I ended my last post with a sentence about the “body two Others-to-each-other constructed.” In parenthesis I suggested this body might be a ‘community’ or ‘polity’.

Usually, I resist the word “community,” and insist on ‘polity’ for analytic reasons. But, in this case, I will start with ‘community’, first because it is easy to write in American, and second because of its almost forgotten etymology: ‘community’ is “united with”—or, in other words, “e pluribus unum.”

That is, Susan and I, 47 years ago, transformed a plurality into a unum that has now disappeared since I cannot unite myself to the Other that was essential to this unum.

What exactly was this unum that, through continual practice, made a thing all who approached it had to contend with?

Not surprisingly for those concerned with the individual (psychological) impact of not being “united with” a most significant Other—in this material life at least—, leads me often to reminesce about various moments when Susan and I made something that neither of us had experienced before. There were several “beginnings” to the construction. The first one happened, one morning at the International House of the University of Chicago, at breakfast when half a dozen of us introduced ourselves. Susan liked to recount how she thought, after hearing me mumbling my name, “well, that’s one I will never remember!”. Fifteen months later, at what could count as the last of the beginnings, we were married and she who had been “Susan Martin Brydges” became, for all State matter at a time when she could have chosen differently, “Susan Brydges Varenne” (I do not recall any discussion of this). In between she had changed from being “Sue” to earlier others to being “Susan” to all the others we gathered from then on. I was the main architect of that change.

Anthropologists know well that naming and renaming practices are essential signs of powerful processes. The renaming marks the constitution of some boundary future, more or less significant, others will have to deal with. All unum’s are unum-for-others, as well as for those who make it.

Another sign is the first picture of the new unum that was then shown to various somewhat significant others (parents, siblings, etc.) to alert them to something new in their lives too. Taking this picture was itself a complicated engineering feat in the days long before selfie technology appeared: the picture involved setting a camera on a chair, focusing by hand, setting a timer, taking the pose… And it involved waiting at least a week to find out whether the picture was useful for its purpose.

From a sociological distance:

In popular sociology, what Susan and I made may be labelled “traditional.” Actually, it looked like that 47 years ago also (the boundary traditional/modern has not moved much in half a century!). What we made was not at all what the “young people” of 1972 were supposed to make or be making. 1972 was the year of publication of The Joy of Sex—and certainly not The Joy of Marriage… Susan established herself as the cook (I had cooked a little earlier), I took care of all State and bureaucratic matters (Susan had done so very efficiently in the contexts of three different nation-states). I developed my career at Teachers College while Susan suspended her doctoral studies. In our first years together, as the children were born and we lived in a university building inhabited by other untenured faculty members and their wives, Susan’s women friends there challenged her, mercilessly as she sometime told it when irritated. Why, did they ask, did she “accept” something that must be forced on her? The more she was challenged, the more she was adamant that whatever Susan and I were making, it was not something imposed on her. Most of these women were moving on to their divorce in the midst of various dramas. In parallel, we were further strengthening our unum. There was no méconnaissance here, no mere acting out of “dispositions learned early in life,” no mere acceptance of norms that were not anymore anyway the norms of “our” academic, intellectual, “culture.”

From the anthropological distance:

The sociological stance, of course, is one that places the observer/analyst/critic at a distance, looking on at outcomes of invisible processes. My anthropological stance is one that places the observer/participant in the very midst of these processes. From close by, indeed from inside, what continues to strike me is, first, the difference of our unum from the other unum’s we knew, from that of our parents, to that of our siblings, friends, and later children. Many would also classify these as “traditional” but that would erase all interesting differences, in the same as the labels “primitive” (or the new label “indigenous”) erase the major differences Boas taught us, anthropologists, we must pay attention to. The second thing that strikes me is that everything Susan and I build was always unfinished and, more importantly, in need of reconstruction according to plans we borrowed (and that often proved inadequate), and with always insufficient resources we had to assemble from multiple sources. This was most salient when the children arrived, and then again when Susan was officially diagnosed as seriously sick. As the doctor told us then, when speaking a diagnosis we had not paid attention to earlier: “your life is now going to change as we will have to meet every month for ongoing tests and so forth…”

Susan and I made what I wish I still could call a “culture”—an artful-assemblage-for-us that was our reality, our fact, for 47 years, and is now in the past, getting solid in history, while it had been always been fluid.

Coda:
I am writing here as if our unum was only made of two persons. In fact it was made of much more as it affected people in Michigan and France who had never, until then, had to deal with each other and with what their children had done… As our children were born, it got to incorporate three more, then three more, then seven more. Actually, as the children made their own unum things got much more complicated. I will get to this sometimes in the future, expanding on the metaphor of the “gravity well” that I have used a few times recently. Any unum (community, polity, society) catches those who approach and somehow changes their trajectory. But unum’s, particularly as they grow, also divide, seed, etc., other unum’s that can then modify the trajectory of the earliest one.

[first composed on August 5, 2019]

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