Community and Society ArchiveWelcome to Community and Society where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the changing nature of community and society in America today. What are the challenges and opportunities these changes represent for the Jewish people in America at the dawn of a new century? To access the Community and Society Archive, click here."The Future of Family and Tribe," a seminar of CLALs Jewish Public Forum held January 28-29, 2002 in New York City, brought together a dozen leading thinkers on gender, gay rights, adoption, reproductive law, bioethics, and aging. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based on participants contributions to the seminar. To view other essays from "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar, click here. This seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement. For more information about the project, click here.
Professor Riv-Ellen Prell participated in "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar. Professor Prell, an anthropologist, is Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota where she holds adjunct appointments in the departments of Womens Studies and Jewish Studies. She is the author of Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation (1999), Prayer and Community: the Havura in American Judaism (1989) and co-editor of Interpreting Womens Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (1989). Professor Prell teaches about ethnicity, race, and gender in 20th century America, and writes about American Jewish life, particularly about Jewish community, gender relations, and religious life. Her contribution to the JPF Seminar follows below.
Memory vs. Markets: The Future of Jewish IdentityBy
Riv-Ellen Prell
What will it mean
to have a culture or be part of a culture in 2015? What institutions, groups, or people
will transmit culture to the next generation? Most
of us who study culture no longer regard it as a coherent, unchanging system shared by all
members of a unified group, undifferentiated by gender, race, religion, or class. Rather, culture is understood as dynamic and
protean. We know that it is shaped by the powerful structural relations of nation, market,
technology, and media. Yet, for all of its
fluidity, culture defines our experience, and shapes our very capacity to negotiate
reality. Without understanding how culture is
transmitted we will be able to understand very little about the future. I will start my
reflections on the future of culture by talking about the past. A few months ago, I sat with my brother and my
dear friend Rabbi Laura Geller in Los Angeles to talk about my father. He had died, at nearly 91, that morning, and she
was preparing his eulogy for the funeral the following day.
I talked about my father as a man with a strong work ethic, and as someone
whose commitment to justice shaped much of how he lived, including which sports teams he
rooted for (those from public universities), whom he employed (people down on their luck),
and his propensity for helping others. My father rarely
walked into a synagogue, but he never doubted that the values and issues with which he
identified were Jewish ones. Why? Because he
was part of a Jewish culture that he learned from the street, from his friends, from his
familyalmost, it seemed, from the air he breathed.
And my fathers kind of Jewishness is familiar to many people I know.
The rabbilike all of the friends and family who know about my father's life or who
heard about it at the funeral that daytold me that the story of my fathers
life is more than just his story. It is the story of a whole generation of the
American born children of Jewish immigrants. I believe that we
will encounter neither that culture nor its means of transmission in 2015. By that not too
distant time, if current trends continue, few American neighborhoods will be as ethnically
defined as his was. Few people in the middle
class will participate as actively in public and organizational life as he did. They will live lives that are more culturally
diverse than his, and their universeswhom they know, where they travel, what forms
of entertainment they consumewill be far broader. Certainly, culture will remain a
crucial source of identity; what culture and identity will mean in
the future is less clear. Both will become
less fixed and more synthetic, reflecting a world of boundaries even more porous than
todays. Cultures and identities will be
more global, multicultural, and transnational. The great cultural
divide between members of my father's generation and those who will come of age in 2015 is
the issue of choice. My father lacked choices
that will be widely available to that future generation.
Perhaps more importantly, even though my view of culture may lead me
to insist that he made plenty of choices about who he was, he did not believe he
could choose who he was. He did not see his
identity and culture as items he picked out, like clothing at a department store. No, he
thought of himself as obligated to care for those he cared for, to support the causes he
did. Today, we operate under the illusion
that we have nothing but cultural choices. We may believe that this is particularly so for
the educated and affluent elite, but we also think that anyone, particularly in America,
is entirely free to invent and reinvent herself. In other words, we
often operate as though culture were just another consumer good, something individually
customized. We operate as though we could choose from a veritable boutique of privately
tailored identities that come off the rack whole and brand new, free of memory, history,
and communal connection. If, however, our
culture shapes our experiencethat is, if it defines our sense of identity and
realityit is never simply a personal invention.
Culture is a collective affair that invents us as much as we invent it. But
if culture cannot be a purely individual matter, and if the forces of family,
neighborhood, and community are waning, where will culture come from in the future? To my mind, the
vision of a future in which everyone believes she has absolute cultural freedom
constitutes a dystopic fantasy. In that world
there would still be powerful forces defining identity and culture, but they would most
likely be market forces. A consumer-driven world needs us to believe that it is through
"ownership" and "style" that we can best define who we are, and that
infinite choice and perpetual newness are the ultimate good. Indeed, the market already
provides the vocabulary by which we construct reality.
We "buy" ideas and "choose" our best
"options." True, even in an extremely market-driven world we might continue to
feel connected and loyal to nations and religions as well as to corporations, logos, and
brands. But our identities and actions as consumersof goods, services, even
communitiesmight well define daily life to a far greater extent than traditional
relationships embodied in family or other collectivities.
After all, it is possible to imagine the America of 2015 as one in which
many of the institutions of American life, from the neighborhoods in which we live to the
schools and religious institutions some of us attend, have become inseparable from brand
names. Is this dystopic
world the logical result of the post-war American middle class ideal? The suburbanized family that lives in a
cookie-cutter, private house, cut off from multigenerational relationships and people of
other economic classes, part of a cultural consensus devoted to deracination, seemed to be
the solid social foundation of a post-industrial nation dependent on a homogeneous
citizenry of eager consumers. The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss warned that
such a culturally undifferentiated society, which he called a "mono culture,"
was bound to be a depressingly sanitized world that privileged standardization and efficiency at the expense of
memory and cultural texture. A mono culture, he believed, would inexorably erase the
cultural variability that stands at the core of human existence. Levi-Strauss could not have anticipated chain
stores and restaurants, or even the dominance of consumption. I doubt, however, that he
would have been surprised at a mono culture grounded in the illusion of choice, the
conviction that what replaced "the old" was better and more desirable, not least
because it was chosen freely. I dont
believe, however, that even the most homogenized world could be completely devoid of
difference and dissent. There would be countercultures even in this
monocultural dystopia. Their
followers would reject market driven choice. They
would draw on memories that still exist in their personal lives, as well as in books,
films and music. In a world in which families
were even less stable, neighborhoods more splintered, and personal histories more global
and heterogeneous than they are now, I imagine that such countercultures could be fostered
and transmitted primarily by means of what historians Sara Evans and Harry Boyte call
"free social spaces," meaning places of association where people can meet, share
memories, and imagine alternative realities together.
Free social spaces like beauty parlors and barber shops, union halls and
voluntary organizations, write Evans and Boyte, are places that can provide people with a
sense of culture, connection, identity and belonging. It was the culture fostered by such
places, for example, that helped mobilize people to demand radical change in the Civil
Rights Movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, virtually every
analysis of movements for political change reveals that such social settings are crucial
because we are never socialized by families alone, and formal institutions never do the
work of cultural transmission in isolation. Intermediate
levels of association also have an important role to play, and one that could, I believe,
become increasingly more important in the future. Even if the
particular free social spaces that have proved important in the past closely knit
neighborhoods, ethnic and religious associations, clubsdo not exist in 2015 (indeed,
many have disappeared already), it is not impossible to imagine new experiments with such
intermediate associations. In the world of
Jewish culture, the world that I (like my father) know best, many of the most important
settings for socialization have disappeared, but I can think of possibilities for future
ones. Perhaps aged, retired Jewish Baby
Boomers, for instance, might create multi-generational cultural houses where people get
together to make music, create art, tell stories and think about change. Instead of being rooted in the Jewish
neighborhoods of my fathers generation, perhaps such places could pop up in shopping
malls or near suburban synagogues. Indeed,
synagogues continue to have the potential to be communal houses: ongoing experiments with
synagogue transformation suggest that their classical functions as houses of assembly and
learning are re-emerging for adults. What might happen
in such Baby Boomers houses is difficult to anticipate, but they could certainly be
places that draw on history and memory to provide an alternative model of culture that is
not simply didactic, but rather deeply felt. They
could be places that involve the senses, community, and stories. They could be places where older people are
valued, places that ask things of people--to act and care for others, to remember, and to
learn. They would not be cults; they would
have to accommodate the diversity of people's lives.
But they would tie identity to something that cannot be purchased or
replaced. The increasing
importance of computer technology cannot be overstated as a critical dimension of the
transmission of culture. It has reshaped our
sense of time and space. It has created
powerful forms of association and collectivity via the Internet. Nevertheless, whatever
technological wonders await us, no matter how promising the computer is for redefining
work, entertainment, and even erotic pleasure, it will never replace human association for
most of us. The nightmare
future of 2015 is one that erases difference as cultural reality and replaces it with
difference defined by consumption or ownership. But no social or cultural revolution has
entirely done away with resistance to homogenization, with the power of memory to define
and redefine identity, or with the power of social collectivities to define destiny. We
can continue to seek out and create spaces and institutionsfree social
spacesthat help us shape and transmit alternative forms of culture. Writing as a
member of the Jewish minority, I know that the existence of the Jewish people depends on
investing in forms of association that are built on memory and values that resist the
market as the source of identity. To view other essays from "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar, click here.
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