(Tradition)
I read the topic for this week’s discussion and groaned internally. Nothing about Purity Balls, the ritual, is traditional – my academic work has nothing to do with traditional anything! After succumbing to the inevitable what-am-I-doing-in-grad-school malaise for a wee bit, I snapped right back and began really thinking about the act of tradition-inventing (sounds like an Olympic event doesn’t it?).
Eric Hobsbawn discusses three possible reasons for why traditions are invented. First, invented traditions establish social cohesion – they signify membership to a group; second, traditions – both invented and not – act to legitimize the institutions that they belong to; finally, traditions act as agents of inculcating beliefs and values into the membership of an institution (Habsbawm, 9). How interesting it is then, that inventing tradition actually has nothing to do with actually upholding tradition itself!
In terms of my own research, the Purity Ball ritual is an invented tradition that seeks to enforce sexual rules by tying to Christian history and tradition, when in fact this tie does not actually exist! Tying invention to tradition through history aims to set up a feeling of legitimacy. Almost as if having a history legitimizes the ‘tradition’ in a way that simply advocating for a new practice would not. It seems as if people will adhere to ‘tradition’ more religiously (!) than to rules that are newly set out.
A prime example of this tradition-vs.-edict discussion is the Catholic Church’s Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican in 1962. By formalizing change of practice into a 'traditional' council, the Church was able to pass off changing with the times as 'theological reform'. Hobsbawn concurs, "Inventing tradition is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization that is created by imposing repetition" (Hobsbawm, 4). The counter movement within the Church itself that resists the changes of Vatican II is a product of the membership's unwillingness to adhere to these invented traditions!
In similar fashion, the ritualization of Purity Balls is based on the Christian 'tradition' - supporters and organizers of these events tout it as keeping with Christian values and suggesting that it is a "the" American way - protecting the American nuclear family and promoting good Christian family values. By aligning itself with patriotism (somehow inherently American/Western) and religion (Evangelical Christianity), this ritual movement claims to be the "opposite of novel, [...] rooted in antiquity, and opposite of constructed, [...] so 'natural' as to require no other definition other than self-assertion" (Hobsbawm, 14).
This entire assertion is false – an ‘invention’ if you will! The ritual of protected a virgin’s purity is more anthropological than religious. A multitude of non-Western cultures deal with the ‘problem’ of sexual pollution brought about by unbridled female sexuality – including the Newari Buddhists of Nepal, the Tiyyars and Nayars of the Indian Malabar Coast, and the Etoro culture of the New Guinea Highlands . Much anthropological research has been conducted into the roots of sexual pollution, suggesting that a menstruating female who is capable of bearing a child without acknowledging its paternity is a threat to the order of the society. Hence, the focus on sex is actually about maintaining social order – or as the proponents of Purity Balls put it, ‘family’! Marriage removes the threat of societal disorder by assigning an offspring’s paternity to the mother’s husband. However, single, fertile, women still remains a threat to the social order. This issue is dealt with in a number of ways across cultures. For instance, in the Newari Buddhist tradition, the premenstrual girl is married to a belwa fruit – a husband-symbol. In a society where sexual roles are enforced directly, the threat of sexual pollution seems to be diminished greatly. Hence in the case of the Purity Ball ritual, this ‘tradition’ of Christian family values is merely an appropriated, rebranded mechanism for enforcing rules against what is seen as a threat to society – namely, sex.
Hobsbawm asserts that traditions are part of the superstructure, while routine is part of the base. I am forced to question the top-down mechanism of inventing tradition then. Is the routine for legitimate if it is supported by an overarching principle? Or should the practice on the ground be reflected by the structure at the top? If as Hobsbawm suggests, tradition trickles downward, then this implies that we are all products of our society. Interesting when contrasted against the view that society is a social construct!
On an unrelated note, this week’s blog was extremely hard for me to complete due to the lack of formulating questions. Perhaps I – like society – am in need of an (invented) tradition of boundaries to inform my direction of thought?
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4 comments:
Hi Roselle,
The three reasons for tradition inventing mentioned by Hobspawn seem like they could apply to religious values too. Religion is seen by some as having its raison d'etre being to promote social cohesion, relision legitimizes its own insitutions, and religion can inculcate certain beliefs and values into a population. Over the course of this semester I've been feeling more and more like no one term, be it religious experience, emotion, tradition, religion, ever has its own discursive domain. There seems to be such crossover, and such interrelatedness that one could almost substitute one term for another in any given context and it would make sense.
But, back to your blog, I really liked how you applied this process of tradition-inventing to your research, it makes alot of sense. I agree that the process of inventing tradition is a far better way of getting people to adhere to the new rules, rather than calling those new rules, "new". People don't trust "new", we like comfort, and by playing on this tendency, many practices (like Purity Balls) can be sanctioned and endorsed.
It does seem like tradition is invented from the top down, as a method of control. But I guess, folk tales, superstitions, these are also inventions of tradition at a grassroots level. It would be interesting to contrast the two.
Hey Roselle,
I would just like to say:
1) I am happy that you were able to snap out of the grad-school malaise, you definitely deserve to be here!
2) It would be very weird being married to a friut! I think I would prefer to be married to something full of sugar, like a chocolate cake =)
In regards to the assertion about the ritual of purity balls being more anthropological than religious, I think that while there is clearly strong anthropological evidence through which the purity balls can be understood, the Christian "tradition" is vital to its understanding. I think that you are right that more work has been done on this idea in the field of anthropology, however i think that looking at how they (Purity balls community) connect themselves to the Christian tradition and how they believe these connections to be true is a fascinating topic to study!
I feel as though I learn more and more about our project every week! I can't wait to read your final paper!
Hey Roselle.
Great blog this week. You incorporated the readings brilliantly into your project. I could also see how your mind worked out how tradition is useful to the study of purity balls as you wrote.
I do think that your project has a fair bit to do with the Christian tradition itself. While the purity ball may have very little to do with biblical, 0-33AD Christianity, it fits well within the traditions of many fundamentalist movements that have arisen since the 1920s. Family values and nationalism have been connected to the Christian faith largely because of opposition from liberalism, and these sort of traditions are used to enforce that social identity. So whereas a bunch of different cultures do value the purity of unmarried women, each culture uses its own traditions in order to validate their values. So it is anthropological, but an anthropologist studying a purity ball would be studying the group’s religion as much as anything else.
I don’t think society being a social construct is contrasted with we being shaped by society. It’s a dialogical process, we make society it makes us. Very Berger
Hope you are over the malaise, because I still can’t wait to read your paper.
Hey Roselle,
Sorry that this comment comes a bit late...
I found it interesting that you wrote "inventing traditions actually has nothing to do" with upholding tradition itself. In reading this week's articles, I found myself wondering about the utility of innovation within a tradition. It seems traditions reinvent themselves in response to the changing circumstances and pressures, whether internal or external. Perhaps a tradition's very survival then is dependent on the extent to which it is able to successfully reinvent itself. Here, Madonna comes to mind- many say her success is in large part due to the many reinventions of her stage personality- okay so this isn't exactly relevant to Purity Balls, but maybe you can see where I'm going with it...
For example, Islam's success in the 7th century Arabian peninsula might be attributed to its ability to establish itself as an inheritor of the Abrahamic traditions that came before it. In this way, Islam's ability to present itself as a development stemming from a historical precedent may be just the thing that ensured its survival as a tradition.
On a totally different note, I was channel surfing a few weeks ago and there was a piece on TLC on the topic of the Purity Ball. I think it was early November- just in case it might be useful to you.
See you next week!
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