The Books of My Life: Kibbutz

 

When I was young in the 1970s I, if memory serves, I recall that I romanticised the Israeli kibbutz movement, specifically the "secular" Israeli kibbutz movement, and I romanticised "secular" Zionism and, as a logical consequence, the state of Israel. However, experience with the kibbutzim in the 1970s along with rising cynicism related to the anti-Vietnam war movement, governmental responses to the peace movement, government and corporate lying, capitalist flim flammery, the negative as well as positive wages of secular and religious zionism, and a host of other de-romanticising currents in the post-sixties era, cured me once and for all of romanticism, utopianism, saint making, and a missionary zeal to change the world, at least beyond the occasional armchair intellectual varieties of each.

Despite all of this I still have an interest in communal movements like those of the Hutterites, which has been around for hundreds of years, and the kibbutzim, both of which show that there are viable and workable political, economic, and cultural alternatives to dominant and mainstream forms of political, economic, and cultural organisation and action. Given this continued interest in the kibbutzim, moshavim, and workers cooperatives, it should not be surprising that I finally got around to reading one of the classic works of social science on the kibbutz, Melford Spiro's Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, augmented edition, 1970. Kibbutz would turn out to be the first of a three-book trilogy Spiro would write and periodically update between the 1960s and the 2000s. Kibbutz was updated in 1963 and 1970. The second, Children of the Kibbutz, was published in 1958 and updated in 1965 and 1975. The last, Gender and Culture: The Kibbutz Revisited, was published in 1979 and updated in 1996.

All three of Spiro's works on the secular and socialist kibbutz he gave the anonymous name Kiryat Yedidim to, are grounded on Spiro and his wife's almost a year's worth of ethnographic fieldwork in 1951 at Kiryat Yedidim and periodic returns to the kibbutz in the 1960s and 1970s. Spiro's Kibbutz, however, is not simply an ethnography. Spiro not only explores the contemporary economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of Kiryat Yedidim during the year he was there, he also explores the history of Kiryat Yedidim and its relation to broader Israeli societym if too briefly. Spiro provides us with a short prehistory of Kiryat Yedidim. He explores the romantic, romantic socialist, and romantic zionist background of Yedidim's founders who immgrated from Poland to Palestine in the 1920s. He explores the harsh environment of central Palestine that the kibbutz grew up in and the changes it experienced as it grew up. He explores the communal agricultural dominated economic system of the kibbutz. He explores the participatory democratic political organisation of Yedidim with its rotating offices. He explores the migrations or aliyas of later generations to the commune and the cultural tensions this sometimes brought.

Spiro's attention to tensions point up the fact that Spriro's Kibbutz is not grounded in a purely equilibrium, consensus, or static approach to social and cultural formations. While Spiro notes, for instance, that high social status attached to agricultural work in a commune where the founders romanticised and celebrated agricultural work and going back to nature, he also explores the lower status service sector of Yedidim and the need to rotate these jobs because many did not want to do them, and the tensions that seemed to be inherent in this sector of the Yedidim  economy. He explores the somewhat gendered, as we would call it today, nature of the service sector and the tensions this brought. He explores socialisation practises in the kibbutz, particularly as it relates to child rearing and schooling, and the tensions these sometimes brought.

One of the most interesting, at least to me, aspects of Spiro's Kibbutz is his contention, a contention I find compelling, that Kiryat Yedidim and other similar kibbutzim, are akin to religious sects. Religion, after all, at least on one level, is about meaning and "secular" social forms, including social movements like the kibbutz movement, also give meaning to the world around and to their place in the world around them. As Spiro notes, the meaning system, some of the symbol system, and some of the rites of passage associated with the commune, were grounded in a meaning system that was messianic, millennial, millennialist, evangelical and ethnocentric. Yedidim's kibbutzniks believed that were a city on a hill, a light unto the world, an instantiation--Yedidim and other kibbutzim created an institution and organisation grounded in these cultural ideologies--of how the world could potentially be not as it was but as it was realistically imagined and concretely put in place.

Spiro's book is not without its problems. His prophetic abilities, for instance, are sometimes less than perfect as he himself notes in the updates to the book. In the original text of Kibbutz Spiro contends that a transformation in Yedidim's Soviet Union as messianic and missionary ideologies would lead to a transformation of the commune, if not its end, if they declined and vanished proved wrong. He emphasises the tensions female "gossip" brought at Kiryat Yedidim but he does not explore the role male "gossip" might have played in raising tensions in Yedidim. He doesn't square the circle between the respective impacts of nature and nurture, broader economic, political, and cultural factors, on tensions over family, child rearing, service sector work, which was becoming gendered with more women doing service work and less doing agricultural labour, as I noted earlier. He doesn't compare the kibbutz movement with one of its perhaps closest relatives, Hutterite communes and communalism. He doesn't give as full an exploration and explanation of the various kibbutzim federations as I would like to have seen. Still, Spiro's book is a very interesting historical, social and cultural anthropological, and sociological approach to the Israeli commune movement, and I highly recommend it. Essential reading for anyone interested in alternative social systems and communal and cooperative forms of organisation.

 

Never Was a Cornflake Girl: Thomas Bender, Community, and Identity

I wrote this essay for a seminar on community at SUNY Albany in 1996. As someone interested in the social and cultural construction of reality I have long been interested in community, identity, and the social and cultural construction of community and identity. As someone interested in social movements like Mormonism and Quakerism I have long been interested in how identity construction and community construction are at the heart of the construction of social movements. At the heart of social movements, of course, is a cultural and ideological core. This paper interrogates most of these long term theoretical concerns of mine.

Thomas Bender's Community and Social Change offers us social and cultural theory fleshed out with history. More than anything else Bender’s book takes to task the tendency in social science theories of community to read the famous gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction of the influential German theorist Ferdinand Tonnies in geographical and evolutionary terms.

For Bender, it was the influential University of Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth who popularised the notion that face-to-face rural communities (gemeinschaft) were declining in the face of the growth of urban industrial societies (gesellschaft). For Wirth, and others who followed his lead, urbanism, operationalised in terms of demographic variables, specifically, increasing population, increasing population density, and increasing heterogeneity, undermined traditional communal ways, and gave birth to new urban lifeways, new lifeways that replaced these earlier primary forms of social interaction with secondary social contacts, weakened kinship bonds, and undermined the traditional bases of social solidarity.

Bender takes exception to Wirth’s geographical and evolutionary conception of the community/society binary. Instead he argues that Tonnies conception of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft was both geographic-evolutionary and, the aspect which Wirth ignores, behavioural, He argues that it is this behavioural aspect of the community/society split that allows us look at community and society historically rather than evolutionarily.

Bender explores American community history from colonisation to the twentieth century to foreground how important this behavioural understanding of community and society is. According to Bender it was in the late eighteenth century that America experienced a bifurcation in lifestyles. After the ratification of the Constitution two different lifeways, local lifeways arose in the United States, one local in form and grounded in face-to-face interaction and characterised by “consensus”, and another, national in form and characterized by conflict and the idea of majority rules.

There is something to be said for Bender's volleys against the geographic-evolutionary conception of the community/society binary popularized by Wirth. Bender’s attacks on theories of community like those of Wirth, approaches which are grounded in unilinear assumptions, assumptions which posit the straight line movement from gemeinshaft to gesellschaft, from traditional to modern communities, from rural to urban forms, assumptions which continue to impact the contemporary intellectual and academic mind.

Bender is not the first theorist to raise questions about unilinear models of the evolution of community and society which posits that community had been replaced by society, that face-to-face interactions had been replaced by secondary ones. Unilnear models in general, unilnear models which were prominent not only in community theory but in the understanding of the evolution of humans and human life in general, came under serious attack in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s in the writings of Franz Boaz and Julian Steward and by the 1960s had lost its dominant place in anthropological theory. So, to some extent, Bender provides us with yet another example of someone critiquing a social science paradigm that had already gone out of style by the time he criticised it.

Timing apart Bender does offer a systematic account of the problems with the geographical-evolutionary model of community and proffers a behavioural model in its place. But what he doesn’t offer us is an exploration of that historical, social, and cultural phenomena that manufactures community, identity and its social, cultural, and historical construction.

In recent years anthropologists have begun to focus a significant amount of attention on the nature of identity construction. Cultural Anthropologist John Comaroff, for instance, distinguishes between two major identity forms, the totemic and the ethnic. Comoroff sees the former as an identity structured on the belief in a common ancestral origin, in a common ancestry traced to some animal or plant in the natural environment. Totemic identity structures, claims Comaroff, are less likely to demonise the others whom they mark themselves off against than is that other form of identity type Comaroff delineates, ethnic identity structures. Ethnic identity structures, like totemic, are grounded in ideologies of common ancestry. They are generally geographical in nature, tied to soil, and they are often biological in form, tied to blood. Ethnic identities are generally grounded in a distinction between "us" and "them", with the "them" oftentimes characterised in very negative almost demonic terms.

While Comoroff's distinction is very interesting and helpful it does not go far enough. Identity can be defined in a variety of ways, biologically, economically, politically, geographically, ideologically, culturally, ecologically, religiously, historically, and so on. In the modern West with its complex social and cultural formations, for instance, identity can even be defined in terms of all of these above simultaneously. From 8am to 5pm on weekdays we may define ourselves as an employee of Wal-Mart. From 10am to 10:05am on Election Day we may define ourselves in terms of ones political party. From 11am to 3pm on Sunday we may define ourselves as a devout ward going Mormon. In the first few weeks after an attack on our nation we may define ourselves as a patriotic lets respond to the attack citizen of the United States. If we are a student at the University of Utah we may define ourself as a "Ute" and mark ourself off against that evil "Cougar" other of BYU to our south. When with parents we may define ourselves in biological terms, as a daughter of the Demerest family. When trying to get into Harvard we may attempt to define ourselves in minority categories that have been constructed in the nation in which we live. Clearly, identity and thus community, which is built on the broad shoulders of identity, are very complex phenomena and require further systematic study. And it is certainly far more than just a behaviour. It is a culture and a complex of meanings.

One last criticism of Bender's work, like many classic works in early American religious history, works which often place Puritans at the centre of their narrative tales--yet another unilinear academic tale--Bender place New Englanders and their communities in the very centre of his analysis. He asserts that the similarities between New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake, and the South were more significant than their differences. Even he has to admit that the differences were significant as well, however, particularly when he deals with the differences between the American North and the American South. Nevertheless, he asserts that the back country areas of the South were as locally oriented as the New England colonies and states. But the question remains whether they were locally oriented in the same way? Bender really does need to develop a cultural notion of community in addition to his behavioural notion for if he did he might see that the behavioural similarities are no less important than the cultural variations.

Sources:
Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978)
John Comaroff, "Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practise, and the Signs of Inequality"; unpublished paper in possession of the author
Julian Steward, Evolution and Ecology: Essays on Social Transformation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978)
Julian Steward, Theory of Cultural Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990)

We Love the...Musings on Sport, Identity, and Community

I happened to catch an interview between PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley and long time sportswriter and author of books on sports and, interestingly, Miss America, Frank Deford this afternoon on PBS World. One of the things Deford said to Tavis which I found interesting and which has long intrigued me, was Deford's claim that sport helps create community even in a place like the United States which historically has had a somewhat difficult time creating a sense of national identity and national community. Sport, in other words, can and often times does play an important role in the civil religions and civic national cultures of nations, modern or traditional.

I agree wholeheartedly with Deford's general point. Sport can and often does play an important role in national identities and it can and often does play an important role in the civil religion of modern nation-states. All one has to do is look at how important football is to Brasil's national identity and civic culture, how important rugby is to New Zealand's national identity, an observation made even clear, if further proof were needed, during the 2011 Rugby World Cup held throughout New Zealand, and how important cricket is to the national identities and civic cultures of India and Pakistan, two nations with a long history of conflict and tensions with one other who faced off against each other in the quarter final of the Cricket World Cup in 2011 leading to spikes in nationalism in both nations.

Where I disagree with Deford is with respect to the role sport plays in American identity and community. When it comes to sport in the United States the US is rather parochial or exceptional. The sports that have and continue to dominate the US sport landscape and which appear in regular rotations on ESPN and Fox television and sports radio, are football, basketball, and baseball. Historically speaking all three of these sports have been played largely only by Americans, at first White Americans something that tells you about American racial history, and played largely only in the United States despite claims that baseball's championship series is a World Series and that the NFL's championship series is the Super Bowl.

I do, of course, realise, that American basketball and baseball have become more international both in competition and in participation since the 1960s but compared to football, real football, the game Americans call soccer, rugby, and cricket, international basketball and baseball competitions--there is now a baseball world cup--remain relatively minor sports compared to the world's international sports, and of relatively limited interest to Americans. This American disinterest, by the way, may change if the US football team gets into the final rounds and final games of the football World Cup given the relationship between sport and nationalism, however.

What is so interesting about America's dominant sports of football, basketball, and baseball is that the US really doesn't have a national team or a national team that really matters to most Americans despite the Olympics and the baseball World Cup. American football teams, basketball teams, and baseball teams are city based and draw their support from their cities, their states, or their regions, despite claims that the Dallas Cowboys are America's team or despite the existence of Red Sox or Yankee nation (we shouldn't forget that some places in the US have no major league sports teams or that some jump on the sports team bandwagon for a variety of reasons including winning records and we must not forget migration). They thus are grounded in city, state, or regional identities and communities. They are also often ethnocentric. Fans of the Red Sox, as the photograph above suggests, are not necessarily favourably disposed to other baseball teams or their fans particularly if the team is the New York Yankees and the fans are New York Yankees fans. So, in the end, America's dominant sports actually create tribal identities rather than regional identities.

In this American sport teams mirror or reflects, on the microsociological level, what has long been a fact of life in the US on the macrosociological level. The United States, since its inception, has been a country divided regionally between North and South and, as a result, has had significant regional identities, particularly in the South. Expressions of this Southern regional identity can be found in Southern religion and Southern sports, particularly football, the major sport in the South, a sport that is part of the Southern civil religion as the Southern mania for the SEC, the South Eastern Conference, the major Southern collegiate football conference, shows. What impact all of this has had or continues to have on a common American identity and sense of community is an interesting question that deserves further analysis.

What also deserves further study is the role sport plays in vanity identity. How was the great Jewish baseball player Sandy Koufax perceived in the American Jewish community particularly after he refused to pitch the first game of the 1965 World Series between his team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and their opponent, the Minnesota Twins because it landed on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest holy day in the Jewish ritual year? What role does Black success in a variety of sports play in Black identity in the US? How does Usain Bolt's and the success of other Jamaicans in track and field impact the Jamaican sense of self and Jamaican nationalism?

Some Concluding Thoughts on Rugby and Nationalism
One of the things, by the way, I have become increasingly interested in, partially because I have an interest in contemporary settler societies like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and partially because I have developed an interest in rugby to go along with my interest in real football, soccer, is the role the All Blacks, the New Zealand rugby team, plays in the New Zealand civil religion. I offer the following as a dossier in how sport and nationalism intersect and intermix in the civil religion or civic culture of a nation, a modern settler society nation.

Exhibit number one: Neil Finn and Friends, "Can You Hear Us". “Can you Hear Us” was written and performed by Neil Finn of Split Enz, Crowded House, and Finn Brothers fame. It was written in 1999 to celebrate the appearance of the All Blacks in the upcoming World Cup. The video is full of images of the All Blacks including their famous haka, and All Black fans, including the gathering of friends and family to watch the All Blacks in the World Cup imaging themselves, one presumes, doing all they can to help their beloved team win it, thinking about past Kiwi rugby heroes (they come to the door and cary in the sofa), about NZ heroes in general (Xena, Lucy Lawless, who appears in the video is a Kiwi), and dreaming that they one day might actually be an All Black themselves. Not surprisingly the tune hit Number One in NZ where Finn himself is regarded as something of a national treasure.



Exhibit number two: Not surprisingly New Zealand and Australia are rather competitive with each other including on the sports pitch. Sometimes this competitiveness plays itself out on the rugby pitch. Rugby may be New Zealand's national sport but it is not Australia's. That honour belongs to Australian rules football. Anyway, the following promo on Network 7 for the Australian-New Zealand rugby match reveals a lot about stereotypes and caricatures Australians have about Kiwis not to mention about the role national pride plays in rugby matches between the Wallabys and the Kiwis.



Exhibit number three: Here is the TV1 news report on the All Black loss to the French during the 2007 World Cup in Cardiff, Wales. Note the sense of almost religious like devotion and the very emotional response to loss among All Black fans interviewed in Wales.



Finally, here is one of my favourite hakas. This one takes place before the All Blacks-Tonga game and reveals something about nationalism, nationalism and sports, and the role the haka and the Tongan sipi tau play in revving up excitement, much of it nationalist, just before a rugby match.