Seinfeld Ethnography (46)—Needle's on Empty

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.
One year ago on Round and Square (4 April 2011). The first Seinfeld Ethnography post—George Eats Trash.

[a] Tentacles 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

Kramer goes on a journey of discovery today. He's in a dealer car, and he has no fear of the red zone. It's a state of mind, a voyage toward self-knowledge topped off by a Twix bar. Jules Verne would have known exactly what lies deep within the soul of the implacable Kramer. Here we have it—the best traveling duo since Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, and it's a new adventure. Take a look at their journey to the center of the tank.

Gas Tank 3:05

[a] Running on RF

"There's still some overlap between the needle and the slash below the E."

"How low are you gonna go?"

"Oh, I've been in the slash many times. This is nothing. You get used to it. Just...put it out of your mind."

Zen master Kramer speaks, and the vocal pop as he transmits his wisdom reverberates like a koan threatening to launch the listener into ethereal orbit. It looks like a gas tank, it sounds like a car trip, but it is something beyond ordinary experience. It is a launchpad toward self-knowledge.

What is the sound of one needle falling?

[c] Social RF

What, indeed?[1]

Have you ever done it? I mean, really done it—pushed the red zone to the point where life felt just a little bit different? This isn't like seeing how long you can hold your breath...or your water (although there are parallels). This is mind-fused-with-machine; the stuff of narrative. 

Before I began driving, I paid little attention to such matters. A funny thing happens when you start driving other people's cars, though. The gas tank equation starts to rear its fearsome needle in the midst of compelling social dynamics. You see, gas tanks and fill ups are just another part of life for individuals or shared income groups (such as couples). The dynamic changes completely when you're driving on the man's nickel. Usually it is not as stark an occupy-the-dealership moment as we have in Kramer's episode. More commonly, we experience something along the lines of:
                                           [Uncle George]
    I wonder how irritated    [dad and mom]     will be if I leave the tank almost empty?
                                           [Grandma]

[d] Dreamy RF

There is usually a shorthand socio-economic calculus that emphasizes minute gains, letting the chips whip, fall, and twirl in various relational waves. Remember, the frontal cortices of teenage tank-watchers are not fully developed; long-term consequences do not enter consideration in quite the way they will a decade later. 

Indeed, strife between generations can boil down to something as simple as mom being late for work and finding a gas tank with only the fumes left over from last night's carousing. 

As I moved through the stages of "driver's permit," and "new licensee," to full-fledged driver, I learned to share the economic burden more readily. This was made incomparably easier when the car was mine. That first drab and fully used Toyota Corolla was mine...all mine. The whole eleven gallons were up to me. For a while, I stuck to my car-sharing ways. Not wanting to spend the enormous amount it would cost to fill the whole tank in, say, 1978, I let the needle hover in the pink, slimy, mid-zone between "low" and "now." One day, I cut it way too close(ly), and decided I had better fill'er up. I eased the little sedan into the gas station and prepared myself for the almost seven dollars this was going to cost me. I laid out the bills, one-by-one, before I noticed something that seemed strange. The gas pump read 11.3 gallons. How was that possible? It's an eleven gallon tank. Even then, I understood the dangers of literalism, yet I was intrigued.

"I wonder how far I could push this four-door envelope?", I mused.

[e] Alexandria RF

I thought about it for a whole tank of gas. Then another. I drove, ran errands, commuted, and pondered. I was The Thinker...with my head on the steering wheel.

Finally, I was determined to see just how far a tank could go. I filled the little steel bladder as full as I could make it (I cringe today to think of the damage I did that day to our ozone layer), and it lapped over the rim like frothy water in a bathtub. As I screwed on the cap, gasoline washed over my hands and shoes (I know, I know...I cringe). Behind the steering wheel (and smelling like a refinery), I began to drive. Big highway miles (it helped that I was driving to a large family gathering near Fargo). 

I rolled through the Twin Cities and kept time to the rhythm of eighteen wheelers blowing the little Corolla rightward with every pass. As I neared Alexandria, Minnesota (Milepost 103 on I-94), I looked at the needle. Still good. I kept things cranking, deep into the night. The needle was in the red when I turned off the interstate and onto the long, dark, fifty-mile stretch of U.S. 59 through Fergus Falls, Pelican Rapids, and Detroit Lakes. 

I was terrified. I never felt so alive.

Even today, reliving those red-needle miles on a moonless summer night[2], I shiver to think of how certainty turned to self-doubt and back almost like odd and even minutes on the clock. When I finally pulled into the driveway of the cabin, it was almost 3:00 a.m. The trip meter read "306," and there was still gas in the tank.

[f] Game over RF

I slept fitfully that night, as we write in bad (non-)fiction. Tossing, turning, I wondered just how much farther I could take the little enginge that coughed...and sputtered. Later the next afternoon (after eventually falling asleep like a normal teenager), I decided to find out. I picked at my lunch as I plotted my plan. Then I announced to various uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents:

          I'll be back

Later, this became a movie, but I digress. Bucks Mills Road forms a little loop near the cabin, and it is 3.1 miles long (exactly five kilometers, as I knew even back then). I got into the car...and looped. One, two, three, four, fi....put...put...gasp...wheeze...game over. The trip meter read "321." I walked back to the cabin, exhilarated. Triumphant. That is why these lines, spoken by Cosmo Kramer, resonate for me to this day.

They went farther to the left of the slash than anyone ever dreamed...

***  ***

[g] Transformed RF

We have this little custom in our Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific posts of following the clip and chit-chat with some "theory"...or at least a little perspective from the world of letters. There are many ways we could proceed today, but we will once again be constrained slightly by the fact that I am in Virginia with only several dozen books.That takes out the obvious Zen mastery quotations and the central African initiation rituals I would have chosen without even thinking. Instead, I have selected three passages from different books that speak in one way or another to transformative powers of change. The first is an episode from the great historical text of the eleventh century The Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Ruling. The selection is one of bold, and sometimes foolhardy, action, even amidst calls for relative sanity. I often imagine Kramer on these battlefields. Losing.

The second selection is an argumentative little vignette in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. One thing I learned from Bloom (even while arguing endlessly with him over academic matters large and petty) was that he believed—really believed—in transformation. His methods and perspectives could take readers and listeners for a spin toward the empty needle, and this is just a small example of both his passion and his ability to annoy. The last selection deals with another kind of transformation. It is an introductory essay by Raymond Carver (another challenging individual, as it turns out), reflecting upon how he got started in the writing business.

[h] Tripod PD

Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms
Sima Guang (1085)
36. In Han, Chiang Wei again proposed to make a campaign. The cheng-hsi ta chiang-chün Chang I disputed with him at court: he maintained that, as theirs was a small country and the people were toiling, it was not proper to indulge in warfare. (Chiang) Wei did not listen to him; leading the chü-chi chiang-chün Hsia-hou Pa as well as (Chang) I, he went forth.

37. Eight month. (Chiang) Wei, with tens of thousands of men, reached Fu-han and proceeded to Ti-tao. The cheng-hsi ta chiang-chün Ch'en T'ai ordered the tz'u-shih (Governor) of Yung-chou Wang Ching to advance to Ti-tao and there wait for (Ch'en) T'ai's army to arrive, intending to have them advance further when the forces from the east adn west were thus united. (Ch'en) T'ai and his army were encamped at Ch'en-ts'ang when the various troops under (Wang) Ching's command fought with the Han at the ancient pass and were defeated. Thereupon, (Wang) Ching crossed the T'ao river. (Ch'en) T'ai guessed that, since (Wang) Ching was not sticking to the defense of Ti-tao, there must have been some change in the situation; he led his troops to reinforce him. (Wang) Ching had already fought with (Chiang) Wei west of the T'ao and suffered a heavy defeat; with ten thousand odd men he returned to the city of Ti-tao, while the remainder of his troops were all dispersed...

38. Chang I spoke to (Chiang) Wei, "We may stop here but it will not do to advance any farther. By advancing we may perhaps ruin this great achievement; it would be like adding feet when one draws the picture of a snake." (Chiang) Wei was enraged at this; in the end he advanced and besieged Ti-tao.[3]

[i] Tenpins ADV

The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom (1987)
When I was a young teacher at Cornell, I once had a debate about education with a professor of psychology. He said that it was his function to get rid of the prejudices of his students. He knocked them down like tenpins. I began to wonder what he replaced those prejudices with. He did not seem to have much of an idea of what the opposite of a prejudice might be. He reminded me of the little boy who gravely informed me that there is no Santa Claus, who wanted me to bathe in the brilliant light of truth. Did this professor know that what those prejudices meant for the students and what effect being deprived of them would have? Did he believe that there are truths that could guide their lives as did their prejudices? Had he considered how to give students the love of the truth necessary to seek unprejudiced beliefs, or would he render them passive, disconsolate, indifferent, and subject to authorities like himself, or the best of contemporary thought? My informant about Santa Claus was just showing off, proving his superiority to me. He had not created the Santa Claus that had to be there in order to be refuted. Think of all we learn about the world from men's belief in Santa Clauses, and all that we learn about the soul from those who believe in them. By contrast, merely methodological excision from the soul of the imagination that projects Gods and heroes onto the wall of the cave does not promote knowledge of the soul; it only lobotomizes it, cripples its powers.

I found myself responding to the professor of psychology that I personally tried to teach my students prejudices, since nowadays—with the general success of his method—they had learned to doubt beliefs even before they believed in anything. Without people like me, he would be out of business. Descartes had a whole wonderful world of old beliefs, of prescientific experience and articulations of the order of things, beliefs firmly and even fanatically held, before he even began his systematic radical doubt. One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation. So I proposed a division of labor in which I would help to grow the flowers in the field and he could mow them down.[4]

[j] Learning ADV

Learning to Write

Raymond Carver (1983)
A long time ago—it was the summer of 1958—my wife and I and our two baby children moved from Yakima, Washington to a little town outside of Chico, California. There we found an old house and paid twenty-five dollars a month rent. In order to finance this move, I'd had to borrow a hundred and twenty-five dollars from a druggist I'd delivered prescriptions for, a man named Bill Barton.

This is by way of saying that in those days my wife and I were stone broke. We had to eke out a living, but the plan was that I would take classes at what was then called Chico State College. But for as far back as I can remember, long before we moved to California in search of a different life and our slice of the American pie, I'd wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write, and I wanted to write anything—fiction, of course, but also poetry, plays, scripts, articles for Sports Afield, True, Argosy, and Rogue (some of the magazines I was then reading), pieces for the local newspaper—anything that involved putting words together to make something coherent and of interest to someone besides myself. But at the time of our move, I felt in my bones that I had to get some education in order to go along with being a writer. I put a very high premium on eduction then—much higher in those days than now, I'm sure, but that's because I'm older and have an education. Understand that nobody in my family had ever gone to college or for that matter had got beyond the mandatory eighth grade of high school. I didn't know anything, but I knew that I didn't know anything.

So along with this desire to get an education, I had this very strong desire to write; it was a desire so strong that, with the encouragement I was given in college, and the insight acquired, I kept on writing long after "good sense" and the "cold facts"—the "realities" of my life told me, time and again, that I ought to quit, stop the dreaming, quietly go ahead and do something else.[5]

Notes
[1] These two English words are useful if you ever find yourself in a situation where you don't have anything important to say, yet would prefer to sound profound.
[2] Even a teenager with a still-developing frontal cortex knows better than to try this in winter. At least if the teenager is from the Midwest.
[3] Ssu-ma Kuang, The Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms Volume II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 199.
[4] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 42-43.
[5] John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist [Foreword by Raymond Carver] (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), xi-xii.

Bibliography
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Gardner, John. On Becoming a Novelist [Foreword by Raymond Carver]. New York: Harper 
     & Row, 1983.
Ssu-ma Kuang, The Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms Volume II. Cambridge: Harvard 
     University Press, 1965).


NEXT
Wednesday, April 18th
George's Toilet Book
Yup, no misprint here. George takes a book (he's at a full-service bookstore) into the men's room. The social, economic, and cultural implications swirl downward from there.

La Pensée Cyclique (5)—Total Social Phenomena

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series about Marcel Granet, "La Pensée Cyclique"
One year ago on Round and Square (3 April 2011)—Theory Corner 1c: Bricolage and Change

[a] Total RF

This series is dedicated to understanding one of the most fascinating intellects of the twentieth century, Marcel Granet (1884-1940). In an earlier era, he might have been considered (at least by bibliophiles studying tomes ranging from De l'esprit des lois to 呂氏春秋 between the world wars) the most interesting man in the world. For me, he is every bit of that (as we say back home). Granet's range of interests in social theory and Chinese literature were profound, catholic, and engrossing. I hope that (whether you are interested in French, social theory, or Chinese) you will give Monsieur Granet a little bit of your attention. The material is not simple, by any means, but it is an ideal way to grasp how knowledge really works.

Total Social Phenomena 

Among the authors contained in Marcel Granet’s volumes of L’année sociologique was Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), Granet’s close friend and colleague. Mauss was also Emile Durkheim’s nephew, and the three make a formidable trio that reflects the breadth and depth of the Année sociologique school and the “kinship ties” uniting them. Durkheim began as a philosopher who, growing frustrated with the individualistic interpretations among his contemporaries, embraced the fledgling field of sociology. The two Marcels (Mauss and Granet) pushed those positions into academic disciplines that were just beginning to develop in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

[b] Social RF

Marcel Mauss has often been considered one of the greatest of early anthropologists, and, even though he himself never did fieldwork, his interpretations of the ethnographic accounts of others were masterful. They sustained his own arguments in a series of short accounts that could almost be called “sketches” for further inquiry. Indeed, Mauss’s essays on the concept of the person, gift exchange, sacrifice, and magic have given scholars nearly a century of interpretive potential, and his stature has only grown over the decades. Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and historians have all written works that were inspired by his influence.

Surely one of the great books of the twentieth century is Mauss’s Essai sur le don (The Gift).  It alone has generated almost unimaginable amounts of scholarship, considering its brevity and the fact that it was published first as a study in L’année sociologique. In it, Mauss sparingly but adeptly demonstrates the manner in which prestations, or gifts, are cycled through society, and the processes of thought that are linked to each. After a long quotation from the Edda, the linguistically-gifted Mauss begins with three simple sentences that frame the theoretical and substantive focus of the book:

          The foregoing lines from the Edda outline our subject-matter. In Scandinavian 

          and many other civilizations contracts are fulfilled and exchanges of goods are 

          made by means of gifts. In theory such gifts are voluntary but in fact they are 

          given and repaid under obligation.[1]

[c] Total-italy RF

As many authors have pointed out, Mauss saw “total social phenomena” where others saw only confused or random actions. Building upon the foundations of Durkheim’s sociology, Mauss explicated the social pressure behind gift exchange, and the manner in which gifts formed society rather than merely reflecting it. Total social phenomena are “wholes…systems in their entirety.” They should not, argued Mauss, be studied statically. They are concrete, detailed, and particular—not unlike the kinds of materials with which historians and psychologists are interested.

          The study of the concrete, which is the study of the whole, is made more 
          readily, is more interesting and furnishes more explanations in the sphere 
          of sociology than the study of the abstract. For we observe complete and 
          complex beings. We too describe them in their organisms and psychai as 
          well as in their behavior as groups, with the attendant psychoses: sentiments, 
          ideas and desires of the crowd, of organized societies and their sub-groups. 
          We see bodies and their reactions, and their ideas and sentiments as 
          interpretations or as motive forces. The aim and principle of sociology is to 
          observe and understand the whole group in its total behavior.[2]

[d] Arctic RF

Mauss did “observe the whole group in its total behavior,” and has been a model for anthropologists and sociologists because of it. Indeed, Mauss’s use of ethnographic example is far richer and more nuanced than that of his uncle and teacher (Durkheim), as is his desire to bring the individual more prominently into the discussion of social actions. 

With just the short introduction above, one can clearly see outlines of what would become Marcel Granet’s approach to Chinese society and its regeneration in festivals and the shared harvest. That Marcel Mauss’s influence on his friend Marcel Granet has often been slighted in favor of their teacher, Emile Durkheim, is due, I feel, to scholars’ failure to read Mauss’s less well-known works as carefully as Granet and his friends did.

Perhaps the work that influenced the small circle of thinkers in the Durkheimian tradition the most was his “Essay on Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo Societies.” It has captured few imaginations beyond that small coterie, but it was a powerful reason why Marcel Granet carried L’année sociologique with him to China—and brought it with him as the Qing government fell all around him. It is also surely the reason why Granet recommended that one of his very best students spend two months reading and rereading it. Read it carefully, he told the student; mark it, reread it, and ponder it. It is because this now obscure essay has the seeds of a new way of looking at social life.[3]

[e] Movement RF

It moves. Society—it moves. 

That is the point of Mauss’s brief essay, and it is laid out with the linguistic depth and ethnographic detail that colleagues had come to expect from him. The question behind the essay, as with most of Mauss’s works, is deceptively simple. Why do Eskimo groups winter in one place and summer in another? No good Durkheimian would expect anything but a social answer.  As Durkheim himself maintained, there is a perpetual need of re-formation in all social groups. They are anything but static, even in the most traditional societies. 

Even the most private and sequestered of groups—isolated from others for months at a time—has a powerful need for re-formation and social connection. In the most basic sense, outsiders need to be brought in as marriage partners and child bearers, lest the inner group shrivel, literally and figuratively. Moreover, there is a need for social gathering that comes from the intermixing of groups that usually are hostile to—or at least distant from—one another in several respects. Marcel Mauss makes the point that there is a powerful need for integration and dispersal that goes to the very core of human society.

[f] Dispersal RF

Society moves.

Mauss’s elegant arguments and fine use of ethnographic example gives Seasonal Migrations its power. He describes the coming together of units of Eskimo society in almost the manner of a novelist, much as Granet would later articulate Chinese festivals with an enthusiasm that channeled the literary flair of the great French novels of the nineteenth century. Echoing the social theory behind The Gift, Mauss notes the social necessity of changing locations. They can do none other than to gather, revel, compete, and confuse the social order. They can do none other than to disperse and return to their smaller units in order to gather their strength for winter work (and, as Mauss notes, to rest from the stressful short-term pressures of intense social interaction). Movements are not individual or contrived. They are systematic. Social.

          Winter is a season when Eskimo society is highly concentrated and in a 
          state of continual excitement and hyperactivity. Because individuals are 
          brought into close contact with one another, their social interactions become 
          more frequent, more continuous and more coherent; ideas are exchanged; 
          feelings are mutually revived and reinforced. By its existence and constant 
          activity, the group becomes more aware of itself and assumes a more 
          prominent place in the consciousness of individuals. Conversely in summer, 
          social bonds are relaxed; fewer relationships are formed, and there are fewer 
          people with whom to make them; and thus, psychologically, life slackens its 
          pace. The difference between the two periods of the year is, in short, as great 
          as can possibly occur between a period of intense social activity and a phase 
          of languid and depressed social life.[3]

It is as though human society came together in festivals, only to disperse again. It is as though, being alone, the desire for social grouping fairly pulls them toward communion. It is as though the very pressures of communion dictate their return “home.” It is as though social movements, the interactions of people, were based on a calendrical pressure that was attuned to the changing seasons. It is as though the very movements of the calendar (and this is a key point) were dependent on the movements of people. 

Think about that. No, really think about it. 

It will change your life, just as it did Marcel Granet's. Mauss’s analyses of total social phenomena and the movement of gifts and people would have a powerful effect on his friend Marcel Granet as he began his serious study of Chinese texts and two decades of intense scholarly publication between the World Wars. 

Notes

[1] Marcel Mauss, The Gift [Translated by Ian Cunnison] (New York: Martino Fine Books, 2011), 3.

[2] Mauss, Gift, 4.

[3] Marcel Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated with an introduction by Maurice Freedman] (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 22.

[4] Marcel Mauss, Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology [Translated by Ian Cunnison] (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 76-77.

Bibliography

Granet, Marcel. The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated with an introduction by Maurice 
     Freedman]. New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift [Translated by Ian Cunnison. New York: Martino Fine Books, 2011.
Mauss, Marcel. Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology [Translated by 
     Ian Cunnison]. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.

[g] Seasonal RF

La Pensée Cyclique (4)—Gathering the Social

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series about Marcel Granet, "La Pensée Cyclique"
One year ago on Round and Square (2 April 2011)—Theory Corner 1b: Bricolage Redux 

[a] Social gathering RF

This series is dedicated to understanding one of the most fascinating intellects of the twentieth century, Marcel Granet (1884-1940). In an earlier era, he might have been considered (at least by bibliophiles studying tomes ranging from De l'esprit des lois to 呂氏春秋 between the world wars) the most interesting man in the world. For me, he is every bit of that (as we say back home). Granet's range of interests in social theory and Chinese literature were profound, catholic, and engrossing. I hope that (whether you are interested in French, social theory, or Chinese) you will give Monsieur Granet a little bit of your attention. The material is not simple, by any means, but it is an ideal way to grasp how knowledge really works.

Gathering the Social

All of human life, for Marcel Granet, was grounded in the study of society.  All of it.  A common, but nonetheless important, example is the very word for “society” used in China and Japan today—社會 shehui; shakai. Students of modern Chinese know it as a compound that simply means “society,” and forms further compounds such as shehuixue (sociology), shehui zhuyi (socialism), and many others. When those same students are asked to consider all elements of the phrase, as they must when studying the classical language so dear to Marcel Granet, they invariably have to learn that the phrase’s origins are quite different from their current uses. Bear with me if you do not read Chinese, but this is worth it.  

[b] Congregation RF

Hui should be read verbally here. To 會 hui—to gather, coalesce, congregate, commune (the social-religious idea behind it is powerful)—at the 社 she, the grain shrine to Earth, is to form something greater than the individual, something that moves, thinks, and acts differently than a single human mind or body ever could. It is social movement...social thought.

It is also society in its integral and foundational sense. The grain shrine in ancient China was a place to meet, to plan, and to coordinate activities (such as irrigating fields) that went far beyond the individual family’s interests. It was where village life happened. It was also a place to give reverence to the soil that provided all people with sustenance. “Gathering at the grain shrine,” then, implies a concept in which the individual is part of something far larger, and much more profound, than her own private thoughts. It is profoundly social.

Granet, who “became a Durkheimian before he ever dreamt of China,”[1] never left the intellectual roots of his teacher, and this can be seen clearly in the quotations presented in previous posts. It is only those scholars of China with a narrow focus on sinological esoterica (there are more of them than you might think) who fail to see the sociological analysis in all of his writings. Indeed, Granet recognized a few of these types among his own students in the 1920s and 1930s (those who clamored for the mythical even as they grew bored of the social-structural), and routinely bemoaned their inability to see social action in the texts they studied.

It could well be argued that it was Emile Durkheim’s perspective on earlyreligion that had the deepest influence on Granet. By seeking religion in its purest sense, Durkheim sought to understand a set of religious institutions that were generated by the necessities of life. “Necessity” meant life itself, and the way that it was patterned. By studying those who lived close to the land and focusing on year-to-year (and even day-to-day) survival, the basic—indeed, the elementary—forms of religious life could be seen. So Durkheim taught, and his student, Marcel Granet, internalized the point.

[c] Sacred site RF

This is precisely what Granet sought to do in his first two books. Studying the year-to-year (and, indeed, season-to-season) life of the Chinese peasant, he articulates the forces that provided social solidarity and opposition. He gives just as much care to the lonely life in the fields that separated men from male neighbors—and all men from all women—as he does the enthusiastic festivals in which they were reunited at the time of the spring and autumn equinoxes. Using his Chinese texts for specific images, he fully integrates a Durkheimian vision with Chinese social life.

As with the student, so, too, with the teacher. Durkheim’s is a religion of social movement and interaction. It is not a church religion. It is one that is as much a part of the campfire and the agricultural (or hunting) calendar as it is of ritual. This is not to say that ritual is absent, but it is a part of the very life of the people that Durkheim sought to study. Religion was intertwined with their very sense of being, their very sense of acting and moving.  So tired was Durkheim of the intellectual games and esoteric forms of “higher” religion that he despaired of finding the fundamental social origins of thought in them. Try finding the "germ" of religious life in a Catholic mass, he often challenged. 

He argued that you cannot go backward from religious actions that are the result of centuries of historical accidents. So-called "high" religion (Eastern or Western) was a maze of analytical confusion. Durkheim rather found those origins in ethnographic texts dealing with central Australian tribes with the elemental strains of social-religious life that he taught grounded all societies (and all high religions). Granet found them in collections of early Chinese poetry. Their sources varied, and Granet was indisputably the better linguist. Their social analysis, however, was of a piece. Original forms teach us something we cannot learn from present-day religious doctrine and action, they argued.

Granet headed first to the books (the Classic of Poetry was one of his favorites) and then to the fields. There lay his social-religious quarry.

The very statement that religion arises out of social necessity separates the work of Durkheim (1858-1917) and his students (c. 1870-1950) from most scholars of religion in their own time. For Durkheim, the life of Central Australians was so close to Rousseau’s primitive state that their thought would be generated by society itself. This is important, because Durkheim believed that all thought emerges from social interaction, and all theology emerges from human classification. For Granet, early Chinese peasants (and not those who tilled the land when he himself visited China in the early twentieth century) represented China’s elementary forms of religious life, and their greatest communion and greatest shared joy can be found in the very act of gathering at the seasonal festivals each year, where they became, for a moment, something other—something larger and more powerful than themselves. 

[d] Movement RF

Hui, “gathering,” means thinking as an individual—because collective emotions are still processed and articulated by individuals—but moving as a group. It gives a profound sense of integration and solidarity that binds people together who otherwise might be distant and detached. Indeed, for both Emile Durkheim and Marcel Granet, the conscience collective created by such gatherings can be shown only in action, in the movement of people in concert. Shehui (from gathering at the grain shrine through the conscience collective to general ideas about society  and the universe as a whole) implies lifting skirts while crossing muddy streams, carrying meals for an extended family, sharing food with strangers, anticipating competitions against neighbors, and feeling the lure of contact between the sexes. It implies song competitions, archery contests and, in time, the necessity of returning to working the earth and spending one’s time in labor that is divided both by gender and community. It is religion; it is society. 

Watch Granet the literary ethnographer and social theorist at work here. Take your time to see why he is writing in this very strange way. Don't rush. I think he is channeling the flowing rivers of literary and social thought traditions—from Montesquieu and Rousseau to Durkheim and Mauss...and from Balzac to Zola. Take your time.

          The gatherings of rural communities consisted in powerful orgies in which 
          were affirmed, at one and the same time, the strength of the family grouping 
          and that of the political grouping. Marking the beat of the rhythm by which 
          female and male work alternated, the gatherings had the character of great 
          sexual festivals in which were effected the great matrimonial exchanges by 
          which each group permanently held hostages from all the others and sent 
          them delegates. These festivals of peasant harmony were also festivals of 
          marriage and fertility. Marking the time of rustic work, inaugurating the 
          success to come, celebrating the success achieved, they were moreover 
          great agrarian festivals in which orgies of food were mingled with sexual 
          orgies. They snatched people suddenly away from their monotonous lives; 
          they sharply awoke within them the profoundest hopes to be conceived by 
          an agricultural people; they excited the creative activity of inner life to the 
          highest degree. The practices and beliefs born of this extraordinary activity 
          governed the development of Chinese religion: public and family cults, 
          ancestor and agrarian cults, even the cult of heaven, emerged from these 
          festivals of human and natural fertility in which the domestic spirit was 
          revealed in all its strength while the sense of society was created.[2] 

Granet is here the poet of social gathering and dispersal, but the foundations of his lyric lie in a combination of those very texts that he hurriedly packed into his bags as the fledgling Republican government took its place in Beijing in 1912 in the aftermath of the Qing dynasty’s fall. It cannot really be understood without understanding the sociology behind the sinology…behind the sociology…which in turn lies behind more sinology—all of which lies behind a description that, to my mind, is an outpouring of love for these two magnificent traditions, which were only in their second (or possibly third, depending on how you want to count) generations as objects of Western intellectual concentration when Marcel Granet began to study Chinese society and thought.

Notes

[1] Marcel Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated with an introduction by Maurice Freedman] (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 7.
[2] Granet, Religion, 34.Italics mine.

Bibliography

Granet, Marcel. The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated with an introduction by Maurice 
     Freedman]. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

[e] Dispersal RF

Hurtin', Leavin' and Longin' (46)—Good Ole Boys

Click here to read the introduction to the Round and Square series "Hurtin', Leavin', and Longin'..."
One year ago on Round and Square (1 April 2011)—Theory Corner 1a: Bricolage

[a] Memory RF

We are going to look at longin' today. We are staying with the wistful strands of that overall theme for another week, and this song is all about relationships—just not the kinds you might have come to expect among the generally painful themes of this series. The lyrics here are deep, tender, and resonant—wrapped into a bundle of memory. If the term "good ole boy" has a particular kind of red-state, pickup-drivin', beer swillin', shotgun packin' imagery for you...well, you've come to the wrong place. You won't find any pickup testicles here. Not a one.

[b] Immediate RF

Bob McDill and Don Williams are here to mess with easy preconceptions of what we now think of as territories of red and blue. Bob and Don are not, to be sure, urban liberals pretending to know what "country" is all about (that would be a good description of most country radio these days, and it is why most of it is no better than swill).

No, you'll see thick nuggets of southern life sprouting up throughout these lyrics. What separates this song from your average "country identity" ode is its immediacy. There are real chunks of autobiography here, and for every Stonewall Jackson image you will see, further down the lyrical road, a Thomas Wolfe reference. This is as close to autobiographical realism as it gets in country music. Dirt-kickin' mimesis, as it were.

Take a listen, and leave your preconceptions at the salo(o)n door. Either kind of either kind. If you're packing Fox News or MSNBC firepower, take them out of the holsters and leave them on the table (yup, that little ideological featherweight near your left ankle, too, mobster-boy). You'll get a claim check to pick them up on your way out. No spin here. Just listen...and read.

Good Ole Boys 4:00 

Good Ole Boys Like Me

Songwriter: Bob McDill

Artist: Don Williams

When I was a kid Uncle Remus he put me to bed
With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head
Then daddy came in to kiss his little man
With gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand
He talked about honor and things I should know
Then he'd stagger a little as he went out the door

CHORUS
I can still hear the soft Southern winds in the live oak trees
And those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me
Hank and Tennessee
I guess we're all gonna be what we're gonna be
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?

Nothing makes a sound in the night like the wind does
But you ain't afraid if you're washed in the blood like I was
The smell of cape jasmine through the window screen
John R. and the Wolfman kept me company
By the light of the radio by my bed
With Thomas Wolfe whispering in my head

Chorus

When I was in school I ran with a kid down the street
But I watched him burn himself up on bourbon and speed
But I was smarter than most and I could choose
Learned to talk like the man on the six o'clock news
When I was eighteen, Lord, I hit the road
But it really doesn't matter how far I go

Chorus

[c] Past wince RF

What do you do with good ole boys like that? It's as though Mr. Williams is saying "take that and put it in your preconception pipe and smoke it." Uncle Remus and Stonewall Jackson are likely to have made knees jerk all over the countryside. Mine too; I think my knee knocked over the table. Back in 1982, when I first heard the song, I scoffed at the first verses and didn't take it seriously again until a decade later (when I finally "got it"). Mix in a little "washed in the blood," and we can tuck this little ditty right into our stereotype files, can't we?

But then, if the lyrics in the first verse seem problematic, why do we keep listening, just like I did thirty years ago? I listened back then, but I didn't hear. Still, something stuck. Bob McDill's lyrics are haunting; Don Williams and his velvety voice hung with me like a magnetic field. And if we do (finally) keep listening, the story gets a little bit more complicated—more layered and textured with every line.

It's a real life, told in a particular cultural form (the "memory song") over several scenes, and in just four minutes (with chorus).

[d] Rural (WPA) RF

I would take issue with anyone who can simply peg this song as back country-hokum, as many sophisticates do with all "country" music. On the other hand, don't be too hard on yourself if you don't understand what's the matter with Kansas or how one could go (sort of) deer hunting with Jesus. You might find it interesting that even the songwriter, Bob McDill, would not have written this song when he first started out in Nashville. Back then, he wrote what he thought was "country" music, and failed. He came to understand that the failure lay in running from his origins and from the genre.

Driving along the lonesome road one day (this is how I imagine it)—a complete failure in the songwriting business—McDill heard George Jones's A Good Year for the Roses. Then he got it. He realized that he had to love (good) country music in order to write it well. He couldn't fake it, and he realized that he didn't need to. He had everything he needed in his past and his memory. Daddy, gin, Hank Williams, and cape jasmine—all there.

Those who don't know me very well might think that my opinion comes from a certain partisan strain that I just can't hide—a need to defend a kind of country culture. No, far from it. I was ready to typecast this song in 1982, and would have had no problem tossing it into the ash heap. I couldn't though, and precisely because what is derisively termed "the dustbin of history"...is history.

You see, I study history. For a living. Studying history seriously (not just so that we can bolster our preconceived ideas) causes all sorts of problems for us mortals. It doesn't take long before we start to see that the world is complicated. Really complicated. Individual lives are woven in webs of social relationships and shared meanings, and we begin to realize that the way we look at the world today can't be transplanted onto the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s or beyond. We can't just plop into 1955 with our orange Gore-Tex vests and run with the in-crowd.

[e] Memory RF

So Uncle Remus and Stonewall Jackson give way to those Williams boys (Hank and Tennessee). Daddy is serious, loving, didactic, and drunk. The wind howls, but he's safely washed in the blood of the lamb. Off to sleep he drifts with John R., the Wolfman, and the gyrating cultural changes of rock (and roll). And Thomas Wolfe, for homeward-looking angels' sake.

Whoa.

It keeps on going. This is no facile ode to the farm, no little streetcar named simple country desire, no catharsis on a hot tin roof. The line that floors me to this day is "...learned to talk like the man on the six o-clock news." This is profound and, for me, quite poignant—a kind of Hunger of Memory for a country boy the world could easily stereotype...and dismiss. He makes life choices and practices diction while reading Tennessee Williams and Thomas Wolfe.

Pure country, huh?

Still sound simple? All of a sudden, I am thinking back to my own childhood, and certain books on the shelf that today would make me (and my parents) wince a little. What if I wrote a song about being lulled into sleep? How do I explain Kipling...and Kim?...or (found in grandma's attic) a story about tigers racing themselves into butter around a tree? As "progressive" as it felt to go to school in Madison, Wisconsin during the Vietnam War (we took the entire day off in elementary school to talk about the Kent State shootings) and to discuss anthropology and English literature with my parents (teachers 24/7), none of us would look at what we read and what we said in the 1960s and 1970s and say "that's exactly how I would say it—or even think it—now."
Note—Don't give up on Kipling.

Nope. Times change, and that rusty cliché is a lot more important than most of us realize. Study more history if this doesn't make sense. Really...study it.

[f[ Unexpected RF

So how do we combat this kind of "presentist" provincialism? There is only one way, it seems to me, and it lies in taking the past seriously, writing about it honestly, and letting partisans (of "either" persuasion) rant all they want. This is not new. Michel de Montaigne clearly understood that rich, layered detail always worked better in his Essais than prefiguring a story that would appeal readily to a perception of what readers "like."

Do you sense a parallel to my criticism of almost all Top-40 country music these days?

It's not just Montaigne, either. The godfather of the modern autobiography, Jean Jacques Rousseau, understood this implicitly at first...then quite explicitly as time went on. It is as though he wrote the following lines for interpreters of Good Ole Boys Like Me.

          I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose 

          accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals 

          with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself. I know 

          my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been

          acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim

          originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she 

          formed me, can only be determined after having read this work.

          Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the 

          sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I 

          acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity 

          have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, 

          added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, 

          it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have 

          supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never 

          asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared 

          myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous and 

          sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Power eternal assemble 

          round thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to 

          my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my 

          sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the
          wanderings of his heart, and, if he dare, aver, I was better than that man.[1]

[g] Forgotten RF

These words have had a greater influence on personal writing than perhaps any other in the Western intellectual tradition. Bob McDill seems to channel them in the lyrics, and Don Williams brings them to life. Tell it (Rousseau had a comparative handle on stuff that made readers blush), craft it (it is your memoir, and you have choices), and mean it.

That's autobiography. That's autobiographical song.

***  ***

The challenge in finding an East Asian poem, for the second week in a row, is too easy. And, for the second week in a row, I am determined (against all juxtaposing precedent) to take the easy path. There is method here. This kind of wistful, autobiographical lyric is so important to the Chinese poetic tradition that I want to show how it works. As I did last week, I am just opening the book to the "lyric" (詞) section and picking something. It is that prevalent...and that significant. While I would not expect this single (set of) lyrics to be "just like" Good Ole Boys" (and the very first line can only be understood by a Daoist), I trust that the tonal similarity will be clear enough.

   Tune: "Pleasure in Front of the Hall," Two Songs

     Lu Zhi (c.1246-c.1309)

                              [1]

     Be a loafer—

     Wash off the dust of fame and gain in the vast waves,

     Turn my head away from distant Ch'ang-an

     Content with my lot and my poverty.

     If I do not wear a turban and socks, 

     Who will blame me?

     Nothing disturbs my heart;

     I keep company with mists and clouds

     And have wind and moon for neighbors.

                                       —Translated by Sherwin S.S. Fu

                              [2]

     Wine in the cup is heavy.

     A calabash of spring color inebriates this old man of the mountain,

     A calabash of wine presses heavily on the flower stems.

     Following me, boy,

     Even when the calabash is dry, my merriment does not end.

     But who is with me

     To accompany me to the dark mountains?

     It is Lieh Tzu who rode the wind.

     Lieh Tzu rode the wind.

                                        —Translated by Hellmut Wilhelm[2]

Notes
[1] Jean Jacques Rousseau, Confessions [Translated by J. Cohen] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 35.
[2]  Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo, Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1974), 419.

Bibliography

Liu Wu-chi and Irving Yucheng Lo. Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry. 
     Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1974.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Confessions [Translated by J. Cohen]. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005.

NEXT
Sunday, April 15th
Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down
We hit the hard stuff in two weeks. "Tonight," the bottle let Merle Haggard down. We'll examine the implications for liquid medication and memory.

[h] Contemplative RF