‘Our (Civil) Way of Life’: The Folkloric Civil Sphere

Introduction

Does the civil sphere consist merely of conscious and reflective subjects? Or is there a sense of belonging to the civil sphere that precedes reflection but is nevertheless civil and not necessarily primordial?

This article proposes the concept of ‘folkloric civil sphere’ to account for how the civil sphere can sometimes be formed from below by folkloric habits, customs, and traditions that are shared by broad strata of the population but have almost no state involvement. It examines the extent to which the casual performance of mundane and conventional practices that characterize the ‘way of life’ of the civil sphere’s core group, but lack a sense of drama and collective effervescence, can be seen as civil involvement. The term ‘folkloric’ does not refer to appearances of exoticized, objectified folk customs, or to those created from above in nation-building processes (e.g. Bendix, 1997). Rather, it refers to an overlooked dimension of social life and of the civil sphere: bottom-up everyday conventions that are non-intentional, in the sense that their popularity is rarely the result of cultural entrepreneurship, such as a cookout on a national day, to be discussed later in the article; even in the rare cases when historians and ethnologists can identify the initiators, these practices are not easily manipulated by elite groups, cultural entrepreneurs, or politicians. Examples include (but are by no means limited to) ‘consumer habits, road signs, and inside jokes’ (Löfgren, 1993: 190), leisure-time activities, entertainment, and sports (Skille and Broch, 2019), and distinct food cultures (Ichijo and Ranta, 2016) peculiar to a certain place. They may also include more mundane and inconspicuous rituals, such as locally distinct forms of greeting or applause, or tacit norms of proxemics (Alsmark, 1996; Shapira and Navon, 1991) and body techniques (Frykman, 1990; Mauss, 1973). When millions of Americans who do not know each other sit down to eat turkey on Thanksgiving, the common practice may enable strangers to recognize one another as fellow members not only of an ethnic community but also of a civil one (Kaplan, 2018). I argue that conventional habits, customs, and traditions can open a methodological window onto an unspoken or even unconscious dimension of social life in general, and onto the civil sphere in particular. These minor performances, which create from below a sense of belonging to the civil sphere, involve binary codes of inclusion and exclusion that are quite different not only from those of the ‘conscious’ civil sphere but also from those of non-civil solidarity.

I begin by explaining the concept of the folkloric civil sphere, drawing on theories that pay special attention to the political implications of ‘culture’ in the broad ethnological sense as a ‘way of life.’ To support the idea that conventional habits related to food, material culture, and leisure have civil meanings, I offer ethnological history as a contribution to theories of meaning, exemplified through conventional customs of Israeli Jewish holidays. I then explain the differences between the folkloric civil sphere and non-civil solidarity in terms of their binary codes of exclusion/inclusion and autonomy vis-à-vis the state, followed by the differences between the temporal regimes that operate in the folkloric civil sphere and the ‘conscious’ civil sphere.

The Folkloric Civil Sphere

Among its other traits, Civil Sphere Theory is an inventive attempt to examine cultural sociology’s possible contribution to political theory by intervening in the discussion about civil society as a social realm that mediates between state and society but is distinct from both of them (Alexander, 2006: 53). It departs from classical liberal theorists like Rawls or Habermas who ask how social and political life would be conducted if everyone behaved like rational subjects, making fair decisions and holding logical conversations while ignoring their own primordial, sectoral, and parochial loyalties and interests. This naïve liberalism applies wishful thinking about civic life while skipping questions of why and how the actual civil sphere has the power to transcend individual and group loyalties and interests, or what links people to this sphere emotionally (Alexander, 2006: 13–17; Sciortino and Stack, 2019). Civil Sphere Theory analyzes universalistic solidarity as a social fact, while considering ‘meaning’ and ‘identity’ as essential terms in the civic discourse. Following the ‘Strong Program’ in cultural sociology, it also avoids crude sociologism, which assumes that meanings are always determined by power relations and never vice versa (Alexander, 2007; Alexander and Smith, 1998). Alexander argues that the key to the formation of an inclusive and diverse civil sphere is how ‘free-floating’ it can be ‘vis-à-vis the historical primordialities instantiated in various forms of national stratification’ (Alexander, 2006: 420). Although the civil sphere does not dismiss or ignore particular loyalties, ‘actors are constructed, or symbolically represented, as independent and self-motivating individuals responsible for their own actions who feel themselves, at the same time, bound by collective solidarity to every other member of that sphere’ (Alexander, 2006: 402; emphasis added). Civil Sphere Theory is concerned with the questions of when, where, and how solidarity is constituted in the civil sphere between real individuals with real and diverse identities and group affiliations. Hence scholars analyze civil movements, political actions, and strategies in terms of narratives and symbols (e.g. Ostertag, 2014; Sciortino, 2012).

How does this ‘collective solidarity’ work? Durkheim famously distinguished ‘organic solidarity’ based on diversity and individuality from ‘mechanical solidarity’ based on sameness – where everyone acts out of conformity and each member of the group is replicable and replaceable by any other member (Durkheim, 1966 [1933]: 70–110). Civil Sphere Theory tends to stress the multiple narratives about the division of labor in a ‘complex’ society between different subgroups that, despite their differences, can cooperate, or at least battle each other ‘civilly,’ while mechanical solidarity is commonly identified with non-civil solidarity (e.g. Alexander, 2006: 38). However, although Durkheim attributes mechanical solidarity to what he called ‘primitive’ societies, he identified it in modern societies as well and cited modern nationalism as a prominent example of the major role of sameness and conventionality in the organization of modern social life (Durkheim, 1966 [1933]: 158–159). Indeed, here I will examine mechanical solidarity – social actors acting out of conventionality – as a dimension of the civil sphere: when habits become group icons, everyone is engaging in the same leisure activities or eating the same iconic foods out of mere conventionalism – doing something just because everyone else does it (Lewis, 1969: 42). I argue that imagining this perceived ‘everyone’ suggests a possible universalistic dimension of some folkloric conventions.

Alexander emphasizes that the civil sphere is constituted not only by organized movements and institutions but also by personal motives and relationships. He suggests studying the subjective dimension embodied in ‘structures of feeling that permeate social life and run just below the surface of strategic institutions and self-conscious elites’ (Alexander, 2006: 54). But how do those ‘structures of feeling’ permeate social life if not via ‘strategic institutions’? How does the silent majority have a share in the civil sphere?

Mutual trust and solidarity are more than mere ideas: they work effectively when individuals are emotionally attached to the civil sphere and when the latter is experienced as a group of its own. I suggest that ‘below’ the ‘conscious’ civil sphere, with its three levels – institutions, motives, and relations – there may exist a zero-level that is even less conscious but is crucial for the formation of a sense of belonging, not to a primordial group but to the civil sphere. Since, as I will demonstrate, this zero-level is accessible through the study of folkloric conventions that form ‘our way of life,’ I propose calling it the Folkloric Civil Sphere. I argue that the Folkloric Civil Sphere plays a crucial role in constructing the universalistic and abstract solidarity of the civil sphere. The Folkloric Civil Sphere can transcend primordial loyalties, but it also creates the civil sphere’s own loyalty and group solidarity, along with distinct mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. Whereas the ‘conscious’ civil sphere floats above everyday social ties, the folkloric civil sphere may make better use of them precisely because of its non-intentional nature (Kaplan, 2018). All the same, it is distinct from – and floats above – particular primordial loyalties and interests (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

The four levels of the civil sphere.

What do folkloric conventions such as holiday celebrations, cooking methods and menus, and local forms of leisure time activity have to do with the civil sphere? Why call this folklore ‘civil’?

Remember, first, that the sense of the adjective ‘civil’ in ‘civil society’ goes beyond ‘orderly society’; the word shares its etymology with ‘civilization,’ a term that has overlapped with ‘culture’ to designate a way of life broadly defined (e.g. Williams, 1985: 57–60, 87–93). If, as cultural sociology holds, citizenship is much more than a technical status, sharing a way of life can impart a sense of belonging to the civil sphere.

Attributing political importance to culture, broadly defined as a collective way of life (see Sewell, 1999), can be traced back to Rousseau (1994: 158–168) and Durkheim (2008), who, in different ways, stress the role that widespread religious symbols and rituals play in sustaining the civil order by encouraging loyalty and fraternity. Durkheim contends that ‘social relations can fix themselves without assuming a juridical form [. . .] Instead of being regulated by law, they are regulated by custom’ (Durkheim, 1966 [1933]: 65). Important for us here, his structural definition of religion can be applied to ‘secular’ religion(s) as well (Alexander, 2015: 177) and was applied by several 20th-century American thinkers to the ‘American way of life’ (e.g. Goldberg, 2015; Herberg, 1960 [1955]: 74, 81; see also Befu, 2001: 105–122) and to ‘civil religion’ (Bellah, 1967). Of no less importance is that while most definitions of the religious phenomenon, informed by Christocentric thinking (Leon and Shoham, 2018), prioritize cognitive or mental dispositions over practice, Durkheim insists on the equal analytical status of beliefs and practices (Asad, 1993; Douglas, 1983: 29–30; Durkheim, 2008: 46). From a more Gramscian angle, Kumar suggests that ‘the manners and mores of society [. . .] [are] where values and meanings are established, debated, contested, and changed’ (Kumar, 1993: 382–383) – implying that sometimes ‘manners and mores’ are more stable markers of group belonging than meanings, which are often contested. Scholars of modern nationalism who challenge the dichotomy between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism also recognize the political ramifications of the nation’s ‘way of life’ for civil inclusivity (e.g. Kaplan, 2018; Kymlicka, 1999; Shoham, 2021a). I suggest a closer examination of the crucial role that ‘manners and mores’ play in the mutual recognition of fellow members of the group as partners in a shared way of life – their sharing of conventional practices without necessarily agreeing on common values, opinions, ideologies, and even identities.

Some neo-Durkheimian approaches to public rituals have noted that ‘solidarity is produced by people acting together, not by people thinking together’ (Kertzer, 1988: 76; see also Schwartz, 1991). Can we extend this analysis to conventional rituals that lack a sense of drama and ‘collective effervescence’ but do iconize the group and shape its civil sphere? Indeed, it is hard to understand how (or why) a meaning-centered approach such as Civil Sphere Theory should study conventional routines that are performed offhand and without reflection. Before arguing that they have civil meaning, we must establish that conventions have some meaning at all.

Finding Meanings in Conventionality

The allegedly disenchanted world of modern industrial societies is replete with conventional rituals that are performed devoutly and understood as a sign of civility and a marker of group belonging, but are seldom reflected upon or understood as more than arbitrary conventions. Examples include clapping to express appreciation, shaking hands as a ritual of friendship, making a toast as a mark of festivity, and marking birthdays as a ritual of individualism (Shoham, 2021b). Examples that concern the folkloric civil sphere are holiday customs related to traditions of food, leisure, consumer culture, performance, and celebration (e.g. Etzioni, 2000). However, these conventional rituals appear to lack ‘collective effervescence’ and spiritual energy (see Collins, 1993); in normal circumstances, failing to observe their protocol may seem awkward, annoying, or even insulting – but not necessarily sacrilegious or heretical. But even though observing these protocols is a matter of politeness, studies of incivility hardly deal with violated rituals as cases of ‘civil inattention’ (Smith et al., 2010) or ‘uncivil inattention’ (Horgan, 2020). I argue that conventional rituals encode a second-order meaning that lies not in a (Geertzian) semiotic thickness or delineated sacredness, but rather in the conventionality itself; that is, in the refusal to think about the meanings of norms acknowledged as universal. But how can we study the meanings of conventions we never ponder?

The conceptual relationship between convention and ritual has rarely been examined. Convention is a social rule whose specific content is arbitrary, but which everyone follows mainly because everyone else follows it (Al-Amoudi and Latsis, 2014; Lewis, 1969: 42; Marmor, 2007; Terkourafi and Kádár, 2017) – such as driving on a specific side of the road (Lewis, 1969: 6). Ritual has generally been understood as a marked and framed deviation from everyday life (Bell, 1992), often with semiotic thickness (Geertz, 1973) and dramatic qualities (e.g. Schechner, 1993) that include transformative capabilities (e.g. Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960). Even though most scholars acknowledge that there are ‘conventions of consent used in ritual’ (Bell, 1997: 205) – namely, routine protocols and repetitive (or at least repeated) performances – they tend to distinguish ritual from regular convention and would probably consider an automatic and offhand performance of a ritual to be failed and meaningless (see Douglas, 1968; Goody, 1975; Terkourafi and Kádár, 2017). But is it?

The identification of meaningfulness with conscious reflection was best formulated by Weber, who proposed a threefold scheme for the orientation of social action: thought, emotion, and habit. This triad produces three corresponding ideal-typical social orders: the rational, the charismatic, and the traditional. Regarding the last-named, however, Weber contended that ‘strictly traditional behavior [. . .] lies very close to the borderline of what can justifiably be called meaningfully oriented action, and indeed often on the other side’ (Weber, 1964: 116). This formulation cast a large shadow on 20th-century social scientists and scholars in the humanities, who generally ascribed conventionality to the non-modern ‘other’ via the concept of ‘tradition’ (Boyer, 1990; Fabian, 1983) and left habits to folklorists studying so-called ‘traditional societies’ whose everyday habits were described as too magical and exuberant (Frykman, 1990). Habit’s role in constituting solidarity, trust, and meanings in modern industrial (and post-industrial) and allegedly ‘post-traditional’ societies remained theoretically underdeveloped (e.g. Camic, 1986: 1057–1066; Shils, 1981: 179–185). Durkheim’s notion of mechanical solidarity was one major exception, but it too remained theoretically underdeveloped. The scholarship on civil society followed suit. Its traditional narrow focus on ‘rationality,’ mainly in the Rawlsian and Habermasian traditions, came under sharp criticism based on the ‘emotional turn,’ which underlined the central role of emotions in politics and the civil sphere (e.g. Alexander, 2006; Calhoun, 2001; Collins, 1993; Goodwin et al., 2001; Pernau, 2017). Here, by contrast, I would like to examine the possible meanings of conventionality for the civil sphere.

The systematic sociological interest in the meaning of conventions is associated mainly with Elias (1978), who analyzed their historical development as trickle-down processes that impose disciplinary forces from above and inscribe them on the individual body. Strongly influenced by Freud, Elias interpreted social conventions like table manners as the sublimation of raw desires and emotions; as such they could be a window onto the wild world of the subconscious and an object for symbolic analysis of a wide variety of topics (sex, violence, emotions, body perceptions, and gender roles). Elias’ historicizing approach to conventions and his method of tracing low-key practices in historical sources influenced the development of the anthropological history of conventions, to be depicted later in this article. However, his work still portrays society as overly conformist and people as rule-followers (Al-Amoudi and Latsis, 2014) – pawns maneuvered by the enormous force of the general civilizing process that is universal and unidirectional and works only to further repress or sublimate emotions and desires (Rosenwein, 2002).

Mauss (1973) offered a more balanced approach, proposing the term Habitus to refer to culturally specific physical techniques of walking, swimming, and so forth, which encode group attitudes that are learned through education and socialization but are perceived as ‘second nature’ and whose cultural relativity reveals itself only via a comparative gaze. Bourdieu developed the term to a general ‘theory of practice’ (1977). Like Elias, he emphasized the disciplinary forces imposed from above, but in a more complex way, and hinted that people perform conventions strategically to acquire the symbolic capital of membership in the core group (e.g. Alsmark, 1996; Holston, 2010). Neither Mauss nor Bourdieu offered ways to speak of everyday habits and conventions as meaningful.

A renewed interest in everyday conventions arrived with de Certeau (1984), who highlighted the creativity of individuals’ ‘tactical’ everyday habits and their power to oppose the conformist pressure of established ideologies and regimes of knowledge. But its focus on intentional and reflective tactics kept this path-breaking study from developing a meaning-centered approach to conventionality as a social category.

The schools of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology gave much attention to the role of conventions in securing the everyday flow of micro-interactions and in providing tools for correcting and compensating for interruptions in the flow (Garfinkel, 1967: 36–72; Goffman, 1971). Defining conventions as ‘the traffic rules of social interaction’, (Goffman, 1971: 12), Goffman presented them as a social necessity, albeit one that is meaningless in itself – like the choice between driving on the right or left side of the road. He applied this line of thinking to the concept of ritual, which he defined as ‘a perfunctory, conventionalized act through which an individual portrays his respect and regard for some object of ultimate value or to its stand-in’ (Goffman, 1971: 62). Focusing on rituals whose role is to begin or end an interpersonal contact or mark the passage between personal territories, Goffman identified rituals with conventionality and did not offer analytical tools to analyze the meanings of conventional rituals.

I propose a cultural-sociological perspective, informed by cultural pragmatics, that focuses on how meanings and the sense of belonging are achieved non-intentionally through conventionality and a lack of reflection, and not despite them.

Indeed, conventions mostly mean nothing. That might include some folkloric rituals that are performed automatically and offhand according to a protocol, like grilling meat outdoors on a national day. Since folkloric conventions work at a pre-reflective level, their analysis as social performances (Alexander, 2004) can provide an alternative conceptualization. Like Goffman, and in contrast to classical theorists of ritual, Alexander defined ‘mere ritual’ as a ‘natural and necessary dimension of ongoing social life’ (Alexander, 2004: 535) – in other words, the conventions of everyday life or the Goffmanian social flow. To that Alexander opposed ‘performances,’ acts that are deliberately framed as performances and that may have ‘deeper’ meanings – if the performers put on a ‘convincing’ performance for the audience. In regular performances, fusion between performers and audience is difficult (Taylor, 2022); but in conventional rituals they engage in clear and scripted practices and there is an effortless fusion.

As opposed to other neo-Durkheimian theories of ritual, where meanings are assumed to be latent and always there (e.g. Bellah, 2005; Horgan, 2014; Olaveson, 2001; Schwartz, 1991), in cultural pragmatics meaning is understood to be produced by the convincing performance. Hence, I propose employing the ethnological history of conventional rituals to track the chronological emergence of their meanings.

Ethnological history grew out of Norbert Elias’ work, the French Histoire culturelle, microhistory (e.g. Burke, 1987; Le Roy Ladurie, 1979), and anthropological history, with its diachronic and developmental study of classic ethnological topics: symbols and ceremonies, body perceptions, folk culture, and the like (Cohn, 2000; Geertz, 1990; Kalb et al., 1996). A particular branch of Scandinavian ethnology, the ‘Lund school’, developed a historical approach for ethnological work on the emotional, organizational, and ritualistic conventions and habits of modern industrial societies (Gullestad, 1989). Frykman and Löfgren proposed a historical-ethnological move: follow the development of habits, customs, and traditions from a time when society operated just fine without, say, celebrating birthdays, to their maturity as mandatory social conventions and markers of civilized behavior (Frykman and Löfgren, 1987: 31–33; see also Frykman, 1990). These two ethnologists studied modern societies through the lens of what Latour later called (1993) ‘symmetric anthropology’ and Kurasawa (2004) termed ‘the ethnological imagination’; but Frykman and Löfgren added a diachronic perspective. After defining habits as routines, tactics, and skills that turn into ‘second nature’ even though learned from the environment, they proposed that tracing the historical evolution of what ethnology studies, could be a way to uncover how traditions and customs emerge from mere habits (Frykman and Löfgren, 1996: 5–19). Some habits are forgotten while others are preserved; the latter may become public and turn into customs that are more prone to social reflection, like holidays and rites of passage. Some of these customs, in turn, become ‘traditions’ and acquire an aura of ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality.’

The Lund school’s ethnological-historical method of identifying the traces of low-key practices in historical sources that inadvertently disclose small ethnographic details can help us decipher the meanings of automatic habits and folkloric conventions whose existence was taken for granted from the very start, so that their meanings were never the subject of conscious discussion. In many cases, the newness of a recently adopted convention escaped the notice of the historical agents: sometimes they didn’t know that the practice was new; sometimes they knew but treated it as a mere convention. Since meanings are not latent in practices, but are rather created by the performance, I propose taking a historical perspective on the gradual appearance of meaning.

The Ethnological History of Meaning

The ethnological history of conventions shows that meaning is attributed to them, if at all, at the end of a four-stage chronological process in which they are (1) formed spontaneously from below, (2) disseminated and conventionalized, (3) ritualized as icons of groupness, (4) and only then (and only sometimes) imbued with meanings that may be ambivalent and contested. As in Frykman and Löfgren’s scheme of habit-into-custom-into-tradition, here too no stage is a necessary outcome of the previous one (see Figure 2). But while Frykman and Löfgren still applied Weber’s identification of meaning with conscious contemplation, identified mere habits with lack of reflection, and described a process of increased reflection as habit turns into ‘custom’ and then into ‘tradition’, my model describes a process of increased conventionality (Figure 3).

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Figure 2.

Historical stages in the creation of meanings – increased reflectivity (Frykman and Löfgren, 1996).

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Figure 3.

Historical stages in the creation of meanings – increased conventionality.

Elsewhere I explain this model in detail (Shoham, forthcoming), arguing that when meaning appears in the fourth stage of the chronological process of increasing conventionalization (if it does), it is often contested and ambiguous and still takes conventionality into account. In the context of the civil sphere, I argue that the process of increasing conventionalization in the evolution of folkloric customs reveals elements of mechanical solidarity, where everyone is doing the same thing mainly because everyone else does it; but at the same time, a universalism that makes this ‘everyone’ tangible. To explain the process of increased conventionality, I will now elaborate on the four stages and exemplify them through the evolution of the Israeli custom of grilling meat on Israel Independence Day:

Ethnological history reveals that conventional rituals did not become ‘our way of life’ because of their meaning, but just the opposite: people started looking for their meaning only after they were installed as social conventions and became group icons. The conventions were iconized and reified as ‘our way of life’ not because of some symbolic meaningfulness or semiotic thickness, but mainly thanks to the simultaneity of their performance by a perceived ‘everyone.’ The rituals are part of Goffman’s ‘social flow’ or Alexander’s ‘mere ritual.’ Whereas the subjective dimension is central to the ‘conscious’ civil sphere, in both thought and emotion, the folkloric civil sphere is defined by its conventionality – and its universality. People do not necessarily participate in it (perhaps they necessarily do not) as active and conscious social or political agents; rather, they just do something for fun and spend time with family and friends. In this way they automatically weave social networks of solidarity united by a shared way of life (Kaplan, 2018). Inasmuch as they lack reflection and intentionality, we can quite easily understand how conventional rituals convey primordial forms of group solidarity, such as ethnic and religious affiliations. But how are they civil?

How is Folklore ‘Civil’?

We know that mutual trust and solidarity need more than good faith and good will in order to work: they require a measure of familiarity and even intimacy between strangers. These can be achieved by sharing a recognized ‘way of life.’ These folkways do not have to include all or even many realms of social life. Moreover, they do not have to be perceived as strict norms whose violation elicits severe social sanctions. But doing the same thing at the same time (on holidays) – sharing a common ‘way of life’ – even if some of us wonder about its meaning as group icon, helps people who do not know each other personally to recognize one another as equal members of a group worthy of their solidarity.

When this ‘way of life’ spans the members of the civil sphere, it conveys its universalistic messages through embodied practices rather than through public discourse. According to Civil Sphere Theory, in order to be included, people must put on a convincing performance of civility that not only expresses the civil, universalistic weltanschauung but also shares the cultural codes of the civil sphere, such as the celebration of civic holidays or compliance with the local greeting rituals.

I argue that in order to float above primordial loyalties and create civil, universalistic solidarity, the civil sphere also creates and activates a group loyalty of its own, expressed in the performance of conventional rituals that are recognized as group icons. In other words, the folkloric civil sphere operates ‘everyday essentialism’ (Alexander, 2006: 62–64; Scott, 2003). Civil spheres that overlap with nations operate ‘everyday nationalism’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008). Those conventional practices seem meaningless at first sight but create a second-order meaning that attaches individuals and subgroups to the universalistic civil sphere, experienced as its own form of group with its own traditions, customs, myths, rituals, and narratives; in short: its own folklore (see also Terkourafi and Kádár, 2017).

The folkloric civil sphere is far from being identical with the primordial loyalties of the core group as well as of the peripheral groups. In fact, the folkloric habits, customs, and traditions of the civil sphere have complex relations with the folklores of primordial groups: intercultural negotiations, borrowings, genealogies, tensions, competition, dialogue, cultural exchanges, and so on. Precisely because of the lack of agency in the development of folkloric conventions, the habits, customs, and traditions can emerge from various sources. In many cases, the historical origins of folkloric customs can be traced back to the folklore of the core group. With regard to many unofficial customs and traditions associated with the Israeli holidays, this is often the case (Shoham, 2017). But this does not hold for the Israeli food culture, for example, which has borrowed or appropriated many ingredients and recipes from the adjacent Arab civilization and in some cases iconized them as ‘Israeli’ (Hirsch and Tene, 2013; Raviv, 2015). The more conventional and unconscious such customs are, the less traceable their historical roots. A good example is the Christmas tree, which was brought to North America by German immigrants and was smoothly adapted to and appropriated by the mainstream Anglo-American culture in the 19th century (Pleck, 2000: 47); or pizza, once disparaged as a representative of the ‘inferior’ Italian food culture but later appropriated (while being drastically modified) as an all-American food (Avieli, 2017: 85–86).

The specific protocols of local conventional rituals can be particularistic and, in fact, incidental and idiosyncratic in themselves, like any other social convention. But since this is what a perceived ‘everyone’ does, the simultaneity in performance can be a universalistic act in itself. Hence, unlike the folklore of primordial groups, the performance of the civil sphere’s habits, customs, and traditions conveys hidden messages of abstract and universal fraternity.

But how does this alleged universality of the folkloric civil sphere function on the ground? How inclusive is it? To better understand how the folkloric civil sphere is different from non-civil solidarity we shall now compare their binary codes of inclusion/exclusion.

Binary Codes of Exclusion/Inclusion

The civil sphere employs binary mechanisms of integration and exclusion, constantly separating the ‘civil’ from the ‘anti-civil’ (Alexander, 2006). People must prove they are ‘worthy’ of inclusion by putting on a convincing performance of civility. Even though the civil sphere comprises more than institutions, institutional recognition is crucial for ‘non-civil’ individuals and groups to be accepted into it.

The folkloric civil sphere is not socially flat: like the ‘conscious’ civil sphere (Alexander, 2007), the folkloric civil sphere often forms hierarchies between groups, depending on the effort required to put on a convincing performance of folkloric conventions. It therefore operates its own mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that are quite different from those of the ‘conscious’ civil sphere. On the surface, performance of the conventional practices might suffice to acquire a sense of belonging. In the absence of official barriers, and unlike the folkloric conventions of non-civil solidarity that are often out-of-bounds for ‘impure’ foreigners, membership in the folkloric civil sphere would thus be more accessible for marginalized individuals and groups.

If only it were that simple. Precisely because members of the folkloric civil sphere experience their conventions as an effortless fusion of performers and audience, the folkloric civil sphere erects another barrier, perhaps much more difficult to overcome: the ‘perfect authenticity’ of fused performances, which can make it even harder for ‘non-civil’ individuals and groups to cross the border, ‘purify’ themselves, and become ‘civil’ by acquiring new cultural tastes, habits, consumer goods, and so forth. Sometimes it works, and an effortless fusion is (eventually) achieved, as with the assimilation of Jewish immigrants in America into the ‘American way of life’ (Alexander, 2006: 459–547; Goldberg, 2015). But in too many situations, folkloric performances by ‘non-civil’ groups are framed by the intended ‘civil’ audience as just performances – and the performers continue to be on probation. That was the case, for example, with 19th-century bourgeoisifying Jews in the German-speaking lands, the second and third generations out of the ghetto: their vernacular was Hochdeutsch, they purchased the right consumer products, read the right books, listened to the right music, and lived according to the ideals of Bildung. But the audience judged the performance as inauthentic and left them on probation (Aschheim, 2010). The same is true for women, people of color, sexual minorities, and so on, who try to cross performative borders in circumstances of formal freedom – and run into glass ceilings.

Nonetheless, the folkloric civil sphere enables participation via the performance of group cultural codes; newcomers to the civil sphere can easily acquire new tastes in goods, food, leisure habits, and so forth. And when it comes to holidays, they are in fact forced to celebrate with the core group. Whereas primordial traits like religion, ethnicity, or nationality are constructed in the public imagination as primary characteristics that are not easily acquired, folkloric conventions are essentially a matter of performance, of doing something rather than being something. Hence, they are much more accessible and thus more inclusive, and can function as a code of civility.

It should be emphasized that on the fourth level – that of ambiguous meanings – folkloric customs can be located anywhere on the spectrum of universalism/primordialism and can accordingly affect the extent of inclusiveness. An intriguing example is that on Israel Independence Day, for example, Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel who have adopted many of the leisure habits of their Jewish counterparts ‘celebrate’ by grilling meat outdoors (as they do on other vacation days) – but rarely reach the fourth level of discussing the meanings of this convention (Shoham, 2021a). With the ritual of the Passover Seder, usually celebrated in the home, things are simpler in Israel: non-Jews, whether citizens or temporary residents, are seldom invited to take part (and do not feel it authentic to hold one for themselves); hence the Exodus story remains in the sole possession of the core group even in its conventionalized performance that has been emptied of real meaning (Shoham 2014). Conversely, in America, the Passover story was universalized and came to symbolize freedom in diverse non-Jewish contexts (e.g. Walzer, 1985), and so did the ritual of the Seder as celebrated by Jews (Pleck, 2000: 113–114). Another example of American inclusiveness is that everyone can sit down to Thanksgiving dinner and, if they arrive at the fourth level of a discussion of its meanings – as rare as that may be in practice – develop a sense of belonging by telling the story of refugees and persecution. This inclusiveness, however, has its own limit, because Native Americans are not part of this historical memory and have no choice but to contest it (Adamczyk, 2002). The conventions of the folkloric civil sphere can be reappropriated by individuals and groups in the ‘conscious’ civil sphere, interpreted, and negotiated, thereby providing meanings and functioning as a mechanism for exclusion and inclusion. The discussion of inclusion/exclusion emphasizes that the fourth stage of the struggle about meaning is not a residual category, as most ethnologists would have it. It is a crucial meeting point between the folkloric and the ‘conscious’ civil spheres.

In theory, the exclusion/inclusion mechanisms of the folkloric civil sphere can coincide with those of the institutional civil sphere; but more often than not the two spheres clash about who belongs in the public sphere. Nonetheless, the extent to which the fusion between performers and audience in the folkloric civil sphere is effortless may be a crucial factor in facilitating the sense of belonging to the institutional civil sphere, especially where formal membership and civil rights are contingent on vague criteria of having developed a sense of belonging to the country and the local ‘way of life.’

The concept of the folkloric civil sphere shifts the focus of the discussion of civil solidarity: instead of, or in addition to, legal and institutional processes and the universal language of liberalism, or sacred codes with apparent semiotic thickness, the folkloric civil sphere uses group cultural codes that are embedded in everyday life and that create from below a sense of belonging to the political community, even when it is built on the universalist discourse of the civil sphere. Minority groups and even undocumented immigrants have relatively easy access to these majority codes through leisure-time activities, precisely because of the relative laxity of folkloric rules. Nonetheless, their performance may sometimes be tested for authenticity by the audience; and as history shows, this test is a risky game.

In any case, an ethnological-historical approach to the production of meanings can provide a viable tool for cultural sociologists interested in the complex relationship of culture, citizenship, and habitual conventions in everyday life.

Autonomy vis-à-vis the State

Another illustration of the civil power of folklore is its autonomy vis-à-vis the state. In principle, the ‘conscious’ civil sphere is analytically and empirically independent of the state. However, because the latter is nonetheless a strong social actor in it, it is hard to identify the autonomous civil realm as a separate entity (Sciortino and Stack, 2019). Precisely because of its conventionality, by contrast, the folkloric civil sphere is more resistant to conscious manipulation by political elites and cultural entrepreneurs, including the state. The study of the civil implications of folkloric conventions could thus help delineate an autonomous civil sphere in which meanings are created by the society and not by the state.

To some extent, this might work even for non- or semi-democratic, or even very authoritarian societies. Alexander (2015: thesis II) emphasizes that the civil sphere is always incomplete, dynamic, and struggling for existence, so it can expand or shrink. A ‘conscious’ civil sphere in authoritarian regimes seems inconceivable. Nevertheless, a folkloric civil sphere can sometimes be detected even in the most authoritarian regimes where there is no free speech whatsoever. An interesting example is the Stalin regime’s attempt, starting in 1929, to impose a five-day week, in which 20% of the population would rest on every single day, in order to hinder people from attending church on Sunday, synagogue on Saturday, or mosque on Friday (Zerubavel, 1989). Its failure epitomizes the limits of cultural engineering.

In other words, the folkloric civil sphere is very different from the folkloric solidarity artificially produced by authoritarian regimes that exploit state-engineered folklore to violently enforce social conventions from above and impose the façade of a total consensus. Precisely because of its conventional and non-intentional nature, the folkloric civil sphere can defend its autonomy by means of de-Certeauan resistances – often by appropriating the folkloric practices of primordial groups, like the numerical convention of gathering in prayer halls precisely once in seven, rather than five, days (Zerubavel, 1989). This is the source of the folkloric civil sphere’s power, but also its greatest weakness: in itself, the folkloric civil sphere cannot repair the civil sphere. Universalistic conventionality can enable and strengthen the mutual trust and solidarity needed for such repair and create the sense of belonging needed for the desire to repair, both in democratic and in non-democratic regimes. But the work of repair itself requires more articulate intentions, consciousness, and, most importantly, social movements and institutions (Alexander, 2015: thesis X).

The Folkloric and the ‘Conscious’ Civil Spheres: The Temporal Dimension

The folkloric civil sphere does not, of course, define the civil sphere, nor does it fulfill all the functions of the ‘conscious’ civil sphere. Besides the types of solidarity discussed earlier, the two dimensions of the civil sphere operate opposing temporal regimes and experience time in different ways.

If modern industrial societies indeed underwent a ‘temporalization of experienced life’ (Koselleck, 2002: 168), the civil sphere plays an important part in this process when it incorporates incompatible foundation stories, with their diverse temporal scales (Alexander, 2006: 199–203). The conventions of the folkloric civil sphere, however, appear as ahistorical phenomena. Even on the fourth level of the struggle about meaning, the history of the practices is mostly silenced; nobody really knows or cares where grilling meat on the national day came from or when the ritual was first performed. Their perceived lack of history catalyzes their acceptance (stage 2): often they were experienced as mandatory conventions even when still quite a novel invention (cf. Baselice et al., 2019).

This is not to say, of course, that the folkloric civil sphere exists out of time, just as so-called ‘traditional’ (read: non-industrialized) societies have never really stood still in time (Boyer, 1990; Fabian, 1983). Rather, it adheres to pre-industrial temporalities before time was strongly mathematized during the industrial revolution (Kern, 1983; Zerubavel, 1982), turning clock-time into an independent meaning-maker (Glennie and Thrift, 1996; Snyder, 2013). In industrial and post-industrial societies, the stories that populate the ‘conscious’ civil sphere typically negotiate societal values by means of artificial temporal landmarks like the linear count of years (Spillman, 1997). The folkloric civil sphere experiences cyclical and flat temporality in which we do the same thing every year – not only without counting how many years we have been doing it, but even without arguing that we have done it ‘from time immemorial’ – the case of most of the invented traditions of the industrial era (Hobsbawm, 1983). Per Frykman and Löfgren’s (1996) conceptualization cited earlier, a habit is experienced as something we do constantly and regularly: we always did it and always will. The folkloric civil sphere reveals that the fragmented temporality we experience as an essential condition of modern life does not cover all segments of social life. Along with mechanical solidarity, the civil sphere includes elements of flat, non-fragmented temporality.

Against Methodological Nationalism

The examples cited here are taken from modern nation-states. It is important to note, however, that the term ‘folkloric civil sphere’ seeks to explain dynamics that transcend the limits of the national civil sphere. To the extent that there are supra-national civil spheres (Wang, 2019), national-diasporic civil spheres (Goldberg, 2015), or a global civil sphere (Alexander, 2015: Thesis vi), we can detect in them a folkloric civil sphere that helps to make people care about the regular civil sphere. Future research might examine the extent to which the conventional ritual of the handshake grounds a global civil sphere of diplomatic rituals; or the extent to which the globalized birthday ritual grounds a global civil sphere of mutual recognition by their peers of individuals in their individuality (Shoham, 2021b). Another generally overlooked hypothesis is the extent to which we can speak about ‘tiny’ civil spheres that exist in ‘tiny publics’ (Fine, 2012): small communities, neighborhood blocks, and even nuclear families, which, I would argue, use binary codes of ‘civil/non-civil’ to manage their respective public spaces – such as the family dinner (Bugge and Almås, 2006; see Horgan, 2014). To what extent do such tiny publics engage in their own idiosyncratic folklore of customs, bodily habits, cultural tastes – and the ensuing struggle about meanings? Can they form a ‘universalistic’ civil sphere? I argue that the contents of the conversation at the family dinner table, including debates about solidarity and trust among its members and about mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion, and even about who is allowed to speak, when, and how, and most importantly: who is included and excluded – are influenced also by the food, table manners, and dining rituals accepted in the family.

The concept of the folkloric civil sphere can therefore overcome methodological nationalism – the assumption that, unless otherwise stated, the nation-state society is the society (Chernilo, 2006; Elias, 1978: 241; Kurasawa, 2004: 3; Smith 1983) – in the study of the civil sphere.

Conclusion

The folkloric civil sphere has remained unrecognized in the scholarship that followed the cultural turn not due to its insignificance, but because it is hard to trace the meanings of folkloric conventions, which tend to be perceived as ‘the dust of social activity, empty and trivial’ (Goffman, 1971: 64). The theory of the folkloric civil sphere thus challenges the frequent assumption that modern industrial societies are increasingly complex, infinitely diverse, and painfully conscious of everything. In fact, they can present effortlessly fused performances, which also constitute the modern civil spheres. They are perceived as increasingly complex mainly because we live within them and experience their complexity. We do not see our own conventions because – they are conventions. In fact, there are some respects in which modern life is quite simple.