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January 15, 2006
Russian Winter Festival
Russian Winter Festival in Trafalgar Square, London.
This weekend in London was the Second Annual Russian Winter Festival. It was full of performances ranging from traditional dance to contemporory rock, speeches, food and Baltika--Russia's number one beer. Though I could not understand most of it--even the food menus were in Russian--somehow the excitement of others who did know what was going on rubbed off on me.
Such events (here and elsewhere) are fairly common--only a few weeks ago there was a similar one focused on Italy, and I believe a few others are coming up in the Spring. It is interesting to me why such events are so popular. Asking an Irish friend from the U.S. why she attended four Irish cultural festivals a year, she told me, "It offers a sense of community." To which I replied, "But of the thousands of people there, surely you do not know all of them. In fact, you'll never get to know more than a small fraction of them. You are almost... you are almost imagining them as your community." I was not being critical of it, but just curious. I do the same thing with people of Egyptian background; Coptic people I have never met before insisted on having me over for Christmas dinner a couple weeks ago, and have invited me again both weekends since. I do not think one would this with a complete stranger--meaning somehow, before ever meeting eachother, I was imagined to be part of their community which they were willing to "sacrifice" [word choice will be clearer in the next paragraph] part of their meal to have me at their table.
Bennedict Anderson, in his book, Imagined Communities looks at this phenomena. He describes a nation as being "an imagined political community....It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." His interest in the ability (and consistent tendency) for humans to develop this notion of "community" with people they have never met as a foundation/catalyst in forming a nation. He further suggests, this feeling--that me got invited to dinner, and brought thousands of Russians together in Trafalgar Square this weekend--is so visceral in humans, it is why they are willing "sacrifice" (part or all of) themselves for a nation in the context of war. Such a reading has left me bittersweet about these "celebrations of culture" because it seems that feeling which catalyzes such an event, is the same start that potentially leads to other less desirable ends.
This arguement is not flawless, but at the moment is amongst the leading (partial) explanations for why thousands of people from an ethnic community mobilize so quickly and sacrfice so willingly for a common cause--be it a cultural festival, or a war with a neighboring nation.
Posted by ami6 at January 15, 2006 07:16 PM
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Comments
Andrew,
I have a lot of comments for you and have a feeling they will come as a stream of comments that may or may not ever seem to come to any kind of conclusion or adhere to any kind of continuity... but sometimes, that's more reflective of our experience in life than we'd like to think :-P
First of all, though this sounds terribly politically incorrect (but then again, since when do I care about that?), life is all about discriminating. Regardless of what we might hear at our convocation and graduation ceremonies, life is about closing doors, not opening them. Twenty years ago, you had far more options than you have right now. You could have become a professional soccer player (maybe not an NBA player, in your case.. haha), or a scholar of the Coptic religion, or become fluent in a dozen different languages, or dedicated your life to exploring the African safari. Right now, there's still a chance you could do some of these. In twenty years, that chance will decrease enormously. You'll close doors and discriminate and pursue what's dearest (or tragically, sometimes, what's most convenient) to you.
Right now, you have the ability to pursue many different women in hopes of marriage. One day, Lord willing, you will be decide to marry one woman and be with her for the rest of your lives. Again, the closing of doors.
At this very moment, I am discriminating. Around me, I can hear the buzz of a timer, the hum of a computer, the soft hiss of a 60 cycle hum, the gentle tapping of the keyboard, the low moan of the wind outside my window. I can see an image on the computer monitor in front of me, but I can also see a hundred different objects, colors, hues, shapes and shadows in this room. I can feel my heels leaning upon the desk, my wrists being pressed in to the sharp edge of the keyboard drawer, a dull pain in my lower back.
But as I type this comment to you, am I really thinking about all of these things? No. In fact, I had to 'sit back' and think about what was going on before I could even describe them. And that is because our brain's primary function is to... you guessed it... discriminate. The brain is bombarded with hundreds of thousands of messages from our nerves, sensory glands, etc. Somehow, it is able to discriminate to such a degree that we are not overwhelmed by this influx of information, but can concentrate on specific tasks with the majority of our mind.
So all of this to say that one of our primary functions as human beings is to discriminate, and that if we were NOT to discriminate, we could never make any sense of this world. You could not drive if a tree several miles away held the same level of importance in your mind as the car coming towards you. You could not read with any amount of comprehension if the words in the text of your book did not receive preferential treatment to the titles running along the spines of the rest of the books on your bookshelf. Discrimination has become a four letter word in politically correct western civilization; but it is truly the only process through which we can even begin to understand the world around us.
Thus, while my die are certainly not yet cast, realizing the importance of this process of discrimination, it should make perfect sense that a small community of 'like-minded' people (the extent and aspect of that like-mindedness can be explicated upon in further comments) allows us to function more freely. In the hum and hurry of life on a larger scale, if we don't have a community, a filter, a lens, we'll be bombarded by so much information (useless because of the medium, not because it is inherently useless) that our lives will be meaningless.
More to come as time allows!
Posted by: Daniel at January 16, 2006 02:19 AM