Well, yesterday I posted a trio of dissertations on Kwanzaa and asked what would be some dissertation-worthy research questions about the celebration. Today, I feature one such potential line of research as posed by Amitai Etzioni in a Chronicle Review piece from several years ago.
(Dr. Etzioni has also been a blogger, though apparently not actively since October. But especially see his "Ways We Celebrate" archive.)
Dr. Etzioni places Kwanzaa in the broader research vein that looks at celebrations and rituals and what these reveal about cultures and cultural change:
My colleagues in the social sciences may wish to bring along their laptops, or at least their notebooks, as they join family and friends during the winter holiday season. The ways in which holidays and rituals like weddings and funerals, confirmations and birthdays, are celebrated reveal volumes about cultures and how they change.
The merit of using holidays and rituals as a research tool was driven home to me recently when I traveled to Iran as a guest of a group of reformers. I had long been deeply impressed by the religious fervor of hundreds of thousands of Iranians whom newsreels in the 1980s showed marching in the streets, flagellating themselves with heavy-duty, Hydra-headed whips, drawing blood to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hossein in 683 CE. When I found myself in Shiraz on the memorial day Arbaeen, which marks the 40th day after the martyr's death, I heard that self-flagellations were about to take place down the road, and I rushed there with my camera and notebook. What I found was a well-stylized dance. Young men were eagerly stepping in a circle to the tune of pleasant, if repetitive, music, gently waving slight whips, with which they symbolically touched their well-covered backsides. They did not even work up a sweat, much less draw blood.
I had a little chuckle when I read that, considering some of the consternation recently about Kwanzaa. "There is no holiday celebrated in Africa called Kwanzaa," some complain. "I'd celebrate it, but it seems so complicated," others lament. Or the oddest critique: "It's made up." (Show me some holiday or ritual that is not "made up"--by someone at some time.)
But if Kwanzaa tells us little about Africa, or diasporic Africans' African past, what does it tell us?
Holidays and rituals are the occasions on which our commitment to the values is shored up....Looking at holidays that way leads one to ask which values a given society, in a given historical period, seeks to reinforce.
Such links between individuals, societies, and values are ones that are--and should be--of interest to scholars in a variety of fields. But as Dr. Etzioni points out below, the absence of these links, or their transformation or their disjunctures, are also important foci of research:
Tell an experienced researcher what is being celebrated and how, and that observer will be able to derive some insight into the values a society seeks to uphold. You might object that while people sometimes say a given holiday exists to honor this or that value, their behavior belies what they tell you. Well, that, too, of course, is helpful information. If one concludes that they are merely paying lip service to values they no longer cherish, then it's natural to seek to find out when that happened, why, whether some new ritual has come to take the place of the waning one, whether it is deteriorating for overtly political reasons or more-mundane ones, and so on.
Of course, I was happy that Dr. Etzioni brought up Kwanzaa specifically in this Chronicle piece:
Kwanzaa, for instance, was originally a protest holiday of sorts, invented in 1966, in the wake of the Watts riots, by the black nationalist Maulana Karenga, a professor of sociology at California State University at Long Beach. He devised it to be an alternative to Christmas for African-Americans. He wanted to shield celebrants from what he saw as Christmas's dominant white values -- its European roots and traditions, its contemporary focus on shopping and gift giving -- and to help them reconnect with their African ancestry. An attempt to "reaffirm African culture" (in Karenga's words), Kwanzaa melds the traditions of several African harvest festivals with new rituals meant to embody unity, self-determination, struggle, and other values.
However, over time, Kwanzaa has become more mainstream, commercialized by greeting-card companies and gift giving, and celebrated in addition to (rather than instead of) Christmas. If a team of researchers looked deeper, who knows what ambivalence and variants they'd find?
Indeed. I'm trying to highlight a little of those variants and ambivalences with my Kwanzaa posts this year. And if you've explored the web this Kwanzaa season, you've likely seen more of it. There is nothing inherently bad about variation or about ambivalence. The fact that they exist says something interesting about us as people, families, and cultures. The fact that we sometimes (often?) fear diversity and ambivalence also says something interesting about us. Regardless, there is plenty within Kwanzaa and other celebrations for almost any researcher to sink her teeth into: "Holidays and rituals are so revealing," says Dr. Etzioni, "that it is hard to imagine an aspect of society that they don't illuminate."
And this area has served as fertile ground for past scholars:
Generations ago, holidays and rituals intrigued some of the social-science giants, like Émile Durkheim. More recently, a number of anthropologists have studied rituals and holidays in far-off societies. And a few scholars have turned their skills to American rituals. Elihu Katz, of the University of Pennsylvania, has looked at such practices as reflected in media culture; John Bodnar, of Indiana University at Bloomington, at commemoration and patriotism; Leigh Eric Schmidt, of Princeton University, at holidays and consumer culture; and Penne Restad, of the University of Texas at Austin, at Americans' celebration of Christmas.
I would add that there have been family scientists and others publishing in family journals who have done scholarly work on holidays and rituals. For example, Barbara Fiese has written extensively in this area (see, for example, Family Rituals in the Early Stages of Parenthood, Journal of Marriage and Family, 55, 633-642). Then there has been Ramona Faith Oswald's work on sexual orientation and family wedding attendance. See Who am I in relation to them? Gay, lesbian, and queer people leave the city to attend rural family weddings, Journal of Family Issues, 23, 323-348.) Additionally, holidays, celebrations, and other family rituals have figured into the work of other family scholars--including several right here in McNeal Hall.
But still, explicit study of holidays is not common in my subfield. And of course, explicit study of Kwanzaa is nowhere to be found, at least not through searching journal data bases of family-related journals. This despite the fact that many scholars in my area frequently call for "strength-based" approaches to researching Black families--something that might be achieved through the study of observances of Kwanzaa. And also, this despite recent calls to conduct more research more closely relevant to the everyday lives of families (see Kerry Daly's Family Theory Versus the Theories Families Live By, Journal of Marriage and Family, 65, 771-784.
At the risk of sounding as if, now that my own dissertation research is pretty fairly etched in stone, I now have a case of "buyers' remorse"--looking longingly at all the topics that could have been, I will throw my two cents into the potential topic pot for up-and-coming grad students. Consider Kwanzaa. Not just the history of the celebration within the context of Black power movements. Not just Kwanzaa as a possible tool in righting the ways of errant and potentially errant Black youth. But consider Kwanzaa as a topic for uncovering who Black people and families are at the start of the current century; where we see ourselves as coming from and what our hopes are for the future; how we are constructing or not constructing senses of "community" in contexts that seem to present us with many contraindications for such formation.
I'll return to Dr. Etzioni for the last words:
Young social scientists choosing their areas of specialization should think seriously about joining in this rich vein of inquiry. Rituals, like streetlights, lull us with their repetition and regularity. But the sometimes subtle shifts in light change both our world and how we see it.Posted by perry032 at December 30, 2005 07:44 AM | TrackBack