Monday, December 24, 2012

Culture and Christmas


I am not a Christmas person. Basically I am a religious agnostic - someone who just does not feel a strong urge to believe in what I cannot know. I find religions sometimes fascinating and sometimes just disgusting. Of course, I enjoy Christmas traditions in the family - up to a point. But it may be worth pondering that the Mass for Christ is not only a great celebration for the Christian church and a wonderful experience for our children and family, it is also part of a loosely spun structure that gently controls the Western world, just like other invisible behavior codes control other civilizations.

I am not talking about the Christian religion, because the church and its many denominations and sects is a narrower set. My reference is to all the people who tend to follow patterns of behavior typical of the Western world. That is most of those born into it. They – we - follow these patterns because we have learned that this is what you should do and how you do it. In the widest sense, traditions and social habits – or culture - are what Clifford Geertz called “sets of control mechanisms” (1973). Instead of instinct, which humans hardly possess, Geertz argues that culture serves that function for us. To keep us from becoming unpredictable and even dangerous to each other we need simple, basic guidelines in all of our daily lives that nudge us back onto the beaten path whenever we are apt to wander. The church and other religions have those rules written down, and usually have a long list of sanctions for transgressions (“sins”), but many other cultures do not work that way. The unwritten rules of a culture – whether religious or just social - are much less explicit than the law, but often there are social sanctions instead of courts, such as being frozen out.

Among the many social control mechanisms in the Western world there is Christmas. Ideas about how to celebrate Christmas guide your doings from Christmas Eve (or even from the beginning of the Advent season) until January 6 – or perhaps even January 13. You do not just do things haphazardly. You follow tradition, although tradition has otherwise mostly seemed to have vanished from our lives. Within the traditions there are sub-traditions, and these can be like worlds apart. Christmas in my home country, Norway, for example, is strongly defined by what you eat for dinner on Christmas eve. I grew up with fresh boiled cod, which is a strong coastal tradition. But other parts of the coast eat mutton (“pinnekjøtt”) and inland they eat “lutefisk”. To move from one of these cultures to another (as when people marry) can be a painful experience. You lose your bearings, somehow.

All of this is a matter of course, just something we don't think that much about. But shift it to the more general level of rules, not for a holiday season or a religious feast, but rules for living as it is during the rest of the year for most people – and you see the outline of something much more consequential. Geertz insisted that humanity is not one global entity, it is multiple. There is no underlying global humanity, he argued. There is just this large number of different cultures – different sets of control mechanisms – that we find coexisting around the world.

Or better, they need to coexist, to find ways of living with each other. But they have a hard time of it, the more they meet the more they quarrel. Fanatics seem to win out. What puzzles me under these circumstances is the curious lack of influence of Geertz' notion of culture in later writings on that subject. I suspect it is because Geertz rises above them all, he makes each of them just one among many, and that is an offense to most of their adherents. He even refuses to recognize western liberal humanism as unique or as a standard for all.

I find his thinking refreshing even forty years later, when the ability of cultures to get along is much more on trial than it used to be.

4 comments:

bloggerbob said...

Good reflection material for this season. Christ repeatedly crossed cultural borders, whether it was picking wheat on the Sabbath or in conversing with ostracized. He was offensive to the Hebrew culture and foolish to the Greek culture. Don't see Him rocking around the Christmas tree or dreaming of a white Christmas.

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot,Olav, for your reflections on this thing they call Christmas. Especially, I find your remarks on "traditions" interesting. I always feel a bit uneasy when people start talking too warm-heartedly about traditions. I guess it is because tradition is, per definition, something you do without too much thinking about it. I don't want to say, of course, that tradition is always a bad thing. But in most cases, I guess tradition with some reflection is probably better than tradition without it...
Now, at Christmas eve I feel - as a confessing Christian - quite satisfied with not having been to church today. I'd rather go one of all the other "ordinary" days, not because tradition tells me to, but rather because I sense a personal meaning of going there.
Regards, Björn H

Olav F. Knudsen said...

I appreciate both remarks for their relevance to my train of thought and the additional emphasis they bring both to the need for crossing cultural borders and the value of breaking mindless traditions. They are really two aspects of the same urge to cast off social control mechanisms.

bloggerbob said...

I agree with Björn, as a confessing Christian, I'd rather just stay away than participate in mindless sentimentality that is disconnected from the supposed significance of the day. Very interestingly, the Church placed holidays to try to curb pagan celebrations, but now aspects of the pagan celebrations are part of the holidays. Mistletoe goes back to Saturnalia, and the bunny that lays eggs goes back even further to Semiramis who eventually became worshiped as the goddess Ester/Asherah/Isis. Sad to see not only pagan practice, but also a pagan name (Easter) for one of the two big Christian celebrations.