Happy New Year

January 2, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I don’t generally care for the televised versions of celebrations. Even on a forty-inch, high-density TV, the Tournament of Roses or the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade or New Year’s Eve in Times Square leave me cold. The whole idea of a celebration is to be a participant not a spectator, to feel the energy of the crowd surging through your own body. And you can’t do that from thousands of miles away sitting on a couch with the remote in one hand even if you have a glass of champagne in the other and a silly hat on your head.

But Sunday night as I watched the TV screen in a quiet Florida condo, there was one moment that got to me — a quick montage of celebrations in cities further east that had already rung in 2007: Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Seoul, etc. Durkheim was right about rituals: they reinforce the feeling of commonality, of sharing. He was also right that rituals define a group. If you’re part of the group, you participate; or maybe it’s more accurate the other way round: if you participate, you’re part of the group.

In some cases, this group-defining function of rituals sharpens differences among us. It’s at the root of the “war on Christmas” flap, with people like Bill O’Reilly ranting about the secularization of Christmas and the evils of saying “Happy Holdiays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Whose ritual is this anyway? If it’s a Christian ritual, non-Christians are excluded. If it’s a more inclusive American ritual, the Christ-centered religious elements have to be muted. (Of course, some extremists want it both ways, so that Christmas is a national holiday and yet still very Christian, a designation that would promote their definition of the US as a “Christian nation.”)

New Year’s is the only holiday I can think of that draws no such boundaries between groups. As one of my students put it, it’s the Earth’s birthday. So everyone who lives on this planet is part of it. We celebrate locally, but the images from around the world prod us to think globally.

Blog on Break

December 26, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

The blog is taking a vacation. We'll be back in 2007. We wish all our readers and fellow bloggers all the best for the coming year.

Faith and Fashion

December 26, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

Christmas in the Northeast was a warm one. Brad Wright describes the sartorial adjustments his six-year-old made at Christmas eve services (baring midriff, rolling up pantlegs and shirtsleeves). Dress codes were apparently not enforced.

Sunday evening here in New York, at a local Catholic church’s Christmas eve family mass, the father of one of the little girls in the children’s choir sat in the front pew wearing jeans and a mustard-colored sweatshirt. A few men wore neckties; most didn't. Some women were in their holiday outfits, but some others wore sneakers. I was reminded of a couple I know who exemplify the American success story, raised in a Catholic working class home but now quite successful. Somewhere along the way, she changed the family’s affiliation to the Episcopal church because the people at the Catholic churches just didn’t seem to care what they wore.

It’s anecdotal evidence of course, but it may be representative. Thirty years ago in Americans Together, a study of a Midwestern town (“Appleton”), French anthropologist Hervé Varenne noted the differences in how people dressed for church. The Protestants dressed up. The Catholics offered a much greater variety, from Sunday best to very casual. As I recall, Varenne traced the differences back to the theology of the Reformation, especially (Weber noted this too) insecurity about one's state of salvation. The more individualist Protestant doctrine results in a pressure on members to show outwardly the signs of grace (not that any of the congregants in Appleton nearly a half-millenium after the fact would have put it that way). In Catholicism, your place in the community and in heaven is more secure; you need only to come to church, confess, take communion, etc.

(I highly recommend Varenne’s book to anyone interested in American culture. Several chapters, though not the one on Protestants and Catholics, are available online at his website.)

The Sexual Contradictions of Capitalism

December 22, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
Why is it news when sex objects behave sexually? And why do people feign shock and horror?

I have not been following the Miss USA flap closely. It hardly seems important enough, though anything that makes Donald Trump a matter of mockery can’t be all bad even if it does serve his never-ending quest for publicity.

Trump owns the Miss USA beauty contest and a couple of others. Recently, the alert media reported that this year’s winner, Miss Kentucky, having won her title in the usual way — i.e., parading around skimpily clad in front of a lot of people—had behaved immorally. She had been drinking to bars, testing positive for cocaine, and even kissing Miss Teen USA, who presumably won her title in a similar way. What else could Trump do but threaten to take the title away? He could let the story play out for a couple of days, that’s what, and then continue to keep the story in the news by then saying that she could keep her title. The stock plotline Trump selected was that Miss KY was a basically good small-town girl corrupted by the wicked ways of New York and that she deserves a second chance.

Today, the news is that Miss Nevada is being cashiered for, of all things, being sexual. (Nevada, if I remember correctly, is the only state in the country that has legalized brothels.) Some photos of her kissing and flashing at some party have surfaced (you can find the uncensored version on the Internet, but far be it from a wholesome blog like this one to provide you the URL).

Is all this peculiarly American? I suspect that the beauty pageant is an American invention, and there may be something especially American about it — the display of sexuality amid the continual declaration of high-mindedness, the denial of both the obvious lechery and the only slightly less obvious profit motive.