Manufacturing Tradition
I commented last week on the unholy glee of several URQ bloggers about the apparent decline of Kwanzaa. Over the holidays, I had a chance to chat about the whole thing with a Garinagu friend, visiting from Belize, who holds a doctorate in anthropology. Our discussions gave me a few more thoughts.
To be honest, I alway felt a bit ambivalent of Kwanzaa myself. I’ve never met anyone who actually celebrated it, and it always seemed a bit too manufactured. But my personal reaction, or lack thereof, doesn’t matter. Holidays are supposed to resonate within a particular culture; Kwanzaa wasn’t designed for me, and its imagery and roots don’t reflect my experience, any more than Diwali or Eid do. And its guiding principles sound more like an earnest, didactic policy framework for a small, not very successful NGO than anything inspirational or celebratory.
Festivals have to embody something real. Artificial ones feel like the kind of French vocabulary the Academie tries to enforce to stem the tide of English, inventing words like “hambourgeois” and “bélinographe” instead of “hamburger” or “fax”. Real folks just laugh and use the language that comes easiest – in most cases, the anglicism. Christmas and Eidh are part of Black North American culture as well, and I’ve always doubted that the attraction of “our own holiday” for a politicized fewwould ever replace the tidal cultural pull of of the older holidays.
So the viability of Kwanzaa may be in doubt. But the delight of the more strident URQs for what they perceive as its fading has a very unpleasant stench to it – whiffs of their beloved “stupid darkies pretending to be human” leitmotif, with a foundation of “Why Don’t All These Foreign Freaks Quit Pretending, and Just Do What I Do??” For them, the entire notion of Kwanzaa is risible because it was invented in the sixties by Ron Karenga.
But all traditions start somewhere. Cultures and religions are fond of ascribing noble or mystical roots to their personal celebrations, but in the real world, at some point, some proto-Catholic hesitantly put up his hand (you can bet it was a “him’) in a meeting, and suggested: “Well, we could use little discs of bread, and say something like…”
In fact, I got to see a tradition being born.
The qulliq is an Inuit source of light and heat, carved from stone or made from a reshaped tin can. It burns seal oil, using a small wick of moss or Arctic cotton. This tiny tool, which required careful and skillful tending, would heat tents or igloos, cook food, melt snow for water, and dry clothing.
In the early nineties, two Inuit women from Baffin began to open meetings that they chaired by lighting a qulliq.They’d explain what they were doing if there were non-Inuit in the room. It was a nice gesture, like lighting a candle. And it caught on. They began to get invitations to attend meetings, conferences and workshops to light a qulliq. Other elders began receiving similar inivitations. Gradually over the decade a sort of protocol evolved around the ceremony, including opening remarks and a prayer, and it seems on its way to becoming a well-established part of contemporary Inuit culture.
What’s interesting is that the symbolic lighting of a qulliq, as far as I have been able to determine, has no traditional origin at all; it is not described in any literature, written or oral. Inuit are among the most supremely pragmatic people in the world, and the notion of wasting fuel and wick for ceremonial purposes would have seemed supremely silly to a culture based on hunting and gathering in the toughest environment on the planet. The entire qulliq lighting ceremony in a purely modern invention, a culturally imaginative response to the universal human need for ritual. And it strikes just the right notes: it FEELS right. It’s a new creation, but it does what a ceremony should do.
Will Kwanzaa “work” in the long term? I don’t know. But to mock it simply because it’s a new social invention is foolish. And to dance prematurely on its grave with the vicious glee of a Shaidle is – well, predictable.
Interesting!
On there being a “universal human need for ritual,” however, I disagree. That most people engage in ritual is one thing, but no proof of such activity being universal exists.
I wouldn’t be prepared to defend that thesis before a doctoral committee. I will simply note that every culture I can think of, traditional and contemporary, feature communal activities – somereaffirm membership in the community, some mark rites of passage, and some aim to achieve transcendence, in the Joseph Campbell sense. He once wrote amusingly about a Grateful Dead concert, viewed through mythological/anthropological lens, as a perfect example of community Dionysian celebration intended to evoke a sense of the ecstatic.
When are the Catholics (or anyone else) going to begin blessing the beef jerkey for the carbohydrately challenged Atkins congregants…
Chrystal Ocean
On there being a “universal human need for ritual,” however, I disagree. That most people engage in ritual is one thing, but no proof of such activity being universal exists.
“Ritual” doesn’t need to be a holiday or group activity. It can be something as simple as a family tradition, or even a habit such as having a cup of tea for breakfast. It’s a trend towards the familiar.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about Inuit traditional practices and their current incarnations (vs. sweat lodges, smudging, etc) and I have witnessed this “manufacturing” of tradition. I’m not sure it “feels right”, but I do see an important distinction that makes it different from Kwanzaa.
Kwanzaa was pulled together by an activist using previously unrelated African objects, acts, and ideas in response to, and as a way out of, following the dominant cultural celebrations at the end of the year. In other words, to show independence and separation from the norm.
Lighting the qulliq was started by members of the establishment (whatever their role) using a previously unrelated ritual as a way into the dominant cultural celebration at the start of a meeting. In other words, to show that they were like the other natives who had long established ritual ceremonies for the start of long gatherings.
It’s an easier path to get a ritual accepted into the establishment than it is to be established out of it. Ask Christmas.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking about Inuit traditional practices and their current incarnations (vs. sweat lodges, smudging, etc)…”
Inuit sweat lodges?? Inuit smudging???
No.
Lighting The Qulliq and Drum Dancing V. Sweat Lodges and Smudging.
Landmark case, that was.
@balbulican -