Seinfeld Ethnography (44)—George's Tip Jar

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.

[a] Tipster RF

Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 

George Eats Trash     No Soup for You     Elaine Exclaims    The Puffy Shirt    Poppie's Pizza     Mr. Bookman

Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party
George's Friend        Jerry's Haircut          Face Paint             Mustachioed       Smoking              East River
Pool Man                   Dunkin' Joe              Life Lessons          Reckoning          Dog Medicine      Shower Heads
Looking Busy            George Tips             Kramer's Job          Empty Tank
Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.

Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific

Historical contingency. That's what I want to think about today. And authenticity...well, and doing it over. You see, George wants to make sure that his dollar is seen as it goes into the tip jar. This is not a new issue—for George or for us. By chance (historical contingency), the guy behind the counter looks away and attends to other business just as the bill goes in.  I must say that I am amazed how often this happens in "real life," but that is another issue for another time. The real issue here, it seems to me, is that George tries to hit the ol' reset button on this little fragment of structural negotiation—this tiny event in a big, confusing world. Take a look at George's travails, and think about how you might handle the situation. If it hasn't happened to you yet...it will.

George's Tip Jar 0:36

[b] Chance RF

I have had this theme lined up for weeks, but chance would have it that a similar situation occurred for me today. I ordered my coffee and the proprietor turned to prepare it just as I was putting a dollar in the bowl. As more chance would have it (chance and structures often intersect, you see), I had not released the bill yet. Daring not pull back on my forward motion (putting it back in my pocket only to "tip" again seemed ridiculous on an almost Costanza level), I set it on the tip bowl in a way that would make the new bill hard to miss. When it was all over—the whole "event" took several seconds—I felt silly for the obvious "look, I gave you a tip" angle of the bill. Having watched George's tip clip, though, I let it be.

George has taught us that the sanctity of the tip jar's inner bowl must never be violated.

But enough about me. Maybe it is just George and Rob who seem to tip just as others are turning their attentions elsewhere. I am intrigued above all by the role of chance in the whole cultural encounter, and the expectation of the giver that the receiver will notice. George is just a little too obvious, of course, and way too concerned with his lost opportunity. Still, attentions are fickle, and "our" investment in the tip-giving may not be at all equal to the tip-receiver's. In fact, as I have pointed out before on these pages, acknowledgment creates its own kind of awkward moment.

[c] Tips RF

So, what readings will we tackle today as we think about fate, luck, and contingency? Since I am in northern Virginia right now, and do not have access to my full library, I cannot pick out the readings that would be my obvious choices (Martha Nussbaum's work, among them). On the other hand, that is part of the fun of these weekly posts for me. I get to think about our themes in ways that might not have been apparent to me if my library selection had been wider. Consider it a kind of bibliographical bricolage, and let's have some fun contrasting George's moment with history, philosophy, and cultural theory.

We start with T.S. Eliot's opening lines from Burnt Norton—some of the most prescient words ever written about time and chance. We then take a detour to Darwin, and Louis Menand's discussion of chance in natural selection from his fine book, The Metaphysical Club. We conclude with one of my favorite books, and an odd discussion (given our study of George) of learning. Just imagine George in the various learning environments Bateson offers. If you really imagine George under those learning conditions, it can be great fun.

[d] Possibility ADV

Burnt Norton
T.S. Eliot (1943)
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in times past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                               But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.[1]

[e] Finch fate ADV

Chance and Natural Selection
Louis Menand (2004)

Darwin thought that variations do not arise because organisms need them (which is essentially what Larmarck had argued). He thought that variations occur by chance, and that chance determines their adaptive utility. In all seasons it happens that some finches are born with marginally longer and narrower beaks than others, just as children of the same parents are not all exactly the same height. In certain environmental conditions, a narrower beak may have a positive or negative survival value, but in other conditions—for example, when seeds are plentiful and finches are few—it may make no difference. The "selection" of favorable characteristics is therefore neither designed nor progressive. NO intelligence, divine or otherwise, determines in advance the relative value of individual variations, and there is no ideal type of "finch," or essence of "finchness," toward which adaptive changes are leading...

A way of thinking that regards individual differences as inessential departures from a general type is therefore not well suited for dealing with the general world. A general type is fixed, determinate, and uniform; the world Darwin described is characterized by chance, change, and difference—all the attributes general types are designed to leave out.[2]

[f] Apperception ADV

Contexts of Positive Learning
Gregory Bateson (1942)

Most profitably, I believe, we can combine the insights of the experimental psychologists with those of the anthropologists, taking the contexts of experimental learning in the laboratory and asking of each what sort of apperceptive habit we should expect to find associated with it; then looking around the world for human cultures in which this habit has been developed. Inversely, we may be able to get a more definite—more operational—definition of such habits as "free will" if we ask about each, "What sort of experimental learning context would we devise in order to inculcate this habit?" How would we rig the maze or problem-box so that the anthropomorphic rat shall obtain a repeated and reinforced impression of his own free will?"

The classification of contexts of experimental learning is as yet very incomplete, but certain definite advances have been made. It is possible to classify the principal contexts of positive learning (as distinct from negative learning or inhibition, learning not to do things) under four heads, as follows:
     (1) Classical Pavlovian contexts
     These are characterized by a rigid time sequence in which the conditioned stimulus (e.g., buzzer) always recedes the unconditioned stimulus (e.g., meat powder) by a fixed interval of time. This rigid sequence of events is not altered by anything that the animal may do. In these contexts, the animal learns to respond to the conditioned stimulus with behavior (e.g., salivation) which was formerly evoked only by the unconditioned stimulus.
     (2) Contexts of instrumental reward or escape
     These are characterized by a sequence which depends upon the animal's behavior. The unconditioned stimulus in these contexts is usually vague (e.g., the whole sum of circumstances in which the animal is put, the problem-box) and may be internal to the animal (e.g., hunger). If an when, under these circumstances, the animal performs some act within its behavioral repertoire and previously selected by the experimenter (e.g., lifts its leg), it is immediately rewarded.
     (3) Contexts of instrumental avoidance
     These are also characterized by a conditional sequence. The unconditioned stimulus is usually definite (e.g., a warning buzzer) and this is followed by an unpleasant experience (e.g., electric shock) unless in the interval the animal performs some selected act (e.g., lifts leg).
     (4) Contexts of serial and rote learning
     These are characterized by the predominant conditioned stimulus being an act of the subject. He learns, for example, always to give the conditioned response (nonsense syllable B) after he has himself uttered the conditioned stimulus (nonsense syllable A).

This small beginning of a classification will be sufficient to illustrate the principles with which we are concerned and we can now go on to ask about the occurrence of the appropriate apperceptive habits among men of various cultures...[3]

Notes

[1] T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1971), 13.

[2] Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2001), 122-123.

[3] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 170-173.

Bibliography

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. 
Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1971.

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2001.

NEXT

Wednesday, March 28th
Kramer Gets a Job

No, really. Kramer works his way up from the bathroom to the board room. Long story. See you next week on Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific

Seinfeld Ethnography (43)—George Looks Busy

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.

[a] Annoyed RF

Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 

George Eats Trash     No Soup for You     Elaine Exclaims    The Puffy Shirt    Poppie's Pizza     Mr. Bookman

Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party
George's Friend        Jerry's Haircut          Face Paint             Mustachioed       Smoking              East River
Pool Man                   Dunkin' Joe              Life Lessons          Reckoning          Dog Medicine      Shower Heads
Looking Busy            George Tips             Kramer's Job          Empty Tank
Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.

Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific

George has his game face on, and he knows how to look like he's busy. This workplace skill is all about appearing to be annoyed, he says. He seems to understand that a look of frustration keeps co-workers at bay, leaving him alone to do (more or less) as he pleases. Take a look at looking busy, George-style.

George Looks Busy 0:42

[b] Busy RF

George is on to something here. The beauty of Seinfeld is that it explores those little pockets of personality and culture, and does a formidable job of getting to the heart of the matter. Why does it seem so right that "looking annoyed" makes a person "look busy?" Have you ever thought about it before? I hadn't. What a gift this is to those of us overcome by procrastination, ennui, and sloth. Just change your mien, and you're on your way.

There are large social, cultural, and economic implications here. Mastery of annoyance could mean the difference between staying put and promotion. Once promoted (as George has shown), it can mean the difference between working and hardly working. I would anticipate a fine line in these matters, but our fictional George seems to have staked out fairly rich terrain here.

***  ***

So what shall we juxtapose with this Seinfeld clip? We have explored the concept of focus in this series of posts, especially with regard to Joe Dimaggio. Annoyance requires a peculiar kind of focus, and George Costanza has mastered it. The funny thing about George is that he will work very hard if the anticipated result is a form of leisure (at least to his mind). We will explore a few extensions of these ideas here. As always, they are not meant to "echo" the Seinfeld clip.

They are meant to make you think in new ways, new directions. Those new directions, you may not be surprised to see (if you are a frequent reader of Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific), are going to focus on the opposite of looking busy and doing little. I have several choice nuggets from Japan, China (by way of Japan), and Chicago (by way of France and Germany).

[c] Really busy RF

The first is one of my favorite passages in Japanese historical literature. It is about a figure in medieval Japanese history, called a tato, who functioned as a kind of part-owner, part-foreman of large rice-field estates called shōen. In his industriousness, he is the very opposite of George Costanza. Next, we have a passage from Ichisada Miyazaki's memorable study of China's Examination Hell. Those little boys worked hard to memorize mountains of manuscript. Finally, we will skip many centuries ahead and look at a University of Chicago professor (channeling Goethe) who wrote about time he felt was wasted—sort of.

All I can say of all these examples is that George is unlikely to have a clue; they really are busy.

Management of Estates by Tato

[d] Tato sources ADV

The husband of the third daughter is a man by the name of Tanaka Hōeki. He is diligent in his farming occupation and entertains no other ambition. He owns several chō of land, and is called the daimyō-tato. He provides his own spades and hoes to cultivate rich and poor fields, and prepares ahead for the dry seasons. He repairs his own domestic-style and Chinese-style plows. He is skillful in handling his workers. He provides recompense for work done by farmers in fixing dikes and embankments, digging ditches, or preparing foot-paths between the rice fields. He also rewords the work of those men and women who come to help in busy planting seasons. Whatever he plants, such as the late crops, rice, and glutinous rice, he harvests far more than other people. The amount he realizes from pounding the crop at the millstone also increases year after year. This is, however, only part of the story. WHen he plants barley, wheat, soy bean, cowpea, millet, buckwheat and sesame, they grow in number and become ripe for harvest. In spring he wastes not a single grain of seed, but in the fall, he receives ten thousandfold in return. From the time he begins planting in the spring to the time he completes his harvest in the fall, he commits not a single faulty step...[1]

China's Examination Hell
Ichisada Miyazaki (1976)

[e] Strict ADV

Formal education began at about seven years of age (or eight, counting in Chinese style). Boys from families that could afford the expense were sent to a temple, village, communal, or private school staffed by former officials who had lost their positions, or by old scholars who had repeatedly failed the examinations as the years slipped by. Sons of rich men and powerful officials often were taught at home by a family tutor in an elegant small room located in a detached building, which stood in a courtyard planted with trees and shrubs, in order to create an atmosphere conducive to study. A class usually consisted of eight or nine students. Instruction centered on the Four Books, beginning with the Analects, and the process of learning was almost entirely a matter of sheer memorization. With their books open before them, the students would parrot the teacher, phrase by phrase, as he read out the text. Inattentive students, or those who amused themselves, would be scolded by the teacher or hit on the palms and thighs with his fan-shaped "warning ruler." The high regard for discipline was reflected in the saying, "If education is not strict, it shows that the teacher is lazy."

Students who had learned how to read a passage would return to their seats and review what they had just been taught. After reciting it a hundred times, fifty times while looking at the book and fifty with the book face down, even the least gifted would have memorized it. At first the boys were given twenty to thirty characters a day, but as they became more experienced they memorized one, two, or several hundred each day. In order not to force a student beyond his capacity, a boy who could memorize four hundred characters would be assigned no more than two hundred. Otherwise he might become so distressed as to end by detesting his studies....It was usual for a boy to enter school at the age of eight and to complete the general classical education at fifteen. The heart of the curriculum was the classics. If we count the number of characters in the classics that the boys were required to learn by heart, we get the following figures:
               Analects.......................................................11,705
               Mencius.......................................................34,685
               Book of Changes.........................................24,107
               Book of Documents.....................................25,700
               Book of Poetry.............................................39,234
               Book of Rites...............................................99,010
               Tso Chuan.................................................196,845
The total number of characters a student had to learn, then, was 431,286.[2]

Journal Entry
Mircea Eliade (1959)

4 November

[f] Work ADV

On 27 January 1824, Goethe said to Eckermann: "Basically it has been nothing but toil and work, and I may well say that I have not had four weeks of real enjoyment in all of my seventy-five years....There were too many demands on my activities from outside as well as from within me. My real good fortune has lain in my poetic reflections and creations. Only how greatly these have been disturbed, limited, and hindered by my external situation! If I had been able to hold myself back from public and business endeavors and activities and been able to live more in solitude, I would have been happier and would have accomplished far more as a poet."

As always, I see Goethe's destiny as my own. But obviously on a different level. I'm thinking of these three years of teaching at Chicago. How much wasted time! How much I could have accomplished if I hadn't had to teach six hours of class a week, and for six months. (Let alone the time for preparing them, or for trips). The most fertile years of my life are the years of poverty I spent on the rue Vaneau. I woke up every morning without a schedule. Now, during the academic year, I have only two days a week to call my own: Friday and Saturday. The other days, I prepare for my classes, I write tedious articles, I receive students preparing a doctorate on some subject in the history of religions. Certainly, this work fascinates me. Guiding a young person, helping him to see things as I see them now., after thirty years of research, is equivalent to a cultural creation. Sometimes, after a successful class, when I think I've been understood, I have the feeling of having written a book. I suppose my best books will be written by someone else.[3]

Notes

[1] David J. Lu, Japan: A Documentary History (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 100.

[2] Ichisada Miyazaki, China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China [Translated by Conrad Schirokauer] (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 15-16.

[3] Mircea Eliade, Journal II: 1957-1969 [Translated by Fred H. Johnson, Jr.] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 71-72.

Bibliography

Eliade, Mircea. Journal II: 1957-1969 [Translated by Fred H. Johnson, Jr.] (Chicago: University 

          of Chicago Press, 1977.

Lu, David J. Japan: A Documentary History. Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.

Miyazaki Ichisada. China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China 

          [Translated by Conrad Schirokauer] (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.

NEXT

Wednesday, March 21st
George's Tip Jar

George gets caught with his hand in the cookie tip jar. It is all about social mores and historical contingencies. We'll investigate next week.

Seinfeld Ethnography (15)—Too Late for Coffee

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.
Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 

George Eats Trash     No Soup for You     Elaine Exclaims    The Puffy Shirt    Poppie's Pizza     Mr. Bookman

Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party

Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.

[a] Temporal caffeine  RF

Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific
When is coffee...just coffee? Although this scene might be considered just a bit "racy" in some parts of the globe (only half of this blog's readers are from North America), I don't think the reference to what coffee...could be is all that sensitive. Most people won't bat an eye, of course. Here's the point, though. Eyes should "bat" over the profoundity of the question ("was it really coffee?") and that has everything to do with the question's underlying social theoretical significance. 

When is it coffee, and when is it something else? When is something "just a gift" or "just a little favor?" There are social and cultural minefields here that we have all negotiated, because it is not just coffee and potential midnight amorousness involved. Think about the larger implications of this little scene.

[b] Opportunity  RF

When is a colleague's invitation to dinner...just dinner? Does he want a favor? When is a good turn done by a friend...just a good turn? This isn't just about coffee, people, and we'll consider some of the possibilities in this week's readings. For now, though, watch George, Elaine, and Jerry. Elaine has a point when she wonders what George's parents did to him.

Too Late for Coffee  1:44

It is hard for me to think of this scene without getting onto my social/cultural hobby horse and saying—for probably the fortieth time on Round and Square so far—that we tend to overplay the individual psychology in this sort of scene (George does set himself up for this) and underplay the wider social dynamics. Beneath the almost clinical oddities that make up George Costanza lie a very deep and real set of social issues caused by the exchange of gifts (coffee, for example) and the obligations they create.

The French social theorist Marcel Mauss (1874-1950) wrote that gifts have a way of "forcing obligation" on the receivers. Mauss has a profound point here. That dynamic has never gone away—in any society, large or small, that I have encountered. We are going to investigate, in this week's ethnographic and theoretical readings, some of the ways in which the rich dynamic of gift and obligation play out in social life. George may seem to be an isolated wierdlet, and, indeed, he is. His psychological problems, though, have much deeper roots in the way that we all go about our lives. It is why Seinfeld remains the most masterful of all television shows. Even when we can't stand to look at him anymore, George (and other characters) show us the path toward deep understanding.

Marcel Mauss
The Gift

[c] Gift

Among all these very complex themes and this multiplicity of social 'things' that are in a state of flux, we seek here to study only one characteristic—one that goes deep but is isolated: the so to speak voluntary character of these total services, apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested. Almost always such services have taken the form of the gift, the present generously given even when, in the gesture accompanying the transaction, there is only a polite fiction, formalism, and social deceit, and when really there is obligation and economic self-interest. Although we shall indicate in detail all the various principles that have imposed this appearance on a necessary form of exchange, namely, the division of labour in society itself—among all these principles we shall nevertheless study only one in depth. What rule of legality and self-interest, in societies of a backward or archaic type, compels the gift that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back? This is the problem on which we shall fasten more particularly, whilst indicating others.[1]

Andrew Kipnis
Producing Guanxi

[d] Guanxi

After everyone sat down, hosts most always offered tea, cigarettes, and sometimes small snacks like melon seeds, watermelon (during the summer), and (especially at weddings) candy. Hosts did not ask guests if they wanted these tidbits, and guests were expected gracefully to accept them. The informality of asking is someone wanted something and refusing it if one didn't was reserved for everyday situations among friends and relatives. Informality implied a close guanxi [social tie]. A demand for informality from a guest was both rude and prohibited the guanxi-producing practices through which distance could be overcome. Cook Feng explained that people don't smoke and drink alone and told me a popular local saying, "wine and tobacco aren't split among households" (jiuyan bufenjia), implying that one shouldn't be too possessive with wine and tobacco. As media of ganqing [social emotions] tobacco and wine had to be shared to be effective.

During my first summer in the village this practice presented me with a problem. As long as I drank tea, I could use my foreignness to excuse my inability to smoke. However, during one period stomach problems convinced me to also avoid tea. Though tolerant enough not to be mad, my host commented "How can you both not smoke and not drink tea? If you don't smoke and don't drink tea, what do you do? I had made myself a social cripple. By not accepting cigarettes and tea, I was refusing to participate in the creation of good ganqing and hence the establishment of guanxi. I quickly learned to always accept tea, but also found it was not necessary to drink much.[2]

James Watson
From the Common Pot

[e] Village Life

One must conclude, therefore, that shk puhn is quite obviously more than a simple feast devised as a convenient way to celebrate festive occasions. It is a central symbol of community life. Those who eat from the common pot are bound by a special relationship. the very act of sharing this low cuisine has the symbolic effect of obliterating class and status differences. Periodically, even the wealthiest entrepreneurs and the most exalted of local politicians shed the trappings of their class and eat with their fellow villagers—squatting on the floor with everyone else, digging in the pot, searching for a prize piece of chicken. This in my view, is why the custom is retained by the people of the New Territories: In sharing the common pot, villagers manage to negate the status differences that govern their everyday lives and create for themselves—momentarily at least—the illusion of social equality.[3]

[1] Marcel Mauss, The Gift [Translated by W.D. Halls] (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1990), 3.
[2] Andrew Kipnis, Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North China Village (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 45-46.
[3] James L. and Rubie S. Watson, Village Life in Hong Kong: Politics, Gender, and Ritual in the New Territories (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2004), 117.


Bibliography
Kipnis, Andrew. Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North China Village. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift [Translated by W.D. Halls]. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1990.

Watson, James L. and Rubie S. Watson. Village Life in Hong Kong: Politics, Gender, and Ritual in the New Territories. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2004.

NEXT
Wednesday, July 13th
High Stakes Betting
Jerry and George decide to flip a coin, and then the social and cultural rules of gamesmanship blow right up.

Seinfeld Ethnography (12)—Marriage

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.
Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 

George Eats Trash     No Soup for You     Elaine Exclaims    The Puffy Shirt    Poppie's Pizza     Mr. Bookman

Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party

Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.

[a] Married   RF

Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific 
The photograph above is vintage, anonymous, and in the public domain. Jerry's marriage is only the last of these. Pretend marriage. It's a big step, and the couple moves rapidly from counting "I love yous" to dry cleaning discounts. The subtext(s) in this episode are about as breathless as the narrative, so take a look, and then we'll ponder love and kinship alliances for a while.

Married syrup  9:18

The episode could go much, much further into the analytical realm. I was ready for a discussion session with George and Elaine at the restaurant. It is all just a little too predictable. Still, it does call to mind the very social nature of marital alliances, and the ways that a wide array of people quickly become involved in the lives of the couple. Marriage and privacy are two words that create more than a little challenge the world over (as we have seen in the news recently and as we will read below). 

The fairly predictable bickering is not Seinfeld at its best, but it does move fairly quickly from the playful exchanges of a couple in love to annoyed marital/martial antagonism and breakup. If this episode is "masterful" in any way (I find the topic fascinating, but the carry-through a little cliché-ish), it is in compressing a story-line of syrupy love to cool separation in just a matter of minutes. With a nod to E. M. Forster's famous assessment of narrative, "the couple was all love-syrup, married for dry cleaning, argued, kissed, made up, rolled over, and then divorced." That's...something.

                    We can't both get pancakes, it's embarrassing. It's like one step 
                    from the couples that dress alike.

And time marches on.
                    Can opener. "Yeah...that's what I said."
And on...
                   "What happened to us Jerry?"
And on.
                  "I guess I just wasn't prepared for the responsibilities of a pretend marriage."
                  "We'll always have...pancakes."

[b] Discount  RF

Courtney and Jerry have left us with a good deal to ponder, even beyond the episode, though. Marriage is one of those institutions that seem to cry out for generalization, only to be beaten back by the sheer wealth of details "out there," in history and culture. Today's episode is really a way to think about generalization...and cliché. Although I do not find it to be even close to one of the best Seinfeld episodes, it may very well be one of the better ones for just making us think. What is this "marriage" thing, anyway?

***  ***

Although they might look like a great deal of work, spend some time with the readings this week. I refrain from calling them "theoretical," because only the last piece has those pretensions. They present a fascinating array of thoughts about marriage in wildly different contexts. They are worth pondering—yes, even the seemingly difficult Lévi-Strauss piece, which should be read just for the cadences...even in English translation. Marcel Granet (1884-1940) gives us an "imaginative ethnography" of early Chinese spring festivals. It is based solely on Chinese classical sources and his fertile, French literary imagination. This is not the place for me to argue for him as a truly brilliant thinker (he is), so just read his very strange "picture" of society in motion. Finally, as the reading in the middle this week, we have the similarly eloquent anthropologist Paul Riesman (1938-1988), whose work among the Fulani is beginning to be recognized by an ever-wider set of readers. In this excerpt, he discusses elements of love, marriage, and "keeping society going" in the patient, reflexive style that his students so admired.

Marcel Granet
The Religion of the Chinese People

[c] Granet

Their first unions were celebrated in the Festivals of Spring, but they could set up house only after the Autumn Festivals. As long as the work in the fields lasted, even old couples were kept apart; nor were suitors allowed to join their betrothed except by night and furtively. They jumped the hedges and, hiding from their kin, courted each other; especially at the full moon, they sang their aubades, taking great care not t be surprised by the cock-crow. These meetings at night were doubtless chaste. The opposition of the sexes was so strong that a long preparation and favourable times were needed to bring them together; sexual union seemed so frightening that it was forbidden for long periods. But when it was allowed and regulated, when in the spring festivals all the young people of a community came together for the first time, what a unique and moving moment it was! They were poetically inspired and, not being able any longer to sing once they were married, they knew of a sudden how to improvise dances and songs in the traditional spirit of their race. 

They made all of surrounding nature take part in their powerful emotions; boys and girls assembling on the holy earth imagined that their youthful unions cooperated in the revival of nature, when in the Holy Place the ice on the rivers melted under the breath of spring, when the waters came to life and the springs, long dried up, spurted forth, when finally the soft fertile rain fell and the dew appeared, when the precocious flowers came up in damp corners, in the time of new foliage, of plumtrees and flowering peachtrees, of swallows returning, while the magpies built their nests and singing, the birds chased one another in pairs.


All the hopes of fertility mingled in their breasts: while the eggs they swallowed, the meteors they caught sight of, the bunches of plantains they gathered up in the laps of their skirts, the flowers they offered each other as betrothal pledges seemed to them to embody the principles of motherhood, they believed further that their nuptials were propitious to universal germination, that they called forth the seasonable rain, and that, finally, by desacralizing the earth, forbidden to human work during the winter, they now opened the fields to fertilization. Sanctified witness of their magnificent labours, the Holy Place appeared to contain an infinite creative power endlessly renewed by the Festivals.[1]

Paul Riesman
Freedom in Fulani Social Life 

[c] Freedom

Thus we saw that Fulani marriage is established little by little over several months or even several years, instead of being a sudden transformation as with us. In the light of Fulani attitudes toward their feelings, however, marriage may appear to be a means, even a training, whose goal is the mastery of love. It is commonplace in anthropology to say that marriage, as an institution, channels man's sexual impulses so that they contribute to the maintenance of social structures rather than subversion. But in reality, in the case of the Fulani at least, the effect of marriage is much more complicated than that. On the one hand, instead of channeling sexual impulses, so that they flower within limits defined as legitimate, marriage, in its beginnings, makes this flowering very difficult. Instead of being a honeymoon, in which the young couple can satisfy their passion and begin to become a unit which will present a common front to others, this period in Fulani marriage prevents the couple from being together and, especially, prevents them from becoming a unit. On the other hand, the ease of divorce and the possibility of polygamy are a positive encouragement to men to be interested in other women. in the same way, this interest on the part of men is an encouragement on women to remain in a way available, whatever their matrimonial situation of the moment.

In a sense, then, the function of Fulani marriage does not consist simply in channeling sexual impulses, for at the same time it diffuses them, making difficult a mutual, exclusive attachment between a man and a woman. This has consequences for people's social life as well as for their emotional life. In social life, that tendency of marriage goes in the same direction as the division of "social" labor which we analyzed earlier, for it favors what we called "the daytime social order" over that of the night. The danger of love, for society, is not that we might be led to make love with an unsuitable person (that happens, but rarely), but rather that we might fall in love with someone so deeply that it seems the other person alone is sufficient and we do not need the rest of society. Indeed, the Jelgobe make fun of a man who obviously loves his wife, and jealousy is severely criticized. Their reasoning on this subject is a bit different from what I have just presented. For them, jealousy, in the first place, is an antisocial emotion, since a beautiful woman is beautiful for everyone and should somehow be shared with others. That does not mean a man should allow others to sleep with his wife, but only that he is wrong to take offense at the feelings she arouses in them. As for the man who appears to be in love with his wife, whether he is jealous or not, people make fun of him for the same reason that they make fun of someone who breaks wind: he shows a lack of self-control and risks, thereby, being accused of being weaker than his wife.[2]

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The Elementary Structures of Kinship

[d] Elementary

Thus, it is always a system of exchange that we find at the origin of rules of marriage, even those of which the apparent singularity would seem to allow only a special and arbitrary interpretation. In the course of this work, we have seen the notion of exchange become complicated and diversified; it has constantly appeared to us in different forms. Sometimes exchange appears as direct (the case of marriage with the bilateral cousin), sometimes as indirect (and in this case it can comply with two formulas, one continuous, the other discontinuous, corresponding to two different rules of marriage with the unilateral cousin). Sometimes it functions within a total system of (this is the theoretically common characteristic of bilateral marriage and of matrilateral marriage), and at others it instigates the formation of an unlimited number of special systems and short cycles, unconnected among themselves (and in this form it represents a permanent threat to moiety systems, and as an inevitable weakness attacks patrilateral systems). Sometimes exchange appears as a cash or short-term transaction (with the exchange of sisters and daughters, and avuncular marriage), and at other times more as a long-term transaction (as in the case where the case where the prohibited degrees include first, and occasionally second, cousins). Sometimes the exchange is explicit adn at other times it is implicit (as seen in the example of so-called marriage by purchase). Sometimes the exchange is closed (when marriage must satisfy a special rule of alliance between marriage classes or a special rule of observance of preferential degrees), while sometimes it is open (when the rule of exogamy is merely a collection of negative stipulations, which, beyond the prohibited degrees, leaves a free choice). Sometimes it is secured by a sort of mortgage on reserved categories (classes or degrees); sometimes (as in the case of the simple prohibition of incest, as found in our society) it rests on a wider fiduciary guarantee, viz., the theoretical freedom to claim any woman of the group, in return for the renunciation of certain designated women in the family circle, a freedom ensured by the extension of a prohibition, similar to that affecting each man in particular, to all men in general. But no matter what form it takes, whether direct or indirect, general or special, immediate or deferred, explicit or implicit, closed or open, concrete or symbolic, it is exchange, always exchange, that emerges as the fundamental and common basis of all modalities of the institution of marriage.[3]




[1] Paul Riesman, Freedom in Fulani Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 211-212.

[2] Marcel Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated by Maurice Freedman] (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 44.

[3] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship [Revised translation by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 478-479. Italics mine.


Bibliography
Granet, Marcel. The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated by Maurice Freedman]. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship [Revised translation by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer]. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Riesman, Paul. Freedom in Fulani Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.



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