Tequila, rites of initiation, and unchosen loyalties

by Helen 

Dara told a story about liquor and localism from which she drew this conclusion:

This gentleman didn’t claim to be as informed about tequila as someone whose nationality suggested an intimate familiarity with it, but his taste for it was justified because he’d first tried it on its native soil as a tourist. But Cancun, of course, isn’t just a place but a scene, a year-round fiesta turistica—and tequila, when it is consumed in the States, is usually consumed as a vehicle for reckless abandon of the spring break variety. The relationship of drinker to drink is no longer one of heritage, but one of role.

The post ends by pointing out that "playing heritage" disrupts the usual dichotomy of unchosen/chosen loyalties. Conservatives like unchosen loyalties, and one of the strengths of loyalty to place and heritage is that it's unchosen. Enter Jonathan Raban and the American city:

Every big city has a particular entrance, a route inwards which is established by mythology, a point of focus which endows the whole complex with a clear shape and pattern... The "greenhorn" is the central character in this mythology of initiation to the city he is the prototypical stranger, the raw innocent. He is the shy figure on the dockside, with his money sewn into his underclothes and his docketed cardboard luggage roped with frayed manila. He wears the wrong clothes, he speaks the wrong language, he comes from a village or shtetl, expert at some craft—shoemaking, tailoring, ploughing—which, if it is practiced at all in the city, is to be found only in the mass-production methods of the factory assembly line. Myths are attempts to explain contradiction in nature. The myth of the greenhorn tries to reassure us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, there is a real continuity between the culture of the country and the culture of the town—between, in effect, our rural past and our urban future. The greenhorn at the dockside, like the grandiloquent architectural slogans at city entries, marks a boundary which is as historically and biographically important as it is geographically.

. . . the most important and most ordinary city miracle is its capacity to transform the greenhorn into just another face in the crowd. He will learn the language, make his way, become a citizen. The very hay-chewing oddity of his appearance at the outset is a tribute to the city's power to change.

The thing that Michael Oakeshott liked about unchosen loyalties was the fact that they are non-instrumental. Chosen loyalties are, for him, always directed towards some material goal and therefore liable to be small and petty; they're also the kind of loyalty that allows a person to opt out if the association is no longer serving their purposes, which is also pretty lame. If Raban is right that cities have "rites of initiation" in a way that rural communities don't, then they might offer a kind of chosen loyalty that captures the aspects of unchosen loyalty that conservatives like.

Comments

[X. Trapnel]

Other examples, perhaps flawed by their lack of distance from the political:

Religious converts / chosen churches.
Utopian / purposive communities.
Heck, college; you used this one yourself earlier.
Certain clubs and associations (think PoR!).

Associating 'chosen' with 'material' is simply a mistake. Insofar as the choice is seen as (or comes to be seen as, in hindsight) an expression of authenticity or identity, it may not (at least in hindsight) be *felt* as a choice (esp. w/ conversion), but objectively--in terms of institutional prerequisites, etc.--it is.