Social Bonding

Written By Simon Morley

This morning I saw about a hundred barn swallows lined up along the same electrical cable near our village. Occasionally, they swooped away across the rice fields for a short time before returning to the line again.  These swallows are doing some socializing before departure for far away southeast Asia. By socializing, they are also bonding, strengthening ties and group coordination that will be vital for surviving the epic journey ahead. This is what the RSPB says on its website: “Swallows migrate during daylight, flying quite low and covering about 320 km (200 miles) each day. At night they roost in huge flocks in reed-beds at traditional stopover spots. Since swallows feed entirely on flying insects, they don’t need to fatten up before leaving, but can snap up their food along the way. Nonetheless, many die of starvation. If they survive, they can live for up to sixteen years.” (1) Usually, a pair of barn swallows nests under the eves of our house, but this year a pair of Red-rumped swallows set up home. Here they are:

But for some reason, after strenuously adapting the barn swallows’ nest to their own specifications (they prefer a tunnel entrance), in July the pair of Red-rumped swallows abandoned their finished nest and were never seen again.

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As soon as I saw the swallows all lined up along the wire I thought of the lines of people waiting to pay their respects to the recently departed queen of Great Britain and Commonwealth. A friend in London had sent me pictures of her all-night vigil at the Palace of Westminster, and it was clearly a powerful experience for her, above all, one that gave her a profoundly meaningful feeling of belonging, of bonding with others and with her heritage.  As she wrote: “the Queen was extraordinarily in our lives.” 

It’s odd being so far away, so very much on the outside, although I too felt the news of the queen’s death as something very significant, and will probably be deeply moved by the funeral on Monday 19th. As everyone my age (and quite a bit older) keep saying: “she’s been there all my life!”

But I’m not here going to add my thoughts to the mountain of views on the British monarchy or the queen. Instead, I want to think about the psycho-social mechanisms involved in the kind of  bonding ritual  in which my friend, like so many others, is choosing to be  involved right now. Why is it so important?

The word ‘ritual’ is not one that has a very good press these days. It tends to be associated with religion, with convention and outdated behaviour. There’s not much place for ritual in our fast-paced, technological society. But that’s precisely the problem. As the British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner argued The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), the ‘ritual process’ is vital for the secure and  healthy maintenance of any society, which he defined in terms of  a binary tension between structure and anti-structure, modes of organization which together are the two major ‘models’ for human interrelatedness. The former refers to a differentiated and usually hierarchical  social system  that separates people into positions of ‘more’ or ‘less’, and thereby ensures security and stability across time.  But that is only one kind of society. Turner juxtaposed this ideal with another that  embraces  anti-structure,   “an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders.” (1969, p.96) As he explained:

Society….is a process in which any living, relatively well-bonded human group alternates between fixed and – to borrow a term from our Japanese friends – ‘floating worlds.’ By verbal and nonverbal means of classification we impose upon ourselves innumerable constraints and boundaries to keep chaos at bay, but often at the cost of failing to make discoveries and inventions…….[I]n order to live, to breathe, to generate novelty, human beings have had to create – by structural means - spaces and times in the calendar or in the cultural cycles of their most cherished groups which cannot be captured in the classificatory nets of their quotidian, routinized spheres of action.  (p.vii)

Turner adopted the Latin term communitas  in order to describe this idea of society as anti-structure, and the term ‘liminal’ to evoke the antistructural experience within the ritual process in order to describe the ‘in-betweenness’ or transitiveness of their state necessary for the deep bonding that antistructure facilitated.  As Turner writes, this is a model of society “as a homogeneous, unstructured communitas, whose boundaries are ideally coterminous with those of the human species.” (p.136)

A 1996 reprint of Turner’s classic text from 1969 published by Routledge: https://www.routledge.com/The-Ritual-Process-Structure-and-Anti-Structure/Turner-Abrahams-Harris/p/book/9780202011905

The problem with  any society based on structure is that it separates and hierarchizes into discrete parts and systems, making the desire and natural ability to intimately bond between individuals and across groups very attenuated, and therefore radically diminishes and circumscribes the potential richness of human relationships to each other and the world.  In our society, bonding is almost only something that happens on an individual or small group level – between lovers, members of the family, supporters of the same football team. Children are better at bonding than adults because they are less structured psychologically. Indeed, the more a society embraces structure the more atomized bonding becomes.   But we all crave to bond as expansively as possible, to experience communitas, and so societies develop ways through which to incorporate the experience of antistructure which is the prerequisite for  collective bonding into its rituals. In his study of Ndembu ritual Turner described the    African tribe’s complex manner of working through the dual impulses of structure and antistructure within elaborate ritual activity, but he also referred to modern western conventions, and  especially drew attention to such rituals as carnivals and other socially sanctioned rituals such as football matches or rock concerts in which the antistructural or liminality can be experienced.  

But as Turner stresses the immediacy and authenticity of ‘existential communitas’ cannot be endured for long by society.  “[T]he spontaneity and immediacy of communitas – as opposed to the jural-political character of structure – can seldom be maintained for very long. Communitas itself soon develops a structure, in which free-relationships between individuals become converted into norm-governed relationships between social personae’ This is  what Turner calls ‘normative communitas’, “where, under the influence of time, the need to stabilize and organize resources, and the necessity for social control among the members of the group in pursuance of these goals, the existential communitas is organized into a perduring social system.” (p.132) It is also a feature of any society that the powers vested in the maintenance of social structure will attempt to appropriate the energies of communitas, of antistructure, in order to maintain and strengthen their position. They will manufacture rituals that offer a modicum of the experience without any risk of the energies released spilling over into potential anarchic anti-social behaviour. 

North Korea is a good example of a political elite organizing society around elaborate rituals that blend structure and antistructure in order to guarantee the stability of their status quo. But here we witness more than just a ‘normative’ use of communitas. Rather, the North Korea  elite  propagates a version of what Turner terms ‘ideological communitas’, in that it has adopted a rigid utopian model of society based on the fundamental yearning for ‘existential communitas’, which it then exploits in order to maintain power.

Modern techno-scientific society based on instrumental reason is dangerously deficient in antistructural rituals.  And when they exist – especially within youth culture – they tend to be insufficiently linked dialectically to structure, and risk failing to pass the vital energy of communitas back into society at large. As a result, adult life is often characterized by a nostalgic longing for the antistructural experiences that characterize youth because such experiences are unavailable to the adult world.

But the British Royal family is an excellent source of ritual processes. One could say that it presents to the world the caricatured image of society as structure, of society as a series of rituals organized to maintain structure. As such, it acts is a mirror  in which society at large can see both the virtues and the vices of living deeply within structure, with the “innumerable constraints and boundaries to keep chaos at bay.”  This is precisely what the queen and the new king call ‘duty’. But the royal family also provides moments when the people can experience  tame or ‘normative’ forms of   communitas:  during the rituals surround the funeral of the queen, for instance. These ‘normative’ forms provide the opportunity for deep and expansive social bonding, the experience of non-hierarchical oneness, while at the same time re-affirming the pre-eminent need for structural hierarchy. I suppose one could argue that, anthropologically speaking,  the continuing significance of the Royals for us moderns, whose lives are starved of ritual, is to offer the experience of both structured and normatively liminal or unstructured relationships to the world (in small and well targeted doses). In the light of the dire straits in which Britain finds itself, its people certainly need generous doses of both.

Simon Morley
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