First of all, I'm an anthropologist. I love to study people. I also love politics and am a strong progressive-liberal-social-democrat and so I am pained to see the division of the party right now. I helped at the caucuses in Nevada and saw it there. I have been at the caucus here in Idaho and saw the divide between Clinton and Obama supporters (the Undecided and Edwards people were hiding in the corners). I am seeing it in my personal life between my roommates and friends, and as part of my College Democrat club. I see the division online like through the DNC.org partybuilder tool's blogs, and I've seen it in my facebook groups. It hurts. My social groups are having in-group fighting. Behavior we would never allow during a normal year is being allowed. It hurts to see your friends and fellow democrats form camps, circle the wagons, and shoot at the center. But I'm lucky I'm an anthropologist. With my knowledge of human behavior I can think through it and calm myself. For those of us who are already tired of the fighting, here are some words of relief based in anthropology.
Sorry this is long, but I've been trained to make it long by my education.
We are in a race. It is quite literal. The media reminds us every day, it is a race to the White House. Races go somewhere. This presidential primary race and interstate primary races are over officially when we get to our conventions. We want to know who is going to win before the conventions, but we don't know right now. This keeps us in an awkward position. It is extending our journey. We just have to keep watching and cheering our candidates on. The race to the convention is our Democratic pilgrimage, and pilgrimages follow rules. For one, on the way to our place, we are in a liminal state that has different rules then normal times.
While this time of negative energy pains me personally, from an anthropologist's view, it is normal. Parties "are only possible within communities that are socialized" (From Max Weber's "Class, Status, Party"), meaning groups with that have rules of behavior that we follow. One of these rules that we should be reminded of is that we need to support and help our group succeed, not work against it. If we have a problem within the group we need to discuss it within the group and not let our enemies and foes use it to further distract us from our goals.
We all want a better country and world. We can't get what we want by without being the change we want to see. We must remember who we are (We Are Democrats, Progressives, and Liberals!), before and after the convention. But this time is special too. Many groups have this time and no other, to rebel, vent or vet, and try things uncommon to us. Let us not take such license that we create personal issues that cannot be resolved later. This convention is our ritual. There is a license prior to our ritual. This may be a time when we are allowed and even encouraged to go against the normal order. I just want to remind people once again, this bickering and veting and whining is not normal behavior.
In "The license of Ritual" Max Gluckman discusses how The Tembu women in Africa have a time when gender roles are reversed allowing women to behave as men, it is a ritual rebellion. It is used to relieve the stress of the taboos normally placed on women in their culture. Our rebellion only works to relieve the stress of our party member ship when we know there will be order again. We must remember "the rituals are statements of rebellion, and never of revolution" (Gluckman 197). People who threaten to vote for McCain are just playing the game. At the end of this time (the convention), we will be changing our behaviors and like the Zulu going to war against other tribes, we will be going to war against the Republicans. Gluckman also says "People are required to express their hostilities to one another so as to secure a blessing; they assert acceptance of common goals despite these hostilities"(Gluckman 201). At the convention, as our pilgrimage comes to an end, our ritual will be celebrated, and we will all be the Democratic Party again. Our blessing will be conferred when we secure a Democratic President in November.
The convention should be our communal goal. We may have a lot to do between now and then, but it is a job that will eventually lead somewhere. Every four years, Democrats from all over the country get together and work together in-person. This pilgrimage has been held in different places, and at different times, but it is the time when we get together and see one another, look in each other's eyes, and give them a handshake or a hug (I'm from Idaho, I need a lot of hugs because it is tough being a Democrat in Idaho). We physically come together and should not bring our hostility with us, even if there is not a clear nominee. This convention will demand all our senses, not just our intellect. This full body experience is why the convention can be so moving. It is OUR ritual, and like caucuses, a very tangible part of democracy. The Democratic National Convention has a great history and we all understand its importance. This year it is August 25-28, 2008 in Denver, Colorado. This convention is when we transform ourselves from being a Clinton, Edwards, Kucinich, or Obama (hyphenated) democrats back into American Democrats. What it means to be a democrat, the things we care about, and how we talk about the things we care about get fleshed out and remembered at the convention. At the convention we will be transforming new people into party members. We will transform old dems into renewed dems and this year more then ever, we will even have some Independents that will become Democrats.
This convention quite literally is how we maintain our world order. We must have a functional Democratic Party to keep the United States a country and a world leader of democracy. We use this convention to connect to our past ancestors. We will remember the Kennedys and Roosevelts, and the Jeffersons. At the convention we remember our heroes, like ours from Idaho, the Senator Frank Church. This convention will help us express our group identity. Party conventions are the behavior of Democrats. We may have great elected leaders, but the convention incorporates other people who aren't just public officials. The convention gives people who are teachers, community organizers, students, and working people a position and responsibility with the party. They will represent our states the best we can for 4 days. We also get to decide as a group our party's platform. What kind of world are we looking forward to, and how do we get there. It is our team effort. It is mandated by our political system of governance. It is part of our contract with each other in our democracy. It is not about the candidates.
This ritual brings about many changes to our group. We will be platform building and may tweak how we thought about things in the past. We will be changing from our thinking of how to negotiate through a Bush Administration to how we will create our Democratic Administration. We will even get to re-create our history. This year we will be electing either the first female, or African-American to the office of President of the United States of America. We aren't just changing our group, we are really changing the history of the United States, and each person in the U.S. who participated in a primary or votes with their bodies in a caucus, can be proud they were the Democrats that did it. It is a big change, and it happens this year at our convention.
Most importantly, the convention will demand new behaviors from each of us. This time of license towards other democrats will be ended. Bickering between Obama and Clinton's supporters needs to be forgiven and forgotten. This idea of the change of behavior dictated by the convention is what started my thinking about what is going on right now. We are in a time before the convention where we are allowed to criticize ourselves, our fellow party members (our candidates), and even our leaders (although it is discouraged). We should be thinking critically about what is going on, not just about our candidates, but about where we would like to improve, and how we will improve, so that when we get to the convention we can make ourselves better. Our inter-party debates, especially our divisions, will be ended. We should take this time of freedom from conventional rules to really think about ourselves. Ideas like "IMPEACH PELOSI AND REID" (from dnc.org blog) will need to take the time at the convention to find out what is going wrong and solve it so that we aren't eating our own. I don't expect unconditional support for every individual in the party but we need to be more productive in our debates. Our enemy is not our-selves and fellow democrats, our enemy is John McCain and 4 more years of a party in control that doesn't protect children, doesn't protect the health of American citizens, doesn't pay its debts, picks fights with other countries, and doesn't follow ethics rules. These are the issues where we need to focus our attention.
This is a passage from "Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology" edited by J. Spradley and D. McCurdy. The article it come from is "Run for the Wall: An American Pilgrimage" by Jill Dubisch. It is where I drew a lot of my inspiration from. I want to share it so you can think of your own additions and thoughts and comment on it.
"Robbie Davis-Floyd, in her book "Birth as an American Rite of Passage", defines rituals as "a pattered, repetitive, and symbolic enactment of a cultural belief or value". According by the religious to David-Floyd, the primary purpose of ritual is "transformation", and for this reason, rituals are often performed to mark important occasions, times, or transitions. From the perspective of those performing the rituals, there are a variety of purposes in carrying out ritual activities: to maintain order in the world, to connect with gods or ancestors, to protect, to express the groups or individual identity, or because the rituals are mandated by the religious systems of the society. Rituals can bring about changes, as when rites of passages such as baptism or marriage transform individuals by moving them from one social status or stage of life to another. Rituals also mark off ordinary life from times when special activities are permitted or required. The carnival period preceding Lent in Catholic cultures both allows creativity and license absent in ordinary life and at the same time signals the beginning of the period of abstinence to follow, a period that itself parallels and dramatizes a pilgrimage is an activity and time set apart, and pilgrimage may take place at time of special significance, such as holy days or national days of commemoration. []
This brings up another important feature of rituals. As the famous scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade pointed out, rituals often reenact the important myths of society, showing us why they are the way they are. Nor do such rituals need to be religious in nature. Thus [] the Fourth of July in the United States, for example, commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence and serves as an occasion to proclaim American values of freedom, patriotism, and community. [] Rituals may also seek to rewrite or reshape the past.
Symbolism plays an important role in rituals. Victor Turner, an anthropologist who devoted much of his work to the study of ritual, saw symbols as having two poles: the ideological and the sensory. On the one hand, rituals engage our senses of sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell (the sensory pole). On the other hand, they also convey important messages about social values (the ideological pole). Although contemporary anthropologists would see these two dimensions as intertwined, with each embedded in the other (rather then as opposite poles), they would agree that it is the combination of the ideological and the sensory that makes rituals so powerful and moving, for they engage more then just our intellects. [] For this reason, people sometimes find themselves moved by the rituals of other groups or cultures, even when they themselves do not share the values of those performing the ritual. [Independents joining in the caucuses this year is a good example]
Although rituals are often perceived as being "traditional", passed on in the same form from generation to generation, the fact is that rituals are an ongoing human activity and must be re-created every time they are performed. Hence rituals are subject to both intentional and unintentional change. More-over; new rituals are created regularly, and old ones modified. []
One reason that the journey "as both a symbol and as an actual activity"is so powerful is that is has the potential to create what anthropologists call a "liminal" state. Liminality is an important feature of those rituals we call "rites of passage," in which individuals or groups move from one stage or condition of being to another [this is also the most dangerous time because old rules no longer apply and new rules haven't yet been enforced]. Victor Turner and his wife, Edith Turner, saw pilgrimage as one type of rite of passage. When one is on a pilgrimage, the liminal period is marked by the physical separation crated by the journey itself. Ordinary duties are left behind, and time and space take on different meanings. This may induce and altered state of consciousness that renders the pilgrim more receptive to both the messages of the journey and the healing or other transformations that pilgrimage can effect. Thus once the pilgrimage is over, the pilgrim often has experienced and inner transformation, such as healing of physical or psychological ills, atonement for sin, or spiritual renewal. Transformation of social status or identity may also take place."
I hope this has made some of you, like me, who are tired of the bickering and negativity, have some patience and perspective on what is going on right now. Wait until I finish the book on Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas. Then I'll go on and on about this "cleansing" of trolls we sometimes do. Wow, and I'll be adding stuff about how we have (since I first wrote this) been praying to our ancestors (MLK, JFK, and FDR) regularly in speeches. Wow, this is going to be a great senior paper next semester.