia criminale [The Criminal Couple], La delinquenza settaria [Sectarian Delinquency]; L’intelligenza della folla [The Intelligence of the Crowd]; La donna nova [The New Woman]; Eva moderna [Modern Eve]; Letteratura tragica [Tragic Literature]; Nell’arte e nella scienza [In Art and in Science]. An extensive introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu contextualizes Sighele’s overall contribution as a public intellectual negotiating between tradition and modernity in the European fin de siècle, able to grasp both the destructive and the constructive power of masses.
This collection draws the multifaceted portrait of a provocative and problematic thinker who, by participating in crucial international debates, brings to post-unification Italy a new outlook on paramount issues like the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, the unstable borders between individual and collective accountability in mass society, the legal and ideological constraints in the education and emancipation of women, the social and institutional challenges to the care and upbringing of children, and the responsibility of literary representation in the relationship between aesthetic standards and ethical norms.

In the aftermath of the US-led ‘global war on terror’, emerging weaponised media of warfare present new means for the military ‘policing’ of populations. Algorithmic modes of observation are applied for the identification of targets, presenting an ‘aerial view’ that is no longer confined to optical media alone, but seeks out the criminogenic patterns and schemas that arise from human populations, or rather their double – the data masses. This article is concerned with the role of the emerging media function of militarised ‘pattern-of-life analysis’ in producing a specific perception of the mass that connects with older notions of masses and populations, as well as with a discourse on the changing nature of warfare. In what ways do the emerging media of observation and targeting of drone warfare contribute to the formation of new relations of visibility, and what does it mean for these media to become ‘weaponised’?

Published online before print October 19, 2016
In: Media, Culture and Society, Special Issue: The Media and the Military, January 2017.

Survivors of disasters commonly provide each other with social support, but the social-psychological processes behind such solidarity behaviours have not been fully explicated. We describe a survey of 1240 adults affected by the 2010 Chile earthquake to examine the importance of two factors: observing others providing social support and social identification with other survivors. As expected, emotional social support was associated with social identification, which in turn was predicted by disaster exposure through common fate. Observing others' supportive behaviour predicted both providing emotional social support and providing coordinated instrumental social support. Expected support was a key mediator of these relationships and also predicted collective efficacy. There was also an interaction: social identification moderated the relationship between observing and providing social support. These findings serve to develop the social identity account of mass emergency behaviour and add value to disaster research by showing the relevance of concepts from collective action.

The article discusses interrelations between working-class performance culture and the German avant-gardist film "Kuhle Wampe or Who owns the World?" (1932). Co-produced by Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Ottwalt, "Kuhle Wampe" contributed to the left-wing projects of producing a cinematic counter-hegemony to commercial film and creating alternative images of the proletarian masses. The film did so, the article argues, by appropriating the aesthetics of working-class performances and reimagining them through the editing techniques of modernist cinema. Contributing to the new modernist studies, the article understands the film as a form of labor movement modernism that articulated modernist aesthetics to imagine modernity from the standpoint of proletarian collectives and represented a particular emergent way of relating to and transforming modernity in the 1920s and 1930s.

Can Crowdsourcing be used for policy? Previous work posits that the three types of Crowdsourcing have different levels of potential usefulness when applied to the various stages of the policy cycle. In this paper, we build upon this exploratory work by categorizing the extant research with respect to Crowdsourcing for the policy cycle. Premised upon our analysis, we thereafter discuss the trends, highlight the gaps, and suggest some approaches to empirically validate the application of Crowdsourcing to the policy cycle.

From 1810 to 1997, in the evolution of a fragmentary, schematic way of representing the crowds in Spanish art from Goya to Antonio Saura —whether in painting or graphic work—, an unexpected Nordic visitor appears: Edvard Munch. In my paper I show the Norwegian artist is essential for Antonio Saura to complete the way to expression and abstraction through undefined crowds treated as a compact mass acting as a whole (Multitudes series).
Thus, Edvard Munch becomes a necessary step between the work of Goya and Saura, a step on a path that borrows concepts, ideas and images by other artists such as Ensor: the moving crowd, a silently screaming mass made by undefined faces.

Photos and videos taken in Tahrir Square from 1st Feb./4th. Feb/6th Feb./8th Feb./10th Feb./11th Feb./18th Feb./ and so on.The University on the Square: Documenting Egypt's 21st Century Revolution project was made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The goal of this paper is to analyze a little-known set of documents referring to a "Dancing Epidemic" that took place in Itapagipe, a suburb of Salvador, capital of the province of Bahia, Brazil, in 1882. Through the studies of a group of physicians, especially Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906), a psychiatrist and anthropologist from the Bahia School of Medicine, the medical knowledge built on this unique phenomenon in Brazilian history is examined. The case in particular involved a crowd that spread through the streets of Itapagipe, attracting the interest of the medical classes, who were intrigued by the symptoms of motor incoordination the patients manifested. Inspired by foreign literature, but developing their own theories, Rodrigues and colleagues created a unique body of knowledge about the infirmity.

Crowdsourcing is rapidly evolving and applied in situations where ideas, labour, opinion or expertise of large groups of people are used. Crowdsourcing is now used in various policy making initiatives; however, this use has usually been focused on open collaboration platforms and specific stages of the policy process such as agenda-setting and policy evaluations. Moreover, other forms of crowdsourcing have been neglected in policy making with a few exceptions. This article examines crowdsourcing as a tool for policy making and explores the nuances of the technology and its use and implications for different stages of the policy process. The article addresses questions around the role of crowdsourcing and whether it can be considered as a policy tool or a technology enabler.

Crowdsourcing is rapidly evolving and applied in situations where ideas, labour, opinion or expertise of large groups of people are used. Crowdsourcing is now used in various policy-making initiatives; however, this use has usually focused on open collaboration platforms and specific stages of the policy process, such as agenda-setting and policy evaluations. Other forms of crowdsourcing have been neglected in policy-making, with a few exceptions. This article examines crowdsourcing as a tool for policy-making, and explores the nuances of the technology and its use and implications for different stages of the policy process. The article addresses questions surrounding the role of crowdsourcing and whether it can be considered as a policy tool or as a technological enabler and investigates the current trends and future directions of crowdsourcing.

Images of police armored vehicles in Ferguson and Baltimore have been influential in a public conversation about the militarization of the police. However, recent critical and abolitionist work on policing rejects the concept of “militarization” for obscuring the longstanding histories and institutional connections between military and police apparatuses. By following the transfers of armored vehicles to police, this article illuminates the logistical pathways that connect colonial warfare and domestic policing, adding an account of the material composition of police power to the historical work of critical and abolitionist thinkers. The article proceeds through a critical reading of records of the Defense Logistics Agency, tracking the transfer of surplus armored vehicles to the police. Designated as “high-visibility property” by the Defense Logistics Agency, these vehicles testify to the materiality of police power. The article then tracks the visibility and materiality of these v...

It-mediated technologies are being rapidly adopted in developing countries. In this paper, we examine crowdsourcing and sharing economy platforms and the factors that influence their adoption in developing countries. While these platforms share commonalities in use of IT and reputation systems, as well as reliance on crowds, and facilitation of the exchange of information, different types of platforms have unique characteristics and bring different sets of challenges. We examine the challenges regarding their successful adoption in developing countries and go beyond the examination of developing economies based on GDP and adopt a multi-dimensional clustering approach that results in a more nuanced differentiation among developing countries. This, in turn, enables a more detailed examination of the applicability of crowdsourcing and sharing economy platforms when faced with different challenges in various types of developing countries.

Carisma e liderança da multidão atravessam a produção ficcional e ensaísta no final do século XIX e início do século XX, período charneira na evolução dos sistemas políticos liberais face à chegada das massas ao palco sócio-político. No início dos anos 20, o regime republicano liberal português vivia a oposição crescente do movimento operário e da direita nacionalista. João de Castro Osório, ideólogo e activista do fascismo português, transpôs em diversas obras, nomeadamente a peça A Horda, o anseio por um chefe que, à semelhança de Sidónio Pais, galvanizasse a multidão para a tomada do poder. Osório dramatiza a tragédia do super-homem nietzschiano perante a multidão, elemento essencial à sua plenitude. Como Sidónio, o carisma só se completa na multidão e é instrumento para a aceitação da autoridade. A relação líder-multidão é trágica, dado que esta só entende o chefe no seu sacrifício. Neste capítulo, procuramos a articulação entre pensamento e actividade de Osório e transfiguração literária do problema da multidão, do líder e seu carisma.

Elias Canetti dedicò più di tre decenni della sua biografia intellettuale all’impresa di decifrare l’enigma della massa, la molteplicità delle sue forme, la relazione di complicità instauratasi con il nazionalsocialismo e le potenzialità emancipative veicolate da alcune varianti critiche di questo fenomeno. Questo studio offre la prima introduzione ragionata, completa ed esaustiva a uno dei testi più provocatori, affascinanti e, ancora oggi, sottovalutati del xx secolo. Concepita dal suo stesso autore come l’“opera di una vita”, Massa e potere rivoluziona le categorie tradizionali con cui la sociologia e, prima ancora, la psicologia collettiva avevano interpretato il fenomeno, alla luce delle esperienze dirette dell’autore con alcune formazioni di massa del suo tempo. Ripercorrendo tali esperienze e i principali nodi di questo capolavoro, si intende qui restituire al lettore contemporaneo l’attualità della caccia al potere indetta da Canetti e preservare la possibilità di un riscatto collettivo dalle forme di sopravvivenza oggi dominanti su scala globale.

To date, the majority of writing on the January 2011 uprisings in Egypt has argued that it was social media and civil society that enabled and fuelled this 'revolution.' These accounts pay scant attention to the historical significance of Tahrir Square and its standing as a site for insurrections (specifically 1946 and 1972). Key facts that do not fit with the social media 'narrative' are omitted. For example, the Egyptian government blocked Facebook and Twitter for eight days, yet still crowds gathered and moved. The mechanisms by which this happened remain unexamined. The notion of civil society is invoked as a driving force behind the crowd's actions in Tahrir Square. However, this contradicts the prevalent definition of civil society as a controlled, 'self-limiting revolution' aimed at minor reform as opposed to violent revolution. The crowd in Tahrir Square created an autonomous domain of political action through the combination of globalized communicative means (e.g. Facebook), with local rumours, face-to-face interactions, panic, and uncertainty. Rumours were major players in mobilising and enthusing the crowd; interviews and diaries of people who participated in the January 2011 uprising - cited in this paper - testify to this. One participant speaks of the crowd's 'collective thinking,' a phrase reminiscent of Gustave Le Bon's 'collective mind,' that reflects on the crowd's unconscious, homogenous, invincible power. The uprisings triggered memories of images and pictures of Mubarak's regime corruption and brutality, circulated via blogs and Bluetooth. The Egyptian government censored traditional media (e.g. newspapers), against which Egyptians created mediascapes, instigators of societal and political change. The catalysing powers of January 2011 are rhizomatic and multiple; the current dominant narrative about Tahrir Square, both in the media and academia, is reductive as it does not acknowledge irrational and local phenomena such as rumours.

The problem of the modern self is the problem of how to provide a self for oneself in a modern society characterized by uncertainty and risk. Confronting this challenge at the turn of the twentieth-century, many city-dwellers fell ill with afflictions of the nerves of which neurasthenia was the most common. Neurasthenia could be cured, the sufferers were advised, if they only learned how to strengthen their will and to assert themselves. Violence, exercised both against oneself and against others, was integral to this project of self-assertion. In a society which is becoming ever more peaceful, the rhetoric of violence will become ever more transgressive, and thus more enticing. Such a society is unlikely to be at peace with itself. As a way to avoid this impasse, we need to think again about the notion of “character.” The thought of John Dewey is helpful in this regard.

Drawing on fieldwork at travelling fairs in England, this article uses a number of concepts—crowd crystals, involvement con- tours, cacophony, intercalary elements—to read the heteroge- neous interrelationships between fair-going crowd dynamics and fairground architecture. The article notes an apparent lack of interest in both these entities (from crowd theory and architec- tural theory, respectively); establishing an historiographical account of this (lack of) interest, it situates fairground crowds within and against crowd behaviour, and crowd theory more gen- erally, and draws on assemblage theory to develop an account of the fair-going crowd, and fairground architecture, that is respon- sive to its particular characteristics.