Majoring the Margins, Minoring the Norm:Rethinking the Culture Concept with the Grateful Dead [1]
by Geoff BradshawCopyright © Geoff Bradshaw 1996. All rights reserved.
"I was sitting in a small, 10x10, Italian restaurant about 100 feet from the Garden, about an hour before the show started.. I heard a commotion on the street, and I saw that all the people on the street were facing the same direction: away from the stadium. There was a lot of noise all of a sudden, sirens and motorcycles made so much noise you couldn't talk... 500 people to run up a street that was about 20 feet wide... I stood looking out the window wondering what the hell was going on... I saw fear in the faces of the people running by. I felt like I should take my head away from the big glass window, in case it might break... I thought the buildings were on fire... Then, the last of the people ran by. About 20 cops with helmets on, and billy clubs out were chasing the people screaming at them GET MOVING! GET OUT OF HERE! The cops were swinging their clubs at people's backs, pushing people in the back who were hurrying, scared. I looked over in time to see a big cop hit a guy who was facing the wall, trying to cover his face with his arms, and trying to get a way. The guy wasn't even trying to move, he stopped against a wall, and tried to protect him self from the swings... The cop lifted his club above his head and whacked him more than twice. A couple more people made it into the shelter of the little restaurant. I was truly frightened for my safety. I did nothing wrong, and I felt that if I tried to "escape" by running, or walking down the street, a police officer might come up and hit me with his club. I stayed for about 20 minutes looking out at the empty street. A paddy wagon roared by up the street, then another down the street. Some cops with helmets went over to a parked VW across the street and started yelling at some one who was laying under neath it... The guy crawled out, and they let him run up the street with out beating him with their clubs. We made it back to the car, and drove south until 2:00 in the morning" [2] .That description, like several others I have transcribed from eye-witness accounts , is not of the violence in Los Angeles in 1992, although one can hardly listen to the string of images described without picturing the video tape of the Rodney King beating so widely circulated just a few years ago. Nor was the man repeatedly struck by the police officer, or the man who crawled under a van to hide out of fear for his own safety, in all likelihood black, or other minority race or ethnicity. They were not trespassing on private property, they were walking, talking and standing on public streets and sidewalks. The events described took place on October first, 1994 in Boston Massachusetts, and the people described were fans of the music group the Grateful Dead.
Unfortunately, the incident described here, is not a singular occurrence. Police brutality against Grateful Dead fans has been alleged at numerous locations. Some of the recent allegations include: Pittsburgh 1989, Orlando, FL 1994, Boulder, CO 1994, and Albany, NY 1995. Just this past summer, I found myself (not unlike Clifford Geertz in his famous Balinese cockfight article) joining throngs of fans running from tear gas canisters which distinguished neither between the rulely nor unruly fan, nor the observing researcher.
In understanding such violence, I would like to return for a moment to the metaphor of the Rodney King beating which I invoked earlier following the description of the violence in Boston. While some might argue that to invoke the name of Rodney King in relation to police brutality toward a primarily white constituency such as Grateful Dead fans is to strip the metaphor of its most powerful racial dimensions, I invoke this relation for several reasons. At the most basic level, for those who have never experienced police brutality firsthand, it is difficult to conceptualize a description of repeated beatings "with a club lifted high above an officer's head," without placing it within some frame of reference. For those slightly older than myself, such descriptions and experiences might be contextualized in terms of images of Vietnam era protests and brutality. For those to young to clearly remember Vietnam, however, I believe that it is the King beating and subsequent riots or uprisings in California, that serves as the contextualizing metaphor for police violence against marginal or minority constituencies today.
Secondly, and more importantly, I do not think it is appropriate in either example to frame our understanding of such violence purely in terms of the individual actions of either antagonists or victims, but rather must be understood in terms of the social relations and conflicts which underlie such behaviors. Where the King incident dramatized racial and economic strife in Los Angeles, the Boston incident among Grateful Dead fans similarly belies a complicated set of social conflicts over issues of lifestyle, class, use of alcohol and drugs, and more complex contestations between differences of social position. As a means through which to hopefully illustrate and examine such matrices of social contestation, I would like to explain a third, more personal reason, for which I have chosen to invoke the image of Rodney King as a metaphor through which to understand this incident of violence, and the social relations surrounding fans of the Grateful Dead.
The day after the news of the Los Angeles riots broke, students gathered on the campus mall of the small university I was attending to air their concerns, fear, and anger over the news. The gathering formed spontaneously on the grass lawn near the Minority Student Association building, and the majority of participants were of African American descent. A young Black man had just finished his statements with the assertion that however much we empathized, white students simply could not understand what it was like to live in constant fear whenever we were pulled over in a car or stopped on the street by a police officer. In response a long-haired white youth interjected, "That's not true. We may not experience it to the same degree, but many of us know what it's like to be run in or pushed around just because of how we look." Most of the Black, Native, and Latino students visibly disagreed with this white youth's statement. One Native American woman seemed to speak for them all when she proclaimed, "That's different, you can cut your hair." To which the white youth made a very interesting response. He said, "Yes, but that would mean giving up my culture!"
What is the nature of such a culture that this youth might have been invoking? While I do not know the specifics of this individual's background, he could have easily been referring to the sense of culture shared by many Grateful Dead fans. For those unfamiliar with the music of the Grateful Dead, and their loyal following of fans, it might appear absurd to proclaim anything as grand as culture based upon something as seemingly trivial as a shared taste in music, and it would be true that one cannot generalize political and cultural positionality via musical taste alone. Among many fans of the Grateful Dead, however, there is a distinct sense of community that transcends the music and forms the basis for shared lifestyles, values and culture. As one fan explained when asked this question:
"Sure, the music is what we are hearing but it's what you feel as well and that extends far beyond what just happens inside [the concert] from 7 - 11pm. It carries on and on, from day to day, from venue to venue. Above all, it's where my family is. Being on the road and being at the shows is 'home' for many of us..."
As most people familiar with contemporary anthropology already know, the "culture concept" has received numerous challenges within anthropological discourse in recent years, including assertions that the very notion of culture itself leads invariably toward essentialism, racism and orientalism because too often it entails an a priori labeling and categorization of its subjects . In the United States, it seems clear that we cannot speak of anything as simplistic as a single unified "American culture." While Americans may share the same physical or geographic space, and encounter much of the same discourse and symbols, their relative perspectives and subsequent meaning constructions often belie multiple points of contestation rather than homogenous cultural unity. Fans of the Grateful Dead comprise only one of many such divisions.
Lest we think that the answer to the culture debate is merely to move toward smaller units of analyses, however, we must also be careful not to essentialize fans of the Grateful Dead as a completely homogeneous entity either. Fans range in age over nearly three generations, and occupy a variety of social positions. Furthermore, in recent years (for a variety of reasons that cannot be detailed here) inter-fan unity has been challenged by dissension between: large scale vendors selling products at shows and small craftspeople; those who respect the host communities and venue establishments and those who agitate local communities and disrupt venues by crashing the gates to gain free entry and other actions; those who choose not to use drugs and practice health-conscious lifestyles, and those for whom concerts serve primarily as a location through which to procure mood altering substances; and other points of disagreement.
Yet despite such challenges, there remain many individuals who continue to express a deep felt sense of identity with other fans, and often describe that identity through terms such as "family," "community," or "culture." In the words of one fan:
"We are a community of people with similar hairstyles, fashions,... the stuff we sell and the food we eat and cook, and similar opinions and viewpoints and pastimes that we engage in. These things are typical of the deadhead lifestyle which other parts of society do not engage in. There are traditions and sayings, and the bottom line is that we are a culture. The music lures us in, the community traps us and the joy keeps us."
The traditional terminology for a group such as fans of the Grateful Dead, however, is to label them a "subculture." Yet to adopt the label of subculture is to implicitly concede a marginal relationship to an undefined "norm" of (in this case) American culture. Yet on what basis should we accept this hierarchical relationship? As we have seen, the concept of a single unified "American culture" seems tenuous in relation to these discussions. In racial composition there does exist a Caucasian "majority" against which Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American constituencies are constructed as "minorities." (This racial majority itself, however, is an amalgamation of multiple ethnic differentiations, and a topic that has come under increasing scrutiny in recent anthropological discussions.) Economically, one often hears of the "middle class" as the norm against which political opinions are weighed. (Yet the latest studies reveal that the United states contains the largest gap between the very wealthy and the very poor of the world's 17 leading industrial nations, resulting in a shrinking of this very middle class ).
By all such traditional indicators, fans of the Grateful Dead, coming largely from white middle class backgrounds, are statistically members of this racial and economic American "majority" or "norm". Yet, obviously they are not regarded as such in the context of the police altercations reported around the country, and culturally many fans identify with a marginal social position, rather than with the so called majority. As one fan dramatically states:
"We Grateful Dead fans are essentially a minority group that inspires varying degrees of fear, loathing, disgust, bemusement, whatever, among the US mainstream. And like other minority groups, the negative behavior of a few winds up being used as a club to beat the whole group with. It's not fair, but that's the way it is."
In this fan's statement we see almost of self-acceptance of marginality in relation to an American cultural "mainstream." If with closer examination, however, the normative majority of American culture turns out to be itself comprised of a plurality of cultures rather than a homogeneous entity, perhaps we need to rethink out terminology. Rather than culture and subculture, majority and minority, norm and margin, perhaps we need to find language that addresses a situation of cultural pluralism or multiculturalism that does not predispose a hierarchical relation between such terms but begins with the premise of equality, tolerance, and the traditional anthropological contribution of cultural relativism.
The questions raised here, are not limited to intradepartmental disagreements on the nature of our own academic jargon. The means by which we and others frame such issues has real social and political ramifications. Debates over language instruction in public schools, proposition 187 in CA, and contemporary congressional welfare and affirmative action debates, are all means by which the framing of multicultural issues through terms such as norm, majority, minority and margin play intricate rolls in the lives of real people.
What is also at issue here, is the basis through which political and legal authority is to be constructed in a multicultural or culturally plural society. What would be inappropriate would be to allow the voice of a politically or economically powerful minority, to be constructed as the voice of a homogeneous majority with the authority to establish the political, legal, and education standards of the "norm." For Grateful Dead fans in Boston, such constructions establish the difference between public access to streets and sidewalks, and their construction as a public nuisance to be removed by force.
As anthropologists increasingly turn to the study of the newly emergent and reconfigured communities, (whether in the United States or elsewhere), we have the potential to use the contribution of our discipline to provide a more sophisticated understanding of such issues in relation to modern cultural pluralism and multiculturalism. In turn however, such issues may help us to provide a more sophisticated means by which to apply our own understanding of culture, in a manner that does not reify the constructedness of a particular norm, nor deny the validity of culture invoked from below.
Notes:
1) This article was originally presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) on November 19, 1995 under the title: "Majoring the Margins, Minoring the Norm: American Culture, Diversity, and Marginalization Among Fans of the Grateful Dead."
2) This eyewitness account is not my own. It has been transcribed from an account posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.gdead in Oct. 1994. Because of the emotional nature of the account, the author's name has been withheld.