Room's afire, room's aflame
This wild beast shan't be tamed
In a place without light
There my heart is burning bright
In a place that is unlit
On those walls our love is writ
Room's aflame, room's afire
Two souls sounding one desire
___
You the one who offer respite
Are the same t'keep me up at night
You may ask if I am at peace
But you trouble me without cease
I cannot my injurer name
Without causing her that same pain
Which I now bear nobly, gently
Going on I'll suffer silently
Knowing these caresses are false
Knowing of another in this waltz
____
Circumstance has taken this evening's dance
The sun is down, it may yet rise again
I will wake once more from life's weary trance
I shall leave the unnavigable fen
This waltz is without a choreograph
The hall is dark, the script and parts unknown
Love's a play without director or staff
All in all we all speak a role unknown
True my future's way is as of yet unlit
Though I be now stumbling through hap'ning dark
Where once was none this rhyme has now been writ
By heaven's troth, this is my steeled mark
Where chance has yet looked upon us poor
It shan't be so when I meet thee once more
_______
Things of pain, things of weight
Why must this always be my fate?
I know I'll always
Feel this heat
Come closer you know it's
Getting late
And I've got to catch a train
_____
Stepping off the train in Chennai
We suffer the earthquakes
Of the beggar's shaking parched palm
Our fates run deep along
Its cracks; empty life line
Signing to the world
"I am here" and "I am not"
The hand shoots into view and quavers
I don't know if people do that when they're hungry
If I cover the fissures with a rupee,
Are they erased?
Our pale flesh dissolves into
The beggar's pink palm
We are casteless both.
The train recedes into the river
And they are one too.
_______
I'm never sure if I miss you
Last fall, more than a year ago
You'd introduced me to myself
Now we're still getting reacquainted
After all that.
I lay in a hotel cot
How many times I've thought
I had reinvented myself;
(Only) variations on a theme.
The still cool at dusk after
It all came down at once
The mosquitoes will be multiplying;
This country affords no quarter.
Who have I been since then?
Last night you wore a black dress
To a big party in my dream.
I'm not sure if the fuss was for you or me.
____________
All of these things I feel I was born to
My class, my caste, my whole identity
Of these things I don't which are to me true
If but one of these things were different...
I only ask by whom they're set or sent
All of these things I feel I was born to
I question even what I clearly see
If my name were changed would I still be me?
Of these things I don't know which are to me true
All of these things I feel I was born to
My face, my fate, even my family
Of all these things I don't know which are to me true
My class, my caste, my whole identity
My face, my fate, or my family
Change but one and I don't know who I'd be
_________
It's been awhile since we kept our bodies warm
With twisting promises of suns not near
I thought that I would be the less forlorn
But I guess that was before all these years
They've gone past since that wanton lonely morn
And I guess that was before all these tears
So what can I do with a heart so worn?
What I have been doin' since we were torn,
I'll write myself a sad, sad song, dear
I'll play it on my harp, dear, and I'll play it on my horn,
Maybe the people'll hear and gather
And maybe they'll be the ones
to keep me warm.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Rugby & Sport
Hayden Higgins
The British & Their Sports
Drs. Allison & Tomlinson
9 August 2010
1. Assess the impact of Rugby School on the development and diffusion of British sports.
The boys line up along the baselines and doff their caps for the national anthem. Some of them pay no attention but most sport a look of brave resolution, and when the song is over they make a circle, the ones in the white mixing with the ones in the grey. They hold hands and recite the Little League Baseball Pledge: “I trust in God, I love my country, and will respect its laws. I will play fair, and strive to win, but win or lose, I will always do my best.”
This scene might happen in America but it is the legacy of England. The orderly white boundaries, the mixing of sport and nationality, the construction of formal sporting organizations, and the impression of sport with moral codes of conduct all bear witness to the pervasive influence of English public-school games on the way sports are played today. Rugby School is responsible for a disproportionate amount of this influence, and crystallizes the argument that the sporting revolution in 19th-century England was due to the conditions at the public schools: at Rugby, pervasive moral standard, mixed with surplus time, land, and money, strongly influenced the sequence of events that led to the contemporary state of British sports.
In order to understand how Rugby might have influenced British sports, it is necessary to begin with a brief exposition of the state of sports before and after the proposed date of the “Rugby Revolution” around the time of Thomas Arnold as headmaster at Rugby, from 1828 to 1842. That there was change is indisputable: “there is no doubt that the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War was characterized by a notable transformation in the scale and nature of Britain’s sporting culture” (Tranter 13). Sports before this period are often depicted as little more than riots, but this may be the result of surviving accounts being largely from segments of society that had reason to be upset at the scale and ferocity of these holiday games: “our appreciation of the content of popular recreation is regrettably partial” (Delves 95).
Some things can be known. Griffin reports that “[Football] was undoubtedly one of the most widely played outdoor sports, but it was usually played in a form much closer to the modern game than standard accounts allow” (45) because the accounts that survive generally detail games at big holidays, which were the exception in terms of their scale and rowdiness. Though the game would be hard to identify in any of its local permutations as today’s ‘beautiful game,’ it was true that “Football matches in all parts of England in the early nineteenth century…[were] not only widespread at this time but that it was also played by locally determined, formal rules” (Griffin 47). Football, the most prominent (if not the most British) of sports, is often located as a pre-Victorian source of class struggle (Delves), and sport was even more divided along class lines than it is today.
Sports are today both more widely practiced and essentially different. Most pre-Victorian popular recreation centered around baiting animals and local variants of football, whereas today even foxhunting is illegal and football is a codified game with a governing body with 208 member associations across the habitable continents. What happened to make the games of animal baiting disappear is also in part the story of why ball sports flourish today, and this process happened perhaps nowhere more explicitly than at Rugby School under Thomas Arnold. Delves identifies rational recreationalists and evangelicals as two cultural forces battling over the future of sport (110). The developments at Rugby, and then at other public schools, resolved the dialectical tension between these in the new synthesis—morally inflected organized games, reflecting the Enlightenment fascination with order and progress as well as the middle class’ obsession with morality.
Arnold himself is often cited as the talisman that makes Rugby so specially located at the center of the sporting revolution, but other conditions are likely more important to the public school sporting revolution as a whole. Firstly, many of the games at the center of British sports require lots of land (rugby, cricket), which Rugby had in the form of the Close. Secondly, games required specialized equipment (especially games like Rugby fives), which were paid for by the boys out of pocket—only possible for the sons of the upper crust. Thirdly, and this applies to public schools broadly, “masters atoned [for the strictness with which they conducted their actual teaching] with an almost total indifference to the way in which a boy employed his leisure” (Mangan 18). Fourthly, the link between the public schools and the universities, particularly Oxbridge, allowed organized games to continue their development and diffusion in a privileged socioeconomic context.
Thomas Arnold is not the architect of British sport; his direct influence on sport is at best limited to benign neglect. Any direct link between Arnold and sports “does not accord with the evidence and should be firmly rejected” (Mangan 16). If public schools broadly were responsible for the revitalization of sports, then he is only transitively due credit for this achievement, because “it was his success in projecting a personal moral image that was of considerable importance to the successful growth of the public school system” (Mangan 15). Arnold’s concern was not sport but moral reinvigoration, and his fame is due to the fact that this is exactly what was needed and wanted at that time and place. A restless middle class clamored for an outlet for their meritocratic inclinations: morality and then sport provided it.
Arnold and therefore Rugby in particular are therefore rightly associated with the growing tendency to view sports as an arena of morality. Arnold’s Rugby boy was supposed to exemplify ‘First religious and moral principle, second gentlemanly conduct, third academic ability’ (Rugby School) throughout his life. The phrase ‘gentlemanly conduct’ echoes today explicitly in the FIFA Code of Conduct and implicitly in the public shaming of sportsmen found to have transgressed that code, with all its chivalric connotations. If at Rugby conduct preceded ability, this thread continued on in the sporting world (with particular strength in England) in the form of amateurism. The amateur was expected not only to play without monetary compensation but also to play fairly, without taking pride in a victorious result, the same way that the moral reformers of the Victorian era valued reservation as a virtue. Through the spread of the amateur, ‘Corinthian’ spirit, sport was transformed into an activity that was not only suitable for Christians but a desirable expression of that ‘muscular’ Christianity. Sports became a medium of evangelization, as “Muscular Christians… pursued their policy of a healthy mind in a healthy body, resulting in 25 of the 112 soccer teams in Liverpool in 1885 having religious affiliations” (Mangan, Imperial Mentalities 12). Perhaps the best-known delivery of this message is found in Thomas Hughes’ account of a Rugby education in Tom Brown’s School Days, which through Pierre de Coubertin had an immense impact not only on British sports but on sports across the world.
De Coubertin found Hughes’ novel revelatory and concluded that “from a moral point of view, no system could stand higher than the English athletic sports system” (Mangan 16). De Coubertin would go on to build this framework into the Olympic Games, which are for most sports the pinnacle of international competition. The Olympics for decades jealously guarded the amateur spirit handed down from Arnoldian ‘gentlemanly conduct.’ Moreover, the Olympics tie together nation and sport with moral fabric—one needs only remember cases as varied as that of Kazuhiro Kakubo, the snowboarder shamed in Japan for bad fashion sense, and Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter blacklisted after being caught using steroids. They are moral battles not only on the individual but also on the cultural level, from Jesse Owens’ triumph in the ‘Nazi’ Olympics to the ‘Miracle’ hockey game at the height of the Cold War, an attitude reproduced in the Vitaï Lampada, fusing the battlefield and the pitch. Rugby’s involvement in this attitude is directly exemplified by Hughes’ writing that the Rugby pupil should be “the true sort of captain, too, for a boy’s army” (107). The pitch, along with the chapel and the classroom, was seen as the forge for the muscular Christian who would be the bedrock of British empire.
Though de Coubertin only wished he had been a Rugbeian, many Rugbeians did have a direct impact on the development of British sports. Many of them were like Coubertin in that they contributed to the spread and institutionalization of sport. Writing down rules to a game, as the boys at Rugby did, was not new; disseminating them was. The public-school network extended naturally into the boys’ hometowns and into Oxbridge, and while it is debatable exactly how diffuse the ‘revolution’ really was, there is no doubting the definite contributions of public-schoolers and Old Rugbeians in particular: “It was, after all, ex-public schoolboys and university men who instigated the formation of the English Football Assocation, devised the first common set of rules for sports like rugby and soccer, set up the athletics clubs and the Amateur Athletic Association and dominated Scottish rugby union” (Tranter 26).
The public schools in this time were tied up with colonialism: “It is no coincidence that many of the sports-promoting headmasters were great enthusiasts for the Empire” (Mangan xxv). To that end, Rugbeians and others spread and innovated across the empire. The public school boy was considered uniquely equipped for colonial administration, having been prepared on the pitch with British organized games; Rugby in particular provided the third-most of all schools to the Sudan Political Service (Mangan, Games Ethic 51). Implicitly (in the language of sportsmen as ‘heroes’ and derbies as ‘battles’) and explicitly (Vitae Lampada, etc.), the “spirit of organized games” was promoted as integral to British imperial success. Games were as important to the enculturation of indigenous peoples as it was to the colonizers: at a Maori school in Australia (in mid-nineteenth-century Australia) “the children were said to be ‘quite English in their love of cricket’” (Mangan, Imperial Mentalities 176). As far abroad as Malaysia, “the provision of sports…became a significant part of the whole educational process” (Mangan, Imperial Mentalities 54). The Rugby approach became the standard.
Organized games are especially good at mediating relations in the colonies for several reasons. The sports field is a liminoid space which, as an “autonomous form of expression,” has egalitarian implications and can serve as a stage for social drama (Rowe 134). In the end, organized games can end up providing a common language where there previously was none, whether between a father and son (Fever Pitch) or Methodist missionaries and Maori tribes (Allison, lecture). In India, cricket was the site of negotiations about postcolonial identity, articulated through the medium of a new kind of cricket, “far from…Rugby” (Appadurai 107). Trobriand Islanders, as shown in the documentary film Trobriand Cricket, melds the game of the colonizers in syncretic fashion to fit the local culture in fascinating ways (the home team always wins!). The Rugby style of games made this possible through a concomitant appreciation for the value of standardized rules and the spirit of innovation.
Tom Wills’ contributions to Australian sport encapsulate the primary facets of the Rugbeian influence: regularization of rules, moralization of play through the amateur ethos, and missionary spreading of these changes. Wills was an Australian who was sent to England for public school, arriving at Rugby in 1850. When he returned to the colony, he carried with him a zeal for organized games learned at Rugby. His words in a letter legendary to fans of Australian rules football carry several important messages (Blainey 19).
Firstly, the basis of his request is that the Australians should have a sport to play in the winter to keep cricketers in shape. Implicit in this analysis is that Wills’ vision of the athlete crosses sporting boundaries. An important part of the vision of the amateur, even into the twentieth century, was that he was a generalist (Allison); C.B. Fry is a perfect example. Secondly, he requests a code of laws drawn up by a club. This follows the Rugbeian formula, in which boys kept rulebooks on them at all times for consultation. Thirdly, he matrixes together morality, spirituality, patriotism, and physicality as being uniquely realized in organized sports. “A firm heart and a steady hand and a quick eye are all that is requisite,” he writes, of a sporting rifleman—even though, of course, it is easily plausible that a robot without ‘heart’ could be a much more proficient rifleman than a human with heart but no ability.
The Rugbeian mixture of morality and physicality contains the Platonic notion that the ‘higher’ (i.e., spiritual) can be reflected in the ‘lower’ (i.e., material) and persists to this day. In Major League Baseball, the Players’ Association gives an annual award called the ‘Heart & Hustle Award’. This award captures many influences, of which the amateur attitude promoted by Rugbeians like Wills is only one—but the fact that that influence was strong enough to survive into the 21st century, across an ocean, in a sport that rejects any ideas of European heritage, is incredible. The award was given to Craig Biggio in two consecutive years, in 2006 and 2007. This is not particularly remarkable—Biggio is in contention for the Hall of Fame—but upon closer examination Biggio’s embodiment of aspects of the amateur attitude yields interesting conclusions.
Biggio played for the same team, the Houston Astros, for his entire career, harking back to the days before the especially commercial practice of free agency (in which players often play for many teams in a career) and alumnus’ fierce loyalty to ‘Old Rugby’. Secondly, Biggio was a generalist, beginning his career as a catcher, then becoming an excellent second baseman and finally ending his career in the outfield—not quite C.B. Fry, but within the highly specialized arena of Major League Baseball, impressive enough. Perhaps the most interesting thing is how clearly disconnected ‘heart’ is from performance when one looks up Biggio’s statistics during his award-winning years (which occurred at the end of his career). He was, quite simply, atrocious (Posnanski). A world in which players are rewarded despite playing far below average is possible because of the particular attitude toward sport cultivated at British public schools like Rugby. This paradigm, which values ‘heart’[1]—a certain manner of conduct unrelated to one’s physical ability—persists to this day, perpetuating the legacy of Wills, the Rugbeians, and the amateur hegemony. A survey of major sports reveals that most if not all award players or teams for ‘sportsmanship’ or ‘fair play’, demonstrating the extent to which the Rugbeian project of moralizing sport has succeeded.
If Tom Brown’s Schooldays is an accurate portrait of life at Rugby, it may contain a seed of an explanation for one of sports’ more seedy problems. Since the seventies, increasing numbers of sports have suffered from problems with performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), starting with amphetamines, then steroids, and now human-growth hormone. It is one of the greatest problems in sports. When stories are broken about use of PEDs, they are never broken by athletes themselves; witness the stony-faced denials of knowledge about use by others by baseball players Mark McGwire (“I’m not here to talk about the past), Sammy Sosa (who suddenly lost his ability to speak coherent English), and Rafael Palmeiro (“I have never used steroids. Period.”) and the ostracism of those who do break the ‘code of silence’ (like trainer Brian McNamee and cyclist Floyd Landis). The ‘code of silence’ dominates Tom Brown’s Rugby as well: Tom, when thinking of going to the Doctor, is reminded of the school levy against ‘blabbing,’ as it is “against public morality and school tradition” (127). Though this ‘code of silence’ certainly has roots much deeper than Rugby, the public-school environment encouraged this kind of dark camaraderie and contributed to its presence in sport.
It has been shown that “from 1830 the sports scenario began to change significantly” (Mangan, PPP 11). Of course, sport was not the only thing to be changing “significantly” in Britain during this period: the Industrial Revolution was charging fiercely forward, changing the way Britons conducted themselves at work and in leisure. In some instances, the changes already set in motion by the public school boys were distorted or enhanced by sociological forces springing which had themselves sprung from the Industrial Revolution. As capitalism entered its fitful growth spurt, “sport and other leisure activities became industries in their own right,” changing not only the marketing of games but also the “character and structure…in the interests of Mammon” (ibid, 14). The codification of rules and organization of clubs into organization made profitable cross-geographical matches possible. Industrialists bought into the idea that sport could have a positive moral effect by sponsoring work teams—better the boys be staying healthy playing football than drinking and fighting in the pub, went the logic. The eventual increase in per capita production, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, led to “increased real incomes and leisure time which, in turn, stimulated a demand for commercialized spectator sport” (ibid, 17).
By identifying the influence of other processes on the development and diffusion of organized sport, one can systematically deduce which effects are specifically Rugbeian and which are not. The Industrial Revolution produced countervailing pressures on sport as presented by the public school model. The modern synthesis in sport is largely a compromise between the influences of the amateur hegemony, derived from Rugby and similar institutions, and the capitalist-industrial complex which turned organized games into industry. Using Raymond Williams’ framework of dominant, emergent, and residual cultures (Williams 121), it is clear that today’s organized games are dominated by the professional influence. However, the residual effect of Rugby is especially apparent in those phenomena in sport which have no explanatory basis in capitalism. One interesting example was provided recently when Dustin Johnson quietly accepted a penalty based on an abstruse rule at golf’s PGA Championship, costing him a chance at the substantial monetary reward. Golf, the ‘royal game’, retains a strong code of conduct that governs not only how loud spectators are expected to clap but also how players are expected to behave off the course: witness the recent ostracism of Tiger Woods as evidence.
Beyond the codification of rugby itself, Rugby School leaves an indelible mark upon British sports through its influence on their practice and audience. The loci of its effects are in moralization, internationalization, and institutionalization of British sports. In each process Rugbeian efforts combined with unique circumstances to propel change in sports from peripheral to prominent. In reforming the moral conditions of Rugby School, Thomas Arnold at once reversed its squalidness and set the table for the gentlemanly amateur to become not only the paragon of athleticism but also a moral hero. The admirer of this Rugbeian code of conduct, Pierre de Coubertin, joined with British imperialism to spread this sporting ideal across the world. The trend of centralization of rules, first found at Rugby in the production of rugby rule books, continued to include the founding of governing bodies and prominent clubs in the major British sports. If William Webb Ellis hadn’t picked up the ball in 1823, someone else surely would have; similar logic seems to apply to the accomplishments of Arnold and de Coubertin. That Rugby—its students, administrators, and admirers—was able to impart, in the form of institutionalized, amateur athletics, such a vital force to British social life should count considerably towards its notoriety, even if such developments were often the result of circumstance and happenstance. Rugby provided the proper environment, the soil for the seed of the revolution in sports; the seed itself was planted by the motivation of the boys, and the seed watered by a moralizing middle class and industrialists keen on harnessing the power of sport to attract the attention of the masses.
Works Cited
Allison, Lincoln. "The British & Their Sports Lecture 8." Cambridge. 12 Aug. 2010. Lecture.
Appadurai, Arjun. "Playing With Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket." Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005. 89-113. Print.
Blainey, Geoffrey. A Game of Our Own: The Origins of Australian Rules Football. Melbourne: Information Australia, 1990. Print.
Griffin, Emma. England's Revelry: a History of Popular Sports and Pastimes : 1660 - 1830. Oxford [u.a.: Oxford Univ., 2005. Print.
"History and Traditions." Rugby School, Warwickshire. 2009. Web. 08 Aug. 2010. .
Holt, Richard. Sport and the British: a Modern History. Oxford [England: Clarendon, 1989. Print.
Kerby, Trey. "Unsuitable — Japanese Snowboarder Busted for Bad Fashion - Fourth- Place Medal - Olympics - Yahoo! Sports." Yahoo! Sports - Sports News, Scores, Rumors, Fantasy Games, and More. 12 Feb. 2010. Web. 08 Aug. 2010.
Mangan, J. A. Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: the Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology. Cambridge [Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1981. Print.
Mangan, J. A., ed. The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Viking, 1986. Print.
Mangan, J. A., ed. Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism. Manchester [England: Manchester UP, 1990. Print.
Mangan, J. A., ed. Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism: British Culture and Sport at Home and Abroad, 1700-1914. London: F. Cass, 1988. Print.
Posnanski, Joe. "You’ve Gotta Have Heart." Sports Illustrated. 14 Aug. 2010. Web. 17 Aug. 2010. .
Rowe, Sharon. "Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance" Google Books. Web. 18 Aug. 2010.
Tranter, Neil. Sport, Economy and Society in Britain: 1750 - 1914. Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge Univ., 1998. Print.
Trobriand Cricket an Ingenious Response to Colonialism. University of Calif. Extension Media Center, 1973. Videocassette.
Williams, Raymond. "Marxism and Literature." Questia Online Library. Web. 19 Aug. 2010.
[1] Of course, the award is called the ‘Heart and Hustle’ Award, and as much as it bears the mark of the amateur attitude, it is also meant to reward several values explicitly associated with the professional, mostly related to a willingness to win at all costs. The point, however, is that in the current synthesis of values surrounding the sportsman, the amateur attitude has persisted in important and unexpected ways.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Myers-Briggs
According to the Myers-Briggs psychological testing profile, I am an INFP. What does this mean? Well, that's the topic of this post.
On the face of it, it means I answered a list of questions in such a way as to cause my score to fall to one side of the four axes, qualifying me as Introversion, iNtuition, Feeling, and Perception. Expanding from this basis psychologists make all sorts of suppositions, which are easily accessed online, but a cluster definition of an INFP can be found out pretty quickly:
On the face of it, it means I answered a list of questions in such a way as to cause my score to fall to one side of the four axes, qualifying me as Introversion, iNtuition, Feeling, and Perception. Expanding from this basis psychologists make all sorts of suppositions, which are easily accessed online, but a cluster definition of an INFP can be found out pretty quickly:
- Their internal lives are supposedly especially "tempest-tossed" (Shakespeare is a commonly cited INFP).
- They are good at bridging divides between people and seeing others' perspectives
- They have difficulty, however, working together, and if not forced to will often do projects alone
- They belong to a group of profiles known as "Idealists" (INFP is usually called the "healer" variant)
- They can be prone to put feeling before fact
- Extremely romantic and idealistic
- They can go through perfectly healthy periods of intense independence and intimacy
- They tend to put off details in favor of creating new ideas and seeing things in the big picture
- Once something does capture their imagination, however, they are perfectionists
- They are usually especially adaptable and flexible to new situations until one of their core principles is violated, which does not go by without a reaction
- They are about 1% of the population
- They avoid conflict
Up until that last one, I think most apply to me. But anyone at any time should be wary of these sorts of tests, while simultaneously embracing them for their value in inducing self-reflection. It is important to think about what our defining characteristics are, if only because that simultaneously forces us to think about what our weaknesses are. Moreover, doing so can help us adjust to emphasize our strengths. Nonetheless, we should never commit the naturalistic fallacy of assuming that because this is the way things are, this is the way things should be. Should I work by myself on all projects, as is my tendency (assuming this profile is correct)? Absolutely not. This reminds me of Social Darwinism in that the same logical process would lead one to think that because a crippled child would die, he should die.
These tests are also useful because they show us how other people may see us. I had an experience this past semester where some friends had a personality test they applied to others involving assigning Greek gods and goddesses in accordance with one's personality. I think I was a third Hephaestus, a third Apollo, and a third Hermes. Hephaestus--the gregarious loner. Apollo--the favorite son. Hermes--the trickster. This was helpful because it reminded me that I exist not only in my own mind but as an image in others' minds. It sounds silly to say, but solipsism is the natural state of the human mind, and anytime we venture beyond it we are really trusting more than just our senses.
As for the INFP designation, I think it is fascinating. To say, "I am an INFP" is a valid statement. To say, "INFP is me" would be disturbing because it excludes the possibility of growth. Doing so is fatal; in all parts of life, I generally prefer a nonzero derivative. Life is dynamic, but don't ever confuse moving about for living. The one is momentary; the other unites the past and present in the moment.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Reason to Believe
The aroma of barbecue pork wafts through the glass double doors. At this eatery, every dish comes with a side of coleslaw and the real locals drink RC Cola rather than Coke or Pepsi. The walls are adorned in quintessential Piedmont fashion: occasional steer-heads, license plates from adjoining states displayed like hard-earned prizes, and tokens of bygone years—black and white photos of state-championship high school football teams, veteran’s caps—all hang quaintly from the warm oak wall. The only thing in the restaurant that indicates the year as closer to 2000 than 1950 is a large widescreen television which envelopes nearly the whole back wall; indeed, the set stands out not only for its size but for its modern garishness. It seems to be intruding on the sanctity of the cozy little place; when I scan the scene, my eyes skim over the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, the John Deere salesman making a pitch over a plate of grits, and the wizened old black men at their daily spots on the bar stools, and swivel back to the out-of-place television.
* * * * *
His teammates are anything but a portrait of composure in the face of difficulty. In the locker room minutes before tip, one is retching in the bathroom. Another hides from the suspicious glares of thousands of fans, his hip-hop shielding him from their jeers. Still another is arguing with an assistant coach, pleading for a different defensive assignment. Yet the coach does not waver; it is his job not to waver. One player sits on the bench, removed from the hype of today’s game only by the degree of his mental capacity. That is not to say he is not concentrating on the game--he is concentrating very hard, harder than any of his teammates. Not on anything in particular; yet his is the most solemn silence. Before lacing up his sneakers for the final time, he says a silent prayer. Not for victory but for effort—to do his best.
* * * * *
A shortish brunette waitress accompanies my smoldering pulled-pork sandwich on its journey to my table. But really, the television is the centerpiece of today‘s meal, not the food, and is the reason such a congregation has gathered. The seasonal pilgrimage to watch the conference basketball tournament is underway. A Wake Forest man, strangely familiar and dressed in a black windbreaker a size too small for his overflowing body, its gold trim matching his impish blonde beard, turns to me in despair.
“We never get a break. Really, truly, can a Wake fan get a break in this world? Chris Paul could have won it all by his lonesome-- all his talent for naught. Golden Boy. We haven’t a chance without him. Abandoned. Like Caesar--wasn’t that Caesar? Stabbed by his own men, you know. Famous play, Shakespeare or something. Only here, Chris Paul is our Brutus. Fulfills only half his commitment, leaves as a sophomore, after handing us our most disappointing season in memory. Eric Williams, now there was a fighter. He stayed through trial and tribulation, and he always got the job done. We’ve got some gritty guys even now. They just can’t get a break.”
* * * * *
As of halftime, the number fifty-two jersey hasn’t left the bench all game. A fifth-year senior, his typical assignment consists of guarding the opponent’s best shooter or ball handler. Yet today’s game is too important to allow his offensive ineptitude onto the court; the liability of allowing fifty-two to handle the ball is too great. On defense he is graceful but fierce, product of twenty years of dedication. Announcers call him a shadow, a blanket, a stopper. But when the ball reverses and his team commences to attack, fifty-two can’t catch a pass, or throw a proper one, for that matter. His shooting has become merely mediocre, an improvement over horrendous past years. Despite his perseverance, the offensive situation has never improved, from AAU up to his job as a role-player under Skip Prosser at Wake. He has always been thankful to a fault: Prosser had been the only major coach willing to offer a scholarship to a player whose natural skills were so suspect. He chose Wake on Commitment Day over Georgia Southern and Eastern Carolina, where he had been guaranteed a starter’s spot. Wake had the best educational reputation. He was studying as a double major, Communications and English, and studying hard. Figured if he couldn’t play basketball he might be able to report on it as a job, if he was lucky, for ESPN or something..
* * * * *
I turned away from the Wake man as his homily ran out of gas. I hadn’t a clue what had happened in the semis before his rant, but I could certainly guess now that it hadn’t been pretty for the Deacons. The man was disappointed, sure, but he had never been disillusioned about the nature of the game. I recalled now meeting him the past November, his attitude effervescent and enthusiastic. He’d told me with childlike glee how his father had walked on at Wake Forest in the Thirties, and how he had followed his father to his alma mater. That night he had proceeded down the nostalgic path all the way to present day, and promised an improvement for the struggling Deacons. At that time he had been willing to forgive young star Chris Paul for leaving after his sophomore year for the bright lights of the NBA—dismissed his treason as youthful ignorance.
* * * * *
Number fifty-two walks to the foul line with admirable poise. The play had not been called for him; in the chaos of last-second bedlam the leathern sphere chanced upon his hands, and he had taken the moment by the throat—attacked the rim and was fouled, with scarcely a second to spare. His team was down by two; two free-throws were awarded per regulation. Fifty-two receives the ball from the referee, sweat dripping from his days-old goatee. He gives the ball two bounces and a spin, one bounce each for his dead brother and one for his girlfriend. The spin has no significance. His mind simultaneously, paradoxically, devoid and swirling, he cocks his wrist and extends his elbow. The first attempt is good as gold and he proceeds to the second, a blue-collar everyman in his workmanship, oblivious to the pressure and expectation and emotion and tension and strain and burden that permeate the moment.
* * * * *
My attention swung back towards the television. The broadcast of the NC State- Georgia Tech game for which I had come to see was interrupted. A recap of the day’s events was in order. CBS sports anchor Greg Gumbel introduced us to the Wake man’s plight. Wake had turned things around midway through the second half, begun approximately when the starting small forward came out with four fouls in favor of a defensive specialist. The specialist enjoyed an unexpected offensive outburst late in the game, and held up a stifling defense to keep the game close. In the closing moments fate had called upon the senior player, a number fifty-two, as he was inexplicably fouled, Gumbel narrated. His first shot fell neatly through the nylon—his second try not nearly so, as I had correctly guessed from the Wake man’s tone. It was too bad. Yet I knew I would meet the Wake man again the next fall, or someone very much like him, whose outlook would shift to optimism with the onset of fall just as surely as the oak tree would bear its autumnal gold. The amazing thing is how in this game, at the end of every hard-fought season, people find some reason to believe.
Eponymous
The Confines of My Mind
Here I am alone, excepting perchance Orion and Cassiopeia in the sky above. I am an island in the tempestuous sea of the wild. I am nearly a mile from another human, a speck of intelligence alien to the vast and rocky Sierran topography. Tonight I prove something; and though it may be of some notice to others, it is an internal battle I face tonight[1].
Why I set myself against the forces of the wilderness is a larger question, whose answer lies in my very nature. In brief, I felt I could not know myself without the
challenge-- like Oedipus exploring the mystery of his birth, 'twas a test perhaps alluring for its very existence. Could I withstand the torrents of nature? This was a query I could not allow to rest.
I huddle around my humble fire. A solemnity I cannot laugh at sets in; 'whistling past the graveyard' is out of the question. This overwhelming blanket of graveness envelops me more tangibly than the approaching darkness, and I realize: this is Nature.
Around me as well is the cold. It is so cold that I actually bury the embers of my fire and attempt to sleep on top of them. I have no sleeping bag, except the bundles of heather and pine needles I have prepared. Though the potential warmth of my tent beckons, I do not waver. My fortitude surprises me; though I have before braved such nights as these, I have always previously done so surrounded by encouraging comrades.
My connate curiosity tells me introspection is requisite for growth, and my thoughts turn inward as I attempt to insulate myself from the external punishments I try to endure. In the wilderness it seems almost that I exist only in the confines of my mind as the impersonal breeze howls.
No one is here to acknowledge my presence.
Therein, however, lies a certain ironical comfort; I am alone, but I exist all the same. In the wilderness I am a self-defined entity amidst swirling disorder. Though the night roars on, I am still here. Under the stars so numerous, I am only one so small and my existence may be absurd but some solace comes from this. There is no order to this world except what I can set to it, and therefore, whatever I can possibly come up with is better than what I started off with.
* * * * *
I survive the night. Though I cannot point specifically to one precise moment of epiphany or revelation, I do know that night was significant in ways difficult to explain. What I found that night was that there is beauty all around-- not only in the sky above or the animals around but also in the everyday wilderness and the basic, fundamental, impossibly quotidian process of survival. I am reminded of the weakness of one human and the incomparable strength of many united. The experience is a simple reminder of the natural and intrinsic beauty of life, existence, and survival. I will forever appreciate life in both its humbling complexity and lucid simplicity-- and finally, finally, I have fulfilled Emerson's mandate: self-reliance.
Of a greater pertinence, I realize that I was misguided in my approach to that night; steeling myself for a confrontation with some hostile idea of Nature was not the answer. I learned that attempting to master Nature as if it were some untamed beast is preposterous, for I am as much a part of Nature as any rock, lake, or wolf. To reach a peace with Nature one must first reach a peace with oneself. Whether I could withstand 'the torrents of nature' was irrelevant--what ultimately mattered was whether I could master not Nature, but myself.
[1] I underwent this ordeal in hopes of attaining the John Muir badge of the Boy Scouts, which signifies a stronger understanding of Man's place within nature. The primary requirement is this night alone, without modern conveniences, absent of company from sundown to sunup, in which the Scout must write a poem, climb a tree, eat a loaf of bread (all of it), and brew tea from an indigenous plant (white fir, in my case).
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Anthro of religion final fieldwork proj
Methodology
I chose Lake Forest Church and the Davidson Hillel as my sites of study. I used a participant-observer approach in conducting field research for this paper. To that end I attended two 9:30 AM Sunday Lake Forest services with several other Davidson students on April 18 and 25. I followed this up with several interviews with students as well as informal mingling after the services. To study Hillel, I attended a Shabbat service on Friday April 30 as well as a special Passover Seder service. Again, I also implemented background research and interviews (informal and formal) to gather data. In approaching both sites I strove to capture the entirety of the experience by placing myself as closely to the mindset of the religious participant as possible, to the point of singing, eating, and praying with them.
Davidson College Hillel
The Hillel is a college organization with a student leader and a rabbi, who is part of the college Chaplain’s Office. They invited me to a Passover Seder (a special occurrence) as well as a Friday night Shabbat service (a regular event). At the Shabbat, when I arrived individuals were sharing pizza and talking; very quickly after I arrived, however, the yarmulkes were handed out and we gathered into a tightly-knit circle. The rabbi said some opening remarks, handed out prayer books, and the service began.
The attendees of the Shabbat, myself aside, consisted of the student leader of Hillel, the rabbi, another non-Jewish anthropology student, and a father, wife, and son. The family was a member of the rabbi’s congregation in Lake Norman; the college services are open to anyone who wishes to attend. The paltry turnout was a matter of great consternation to all present. The student leader pointed out that there was a baseball game at the same time, and that eight of the baseball players were sometime attendees. On the other hand, the rabbi spoke generally, offering that it was typical of Jews that “five people will show up for Shabbat and one hundred and fifty-five will show up for Passover Seder.”
This scene did not, as one might expect, occur in a dedicated worship space, such as a temple or synagogue, but rather in a room in the College Union often used for lectures, concerts, and other secular events. When I asked the student leader of Hillel whether he felt there existed any association to be drawn between the historical plight of Jews, especially before the establishment of Israel, and the “homelessness” of the Jews on campus, he found it interesting but demurred, speculating that they would soon have a physical home. At this point the rabbi chimed in, opining that he had a dream of a Davidson that was 10% Jewish. Their estimate was that it was currently 7%; I declined to point out how far this proportion would be from the local or national population.
Because neither the Shabbat nor the Seder (Lilly Gallery) was in a dedicated worship space, it was even more important to take extra steps to evoke a mood of religiosity. Moreover, in a college where most Jews “just try to be white people,” carving out a space of one’s own seems especially important. In the Jewish Shabbat service, there is an opening section of prayer and recitation which is not actually part of the service. The rabbi explained that in big temples, people would continue socializing and become slowly quieter as this section grew to a close, because it was a way to usher in a state of mind that was conducive to thinking about God. The primary signals, however, of a religious mood during the Shabbat are the donning of the kippah (yarmulke) by all males present, and the use of Hebrew to recite the ancient scriptures. Even before all of this at the Shabbat, members sit around eating pizza, with pepperoni conspicuously absent—the first sign of Jewish ownership of the space.
At first Hillel does not seem anywhere close to as modern as Lake Forest; the Jewish services are in ancient languages, after all. The Passover Seder requires Jews to eat various very traditional foods that would be impossible to locate in a normal supermarket. The Seder has particular emphasis on history, as it follows a highly specific order that has been repeated by Jews across the globe for centuries. Indeed, the Seder is extremely unifying in the Jewish community: at Davidson, it attracted around 150 attendees, compared with seven for the end-of-year Shabbat. It is a time to identify with the larger Jewish community, but also a time to identify with sufferers of all kinds.
In several ways Hillel is very contemporary: to cite one striking example amongst many, during the Shabbat one prayer was sung to the highly untraditional tune of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song[1].” In keeping with Reform theology, God was mostly ungendered. Reform Jews also include the matriarchs as well as the patriarchs in prayers. Songs and prayers were performed in English as well as Hebrew and Aramaic. The Seder featured a microphone and was sped up to accommodate the day’s demands.
The Passover Seder is a microcosm of Jewish emphasis on one’s place in history, but for the Reform Jew its meaning has transcended the Jewish struggle to apply to all narratives of slavery, exile, and escape. Seder occurs once a year in the spring to commemorate the scriptural account of the angel of death visiting Egypt but sparing those Jews who made a mark over their doors. This ceremony was marked by an almost paradoxical sense of meaning derived from history but applied to the present. The Seder is highly ritualized, including foods which must be prepared in specific ways, but the rabbi’s version was contemporary and improvisational. It also recognized differences within Jews: there was a choice offered to Conservative Jews to leave to wash their hands at appropriate times (Reform Jews take this command less literally). The story of the Passover was explicitly linked with the passages of several other oppressed people out of slavery, such as the American Civil Rights Movement. This rendered the passage of the Jews out of Egypt especially salient to the modern Jew, who should seek to help others out of exile as they once were. The metanarrative of escape from slavery is considered universal, and—a hallmark of Reform Judaism—social action is thereby made central.
This application of the spirit behind Jewish literature is typical of the Reform tradition, which seeks to take Judaism “to its beginning.” The letter of the law is less important than its essence; the rabbi lamented the many Jews who were observant ritually but not practically (i.e., they left their religion behind when they left the temple). For example, the Shabbat service was conducted even though it did not reach a minyan (quorum), because the rabbi felt all involved knew the thought behind the minyan and could better serve God by going ahead with the service. This project of reclamation will be important to keep in mind as I explore the Lake Forest Church.
Lake Forest
Physically, the Lake Forest building embraces modernity. The church is only several years old, and the architecture is modern. There is a large lobby with lounges on either side. This is where coffee and hot chocolate is served before the service and where bagels are served after the service. This encourages people to mill about and talk to one another about their lives, creating an inclusive community. Entering the main room, one quickly notices several aspects of the room that differ from traditional churches. Firstly, instead of pews, there are rows of chairs, which are angled towards the stage instead of all being parallel as is common. There is no religious iconography: no stained glass, no crosses, no altar or pulpit. This seems designed to create a less hierarchical relationship between the pastor and the people[2]. The stage itself features Ikea-style decorations around the setup of the band that plays Christian rock at the beginning of every service.
Given the lack of iconography, down to the absence of pew Bibles or hymnals, how does Lake Forest evoke a mood of religiosity in its congregation? Whereas other churches may use other visual, aromatic, or linguistic signals, Lake Forest primarily uses music. The Christian rock music played a less explicit but equally effective role in signaling a religious mood. Individuals would continue filing in as the band played its five-song set, which some sang along to. The church augments the music with video: so that the audience can sing along, the lyrics of a song are projected onto the three large screens behind the stage. Lyrics are superimposed upon suggestive imagery that changes based on the mood the song is supposed to evoke, ranging from footage of tornados to depictions of the Passion of the Christ. The leader of the band was clearly a specialist whose expertise expanded past music and on to religious affairs. He guided the service through the songs and prayer up until he handed the service off to the main pastor.
My estimate of the number of individuals in attendance at the 9:30 services was somewhere around four hundred people, twenty-five of which were Davidson students. The congregation at Lake Forest seemed to be diverse in some ways but homogenous in others. As a very modern, nondenominational church it attracted individuals from all kinds of spiritual backgrounds, from nonbeliever to Catholic to Baptist. Because the church eschews identification with a larger denomination, attendees at Lake Forest very much have a relationship with Lake Forest itself; it cannot be interchangeable in the way Catholic services are, noted one formerly Catholic attendee. Whether or not it is correlated with the diversity of backgrounds attracted at Lake Forest, individuals also showed very different reactions to worship practices. Some stood with arms crossed, refusing to sing along with the Christian rock songs, but some sang enthusiastically, with eyes closed and the right hand raised in praise. As this practice of praise is particularly strong in Pentecostal and Baptist strains of Christianity, that it is implemented un-confrontationally at Lake Forest testifies to its inclusivity, which is stressed at every turn.
On the other hand, the congregation was also very homogeneous in some very noticeable ways. It was nearly completely Caucasian. Importantly, there were no attendees that I ever saw or spoke with above the age of about 60-65. Furthermore, based on an admittedly imprecise survey of the cars in the parking lot, the congregation seemed squarely planted in the upper middle class.
I witnessed a testimonial during each of my two visits to Lake Forest. The first was made by a woman in her late thirties. She had been raised Catholic and became disillusioned with the Church, especially after going to college and getting a job. After marrying, she moved into a new neighborhood and became pregnant, but had a very difficult time delivering the baby. The doctors were not sure if it would survive; her neighbors, a group of which attended Lake Forest, invited her to church and let her know they were praying for her family. She eventually accepted their invitations to attend and “began to believe again.” The second testimonial I saw was presented as a videotaped interview that took place in a member’s car garage. The member professed to be a “born doubter,” and said that Lake Forest was the right place for him because it valued individuality in approaches to the Bible over conformity.
Is it possible to convert to a single church rather than a religion or denomination as a whole? If that church has a specific lexicon through which one begins to articulate one’s orientation towards the universe, then yes (Klass 1999:397). At this point it becomes possible to delineate more clearly that there are two kinds of attendees at Lake Forest: those who ‘convert’ and those who do not. The difference is in attitude toward Lake Forest versus other churches. Some individuals clearly believe that Lake Forest’s nondenominational approach is the best way, whether that means the closest to the intents of Jesus or the most effective for the modern world. The testifiers I listened to fell into this camp. Other individuals are at Lake Forest now but have not lain aside identification with a denomination; most of the students from Davidson that I spoke with fall within this classification. They are simply attending the best church for them at the time.
Lake Forest’s motto is “For people who’ve given up on church but not on God.” Considering the organization’s full name is Lake Forest Church, this slogan requires closer examination to avoid seeming like a contradiction, which it is not if understood in the language of the Lake Forest Church itself.
The motto is really very central to the mission of the church. It is featured in large font on their webpage. It was alluded to in both of the services I attended as a point of pride for the church. But what does it mean in practice? First one must figure out what is meant in the motto by church. Church, in this negative sense, is an obligation; it is an institution, and one that exists for its own sake and not for God’s; it is rigid and dogmatic; it is “pipe organs and priests,” in the words of the pastor. Church should not be, says the website, “a weekly gathering or a building or institution, but a living organism.” Moreover, it should not be exclusive: it should welcome “those whom Jesus welcomed.”
Lake Forest’s motto echoed in my mind statements I had heard at a Baptist church some months before. The Baptist preacher, in the heat of his sermon, yelled that “I don’t have religion. I have Christ Jesus!” This seems just as paradoxical as the Lake Forest motto; isn’t Jesus a religious figure? It seems that, like the Lake Forest congregation, the Baptist preacher was trying to distance himself from the “pipe organs and priests” of highly centralized, institutional religion. The similarities between these congregations did not end there. Like Lake Forest, the Baptist congregation was nearly all white. People dressed in everything from shorts to suits. Music at both churches came from electric guitars and singalongs rather than choirs and traditional hymns. Finally, the Baptist service also features audience participation in which individuals give account of positive changes in their relationship with God, just like the testimonials at Lake Forest.
Lake Forest, then, is not the only church leaving behind tradition. Christianity in America is moving in a nondenominational direction: Americans identifying as “generic Christians” increased from 14.8% of the general population in 1990 to 32.1% in 2008 (USA Today 2010). Lake Forest Church is not unique in its presentation of its relationship with organized religion; traditional denominations are simply becoming less popular in America. In the opinion of one attendee, Lake Forest avoids doctrinal squabbles by focusing on the basics and never focusing unduly on esoteric matters. To this end, Lake Forest remains “accepting of the presence of all kinds of views, while never leaving the truth behind.”
Analysis
If religion is articulated through symbols, what are the powerful symbols of the Lake Forest and Hillel versions? This seems particularly difficult in the case of Lake Forest, which, as noted above, purposefully eschews traditional Christian iconography. But being hard to find is not the same as not existing. For example, Lake Forest collects donations just like any church, but does so by passing around a jeans pocket, instead of the ornate bowl found in many more traditional churches. These offering bowls are sometimes adorned with religious imagery (i.e., crosses) and can be made of shiny metals. On the contrary, in the local context, jeans are part of the uniform of the everyman, making the church seem more accessible. Using a jeans pocket to collect offerings is a signal to both the origin and destination of offerings. It is also a conscious contrast with the practices of traditional churches. For the Lake Forest attendee, the jeans pocket encapsulates the crux of the Lake Forest experience in the way it attempts to reconcile the fractured nature of Christianity in modernity by focusing on issues that encompass all Christians.
Passover Seder is highly conducive to symbolic analysis because many of the foods are explicitly eaten to symbolize experiences in the Passover narrative. For example, the bitterness of the maror herbs is supposed to remind Jews of the bitterness of slavery. Likewise, Jews must drink four glasses of wine on Passover, one for each of God’s promises—to “bring out,” to “deliver,” to “redeem,” and “to take.” This imagery is very much focused on the narrative of the Jewish people.
This stands in contrast to Lake Forest, which primarily orients itself (in part through symbols) in relation to today and today only. The referents of its symbols are present in the lives of its attendees. Contrastingly, the referents of the symbols in the Jewish Seder are overwhelmingly situated along the axis of history. The brand of Christianity presented at Lake Forest, in fact, seems to strive for historylessness: “pipe organs and priests” are institutions of the past. Lake Forest is not fundamentalist, but it does seek to erase what it sees as damage done to the Christian endeavor by the Church-as-institution. It does this in part by explicitly claiming to reject almost as rivals the institutions that have built up around Christianity over the years and return to its original mission, stripped to its core.
This arrangement is clearly exhibited by the stories told by each respective congregation. The Hillel focuses on historical stories, particularly ones that explain current practices. The question “Why is this night different from all other nights?” is the anchor of the Seder. The answer to this question—broadly, because it is a night to remember the escape of the Jews from their plight in Egypt—is inherently historical and narrativistic. Much of the discussion at the Shabbat I visited centered around the question of how modern Jews should interpret the laws of Leviticus, many of which seem outdated now. By couching their answer in the historical ‘spirit’ of the laws and discussing the teachings of various Jewish theologians, the Hillel members viewed modernity through a historical, collective lens. When these members talked about Judaism, they referred not only to their own beliefs and practices but to an organic cultural force through which they traced their identity back for thousands of years.
The rabbi might have appropriated a modern reggae song, but only to sing a traditional prayer; on the other hand, the Lake Forest band played all original songs. The stories told by members of Lake Forest demonstrated 1) a commitment to Christianity as an individual experience and 2) a vision of Christianity without history. The testimonies offered demonstrated an emphasis not only on the individual (they were highly personal and personalized) but also on religion as a social resource for dealing with the world. The Jews told stories about historical exiles, but the Christians at Lake Forest worried about a current “culturewide spiritual depression.” Whereas Hillel constantly reevaluates the course of Jewish history, Lake Forest jumps straight to its core principles and applies them immediately. The significance of such symbols as the jeans pocket is directly linked with the audience’s feeling towards its traditional counterpart, and so will only retain power as a symbol so long as disregard is felt for the institutions behind the silver-plated offering bowl. Their Christianity is refashioned anew by every individual, in theory.
As noted above, both of these organizations are involved in projects of reclamation. It should be noted that while reclamation is a part of rhetoric of fundamentalism, neither group satisfies identification with that label (Eller 2007:276). What they are after is the establishment of an accessible social resource through which they can articulate their place in the world and navigate the problems within it (Geertz 1993:106). Both organizations but Lake Forest especially catered to the kind of individuals Levitt identifies as “the questioning faithful” and the “self-help faithful” (2007:97-106): they are focused on satisfying the requirements of modern, diverse individuals and must therefore be pliable enough to meet variegated demands.
Conclusion
Both Hillel and Lake Forest vigorously engage with the resources and problems of modernity. Their approach to history, however, is divergent: Hillel engages with the past, while Lake Forest disengages. In doing so, perhaps each models the cultural background from which it gathers its adherents while simultaneously providing an option for how to continue to understand one’s place in history and modernity (Geertz 1993:93). Meaning can be defined in terms of relation to history, as demonstrated by the Jewish emphasis on narrative, or in terms of relation to contemporary counterparts, as demonstrated by the Lake Forest emphasis on difference in comparison to other existing Christian counterparts (as evidenced in the testimonials).
Works Cited
Eller, Jack David. Introducing Anthropology of Religion: Culture to the Ultimate. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Geertz, Clifford, Religion as a cultural system. In: The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. Geertz, Clifford, pp.87-125. Fontana Press, 1993.
Grossman, Cathy Lisa. "Most Religious Groups in USA Have Lost Ground, Survey Finds - USATODAY.com." News, Travel, Weather, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, U.S. & World - USATODAY.com. 17 Mar. 2010. Web. 05 May 2010.
Klass, Morton, and Maxine K. Weisgrau, eds. Across the Boundaries of Belief: Contemporary Issues in the Anthropology of Religion. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999. Print.
Levitt, Peggy. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape. New York: New, 2007. Print.
[1] Without instrumentation. If I had to pick a more specific topic to study, it would be the musical programs presented in each organization, which I haven’t had room to explore at length here.
[2] However, the front of the room is dominated by a large stage surrounded by three huge projection screens with display his every move during the service, which suggests that the relationship may still be hierarchical but in a less recognizable manner.
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