Carnival Mirrors

            Barbra Babcock writes that Geertz “has described cultural performances such as the Balinese cockfight as a story that a group ‘tells about itself.’” (Babcock 4) Babcock also highlights the inherently reflexive power of language and the fact that language is a “mirror in which the self is centered and reflected.” (Babcock 1) Finally, both the realms of performance/experience and language coincide in a discussion of metacommunication: “Only by being able to reflect in words about words, to talk about talking, are we able to learn to talk and do so successfully.” (Babcock 3) This article brought two things to mind immediately, the professor’s story of her baby girl discovering the mirror and how happy academics should be that metacommunication is at the center of all being.

            First, as a new baby discovers the mirror she is left with a fear that she is indeed separate from her mother. This is both exciting and terrifying. Yet the truth is much like within larger society, that she is neither an individual nor part of a community without the other. As G.H. Mead writes, “’the self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience, it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience.’” That said, we can consider Tucson Meet Yourself to be the cities largest contained collection of carnival mirrors reflecting out individual “realities” back upon ourselves. 

            Second, as a child learns to speak she begins to learn a language and a series of symbols to communicate. One day, her parents might hope, she will become a graduate student or a college professor and she can spend hours decoding and taking apart layer by layer of the symbols she was taught as a child. As intellectuals we task ourselves to understand words, and we should begin with reflexivity and challenge the very metacommunication that one might claim directs our most basic understandings.

            On another note… I find the discussion of habitus in Pierre Bourdieu and David Swartz interesting but limited. At the end of long discussion of the worth and complexities of habitus, both authors see the concept as inadequate in a modern society. While noting weaknesses, such as the “varied degrees of incongruity between hopes, plans, and chances for different groups” (Swartz 111) as well as the assumption that “the process of objective chances occurs without flaw (Swartz 110)” consistently, the concept’s weakest point is that it is limited to specific societies that have established only weak rituals and systems of impersonal institutions. As Swartz explains: “Habitus seems to work best not only in situations that lack rituals and establish protocol but also in relatively undifferentiated societies where the principle mode of domination operates through direct interpersonal relations rather than through impersonal in institutions” (113). I am left wondering what that means for applying the concept of habitus to modern communities and nations. Can such a concept be extended to present day US? It seems that there are underlying understandings between class that cannot be easily set aside as direct influences of an institution or a ritual that in a way define how a class expects its members to act and exist. It seems to me, and perhaps this is because I have not yet mastered the complexities of this concept, that habitus can be applied to more modern and ritualized societies if it is not the only means of interpretation utilized to develop a mirror in which to look at a society. (*but then again, remember when we build these mirrors to glance into the inner workings of a society we also look within ourselves, can’t escape the carnival mirrors!) 

- Sarah Howard