Paris Olympics opening. What collective belonging looks like at scale.

The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics was on the Seine. Eighty-four national delegations in boats. My daughter watched it at nine in the evening and asked: do they all know each other? I said: no, most of them have never met. She said: then why do they wave? I said: because they're on the same river for the same reason.

This is the mechanism of the Olympic ceremony: strangers unified by a shared category. They are all Olympians. The category is more important than the individuals in it. The waving is not friendship. It is recognition. 'I know what you are because I am what you are.' My daughter understood this, I think, without me explaining it. She waved back at the screen.

The ceremony lasted three hours and forty minutes. She watched every minute of it.

The ceremony lasted three hours and forty minutes. She watched every minute of it. Victor Turner called this communitas: the social bond that forms between people who are undergoing the same process. The wave is the recognition of sameness-within-difference.

Victor Turner called this communitas: the social bond that forms between people who are undergoing the same process or inhabiting the same liminal space. The Olympics is an extreme version of communitas. The athletes are all in the same liminal space: between their ordinary lives and the competition that will define their summer.