Randall Miller, Department of History, St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA 19131
7/16
Ritual and Ethnicity in the Modern City
It is not easy to capture the essence of ritual . There is a Far Side cartoon where "natives" are gathering up the stuff of their real (modern) lives and pulling out the "authentic native" materials because "the anthropologists are coming." That captures one piece of the problem. Or James Agee and Walker Evans in "Let us now Praise Famous Men" describes themselves as a "spy."
Randall has been more alert to ritual in the past few weeks--weddings, bar mitzvahs, funerals. Critics say: We might wonder the extent to which our students might be ambivalent about engaging in ritual, or admitting that they enjoy rituals. Why are we ambivalent about ritual? Secularization? Time is money? Flight from father's control to make one's way in the world, and hence from "tradition" or ritual? In virtually all societies, rites of passage rituals are the most important, but perhaps in America, adolescence is extended. (Craig Brookins, in publication of North Carolina Press writes on this subject as does David Murray at Brandeis) Perhaps it's the absence of a clear common culture make it difficult for ritual to hold sway. Rituals take too much time. Or because the process has been cheapened (such as serial marriages), or by out-of-church--e.g., sky-diving as a wedding "ceremony"--"marriage" generic event so that noone is offended.
Many students are, therefore, are ignorant of traditional rituals and their meaning. Miller feels though, that Americans are indeed, not anti- or beyond-religion.
US News and World report has been reproducing maps from the 1990 census. (Overheads of religious density across the US. are a very dramatic way to show how religiously segregated and ghettoized (by region, not neighborhood) the US is.
One map "where they're filling the pews" doesn't necessarily tell us what people believe. All this masks, of course, notions of politics, public service, marriage and behavioral things.
This variety of religious loyalties complicates the story, but also invites students to enter the discussion of how recruitment and empire-building have been set against exclusivism. But ritual is, perhaps, a way of delineating a public presence, and claiming of a public space and the demonstration of group leaders' power.
Miller uses one ritual, over time, to suggest how historians might investigate this: Madonna event on July 16 in Italian working-class neighborhood of New York, from Orsi's book which represents the new religious history from the pew rather than the pulpit. Celebration is about "power" --of many sorts. Among other things it is a statement of about how the world is supposed to be.
Illustrations from Orsi's book: 1915 version of the event ; 1930+ version of the event; 1938 captured moment of the event , and a modern video from St. Donato's Parish in Phila.
Problems in trying to interpret the issues: age issues, formality of dress, density of population,
Rubin: The early depictions are the result of defamed people asserting ethnic pride.
Barnes: In early 20th c. there is more "public act" reality in to going to church
Jensen: I wonder what else is going on and if this is a first-communion dress which would then put the girl in a more central place in the setting
Montgomery: the dress is a sign of reverence
Miller: so dress distinguished, perhaps, between secular and profane
Glass: where are the clergy? Is this a lay event?
Miller: good question.
Sicius: There's an equal balance here between sacred and secular: it's a social event also and in modern day, the social often overtakes the sacred.
Barnes: I think we could look at the level of formality in clothing to distinguish level of participation.
Miller: I agree with this interpretation, and the with the need to read the document somewhat closely.
Rubin: there was a much more insider view to be had from this event--popular religion needs to be seen through a sort of "amoral familism"
Little: in some sense this portrays a static, romanticizable past, that doesn't catch the fact that there is dynamism and change going on in this setting even as we romanticize it.
Miller: there certainly is a desire to return to a golden past...
Gallien: ...a past that seems to have homogeneity.
Helmer: I'm surprised to see that many men there in 1915!
Miller: remember, the picture captures only a moment, and only through the perspective of the photographer, but it is a men's organization that brings over the patron saint to stave of the threat of becoming "American."
Barnes: Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas at Maim, makes the point that there is no generic madonna, and therefore a "real" madonna is an invention/innovation in the NY context.
Miller: Orsi agrees with this: the madonna of 115th street is a local madonna and maybe there is more emphasis on this in the pluralistic society
Schmidt:That is certainly true for the other immigrant realities also in pluralistic tradition.
Lapsansky: This is a good way to help our students see themselves in the context of NOT being something as well as being something.
Rubin: Looking at a group that was mired in desperation, and their lived experience needs to be in that context in 1915, in order to comprehend the religions of these people
Miller: ...and Orsi does this, and Golab will do that for Poles also and to talk about matching of skills with geography and religious unity
Sicius: California also has a whole different Catholic experience, also.
Presjnar: ...the "who's NOT in the picture" question. There is an older generation, a younger generation, but not much in the mid-range of age, middle folk moving away, either geographically or culturally
Gallien: There should be some pedagogical caution about generalizing from one picture to assumptions far afield
Miller: that IS the principle: we don't have enough information
{Break, then plans for tomorrow's field trip to religious center city: meet at campus center at 1:00 to take a van from campus to meet at Christ Church, 2nd & Market. Park where the tour will end: at 9th and Christian by 5:00 or so. Tour includes Mother Bethel, Catholic churches in South Phila.}
Jensen, Barnes and Miller and Sicius get into a discussion about the distinction between procession and parade as they relate to the process of moving through space, and sanctifying the space.The church is not equal to the religion, but the religion really can't operate without the church. Irish Catholicism and Italian Catholicism have to create a set of institutions (orphanages, schools, hospitals, etc.) to provide a cocoon for protecting Catholicism.
[Note-taker is absent from the room for twenty minutes]
Miller: this is about power. Power of madonna to heal.
Who is the Madonna?
Sicius and Jensen and Elrod and Gallien and Chinery lead a discussion about the madonna as the embodiment of control over the threats that are out there. The community has some power over the madonna: a patron/client relationship. But they agree it's a complex question. In some cases the madonna is more powerful than God himself. And madonna has either power or influence over the son of God, AND she is closer to the "folk"
Miller: ...and is her woman-ness also a part of this closeness to the folk?...
Helmer: appearances of the Virgin world-wide are part of this. If you can see Christ as savior of mankind, Mary is salvation of womankind, wiping out the negative image of Eve
Montgomery: Mary is seen as intermediary: one Catholic says that Jesus would never refuse his mother anything
Miller:.. not refuse to HEAR but not to necessarily grant
Rogers: beyond the theological level, we need to see the domo setting: other more local on-the-ground concerns come to it as well.
Brady: I havent read the chapters where the role of women is played out, but we need to pay attention to whether women really have power.
[After lunch]
Summary of the morning:
Festivals overlap: institutions, participants, spectators, worshippers took the madonna with her wherever they went, and her presence seems to endorse and bless the presence in the new setting, and help to remind of smells, sounds, tastes, healing that bind a common memory from which to create a repeating narrative. All this creates sacred space in the streets, and marked out the divinely-set boundaries of a neighborhood, making claims to nearby Irish, Puerto Ricans. Focusing on what people do may help us get to what people believe is true about what they do.
Miller shows slides of Jacob Riis' photos: working class city help to give a sense of tenement life and how little there is visible of religious life in these settings. For this is what people actually spend their time doing on the streets when the religious festival is NOT claiming the streets. Reform groups are at work here also, trying to get the children into some other kind of conversion: regimented school behavior, learn to cook American food and learn rituals to become "American."
Religious landscape is as much a political/social shrine-making as it is a sacred one. Example: Monticello is a republican religious experience, as are such things as war burial grounds. Edward Linethal, in book Sacred Ground, says the way to understand a people is to look at how/why sacred spaces are defined and created. Current discussion is about who might be included/excluded in the narrative involves the re-definition, which brings about a clarity about the impermanence of the story/space--the making and interpreting of sacred ground. Little Big Horn, Lexington/Concord, Gettysburg and others with each demanding its own kind of veneration.
Before the Civil War, there was very little interest in setting aside hallowed spaces except for "natural" ones (e.g., Niagara Falls) except after Revolution there is a beginning thrust to show the world how to build "good government" and the symbol of it: DC, and some early historical societies that would enshrine patriotic things. But the "cosmic" significance and monumental scale of CW brought about the place to renew own faith and understand death (CW took more than 600,000 lives) First war that was recorded in visual ways, (photography) as well and graves were well-marked and by visiting these graves to renew one's own connection with the faith; finding unknown bodies and re-burying them in a collective place and giving them a name (the irony is that it is black Americans who do the work of this "patriotic" endeavor.) First of these was Gettysburg, beginning in 1863, to buy land and consecrate it for the purpose, (and which resulted in a veterans who were able to get pensions of significant proportions) and fits into the Victorian romanticization of death. more than 3000 monuments built here over a number of decades. Question: who gets to tell that story, and be included in it? Vets reunited and do re-enactments that re-sanctified the ground (as n and s meet together on this ground) and reconciliation between n and s, which makes Gettysburg fighting for abstractions of government and constitutional principles (slavery was removed from the story as time went on, as were African-Americans)
Which story is the "right" story, and who gets to tell it? It is a constant process of re-negotiation and redefinition, as visiting sacred space in a democratic society has problematic things built in. Custer National Park has been redefined as Little Big Horn, the great American Indian victory, and their are two re-enactments, with the Crow (who were Custer's scouts) are playing the role of the Cheyenne, because the land is Crow land.
Gallien: Similar is the controversy about whether to put Arthur Ashe in a particular space on Monument Avenue Richmond Va (where Ashe couldn't play tennis...)
Gallien: multiple interpretations of a war are analogous to multiple negotiations of religious traditions.
Brady: folks in Virginia don't do Martin L. King day, instead it's King-Jackson-Lee days
Harvey: I recently went to Oklahoma City, where the bomb site has become a sacred space: people bring hushed tones and teddy bears. Interpretation is that some evil came out of the blue, into the purity of the heartland, without a sense of this as being generic growth in the heartland.
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