My Favorite Review So Far

http://www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10004992

Family and Friends Combined
A Review by Laurie Edwards
06/25/2003

Friends

It was at the offbeat, vital gathering called the Burning Man festival that Ethan Watters first got hit with the idea of an urban tribe. He manages both exactitude and a sense of wonder as he describes the epiphany that led to his book (and his spot in pop culture), Urban Tribes.

"Certainly each of these people had a relationship with me, but they all had distinct relationships with each other. There was a web of love affairs, friendships, rivalries, work partnerships, and shared homes. Connect any of those twenty-five people and you would find a history of activities and hundreds of hours of conversation that held shared secrets, gossip, and all manner of insight about the world. Those relationships created an intricate web of lives that added up to more than the sun of the friendships. What I saw there in the late Nevada twilight was not a loose group of friends but a single entity of which I was a critical part. There is was, gathered around a campfire in the desert: an Urban Tribe."

If any of the characters from Will and Grace, Friends, or Sienfeld were intelligent and articulate and wanted to tell the world about their lives, the result would be Urban Tribes. Ethan Watters is possessed of both these virtues, fortunately, along with a pleasantly self-deprecating humor; the story of how he lived his life from college until he got married (at around age forty) is the story of a what he calls his Tribe.

Watters admits he learned and wrote a lot of Urban Tribes on the fly. After writing a short magazine piece (which he later conceded was only somewhat accurate) creating "urban tribes" and skimming over the phenomenon, he got a ton of press, appeared on the morning shows—and had to back it up with a book. It's to his immense credit that he studied hard on his subject, flying here and there to check out various tribes all over America, and corrected what he came to see were the mistakes in the earlier article. The resulting book is the best and brightest of the Tribe lifestyle, a fascinating look at post-collegiate social life for singles in America today: the long-delayed marriages, the extended relationships (both personal and professional), and how the Tribe can exert peer pressure to simultaneously strengthen and inhibit its members.

Watters has a knack for getting past the image of a group and culling the essence of what that group stands for. Early in the book he explains a key point, referring back to Burning Man; reading this passage, you know you're getting not only a dedicated free spirit, you're getting a writer who can put words together to make you feel part of the story.

"Burning Man was the art-festival equivalent of moshing, a dance that, because people run into each other full force, appears to be the very expression of antisocial behavior. But those in the mosh pit (especially those who have fallen down and felt a half dozen hands instantly lift them back onto their feet) know the secret: there are elaborate rules to moshing and an etiquette to boot. Burning Man and moshing are not expressions of antisocial behavior but of a heartfelt desire for connection and community in the cool guise of rebellion. The best of both worlds."

This being America, if there's a new movement recognized, there'll be somebody to package it. While Watters is careful to never treat his subject as a product to be sold, he's well aware that others have and do. His observations on some of the more blatant commercial attempts to attract and exploit the Tribe phenomenon are interesting; his amusement and admiration come through clearly, and it's amazing how carefully he's noted how his people are being manipulated.

"...when Ikea played my favorite little-known alt-country band over its store stereo system, it felt less as if I were being manipulated and more as if some committee of sharp-eyed trend setters was spending a lot of time and energy trying hard to please me. That our desires were being sated almost before we felt the desire gave us the sense that we were somehow directing commerce, not the reverse.
Even when he finds out later he's been had by a large corporation—Starbucks disguised as a friendly little coffee shop—he (after some initial bitterness) chooses to see the deception as a positive: A huge corporation is so interested in his business that they're willing to create what he wants."

Watters has taken the time to delve into what created the Urban Tribe lifestyle, instead of merely reporting how it functions. His scholarship seems solid, and he's dug from some pretty eclectic sources. His answers to the question, How did this happen? are wide-ranging, and the dozen or so references all get some airtime, allowing the reader to figure out his/her own position. My favorite comes from Generation at Risk, which Watters quotes.

"The predictable sequence of education, stable employment, marriage and parenthood, that marked earlier cohorts of young adults gave way to an increasing diversity of life paths...For these young adults the options were broader—and the outcomes less certain—than those available to their parents."
Humans are social creatures; barring the need to marry young (thereby attaining companionship), they band together in groups to unsconciously fulfill one another's needs. That often these Tribes go on for years, with members coming and going here and there creates the security of a team without the formal rules of marriage. Activities run from the day-to-day of several members living together and regular poker nights or spaghetti dinners or round-robin emails, to group fun stuff like trips to exotic places, to functional things like getting somebody to vouch for a loan, to helping a member find a nice job. The Urban Tribe is more or less all-encompassing, running the gamut from emotional to financial to professional ties—a family in all but the formal rules...and the requirement that you always stick around. Watters wonders, with a perhaps understandable irritation, why these activities are considered natural and morally upstanding when they pertain to a blood-related family...but part of the "slacker" life when performed by members of a long-standing Tribe. After coming to understand the depth of feeling the core members of a Tribe often have for one another, I wonder the same thing.

Much like the members of a blood family, core members of a Tribe often have roles within the group which they naturally perform for the others. Over time, these roles may shift slightly, but mostly they remain static for the duration of the Tribe. There's the Hostess, the Needy One (always in trouble and requiring some kind of help), the Cynic, the Organizer, etc. As in any group, there are leaders and followers, but what's interesting is that members accept their roles and play them for years. Even "Bill, who shows up to everything with his dog and a six-pack," is an integral part of the Tribe fabric, and nobody can imagine him being anything but what he is.

Urban Tribes lasts only 260 pages, which is a damned shame; I could've read another couple hundred pages of it, no problem. Ethan Watters has managed to put a ton of surprising and often amusing social knowledge into a slim volume, skipping from subject to subject within the framework of the Tribe lifestyle. I've only mentioned a small number of the subjects he covers; he has the ability to explain each one fully without harping on it or dragging the book. Put simply, there's a lot of good stuff here, and you really have to read it.

Too many of the TV shows about tribes give the impression that the lives of the characters are about empty, without meaning (often because they're not married). (Seinfeld even celebrates its nothingness.) Ethan Watters proves there's more to these 'tweeners than pop culture thinks, and offers hope that this strange generation really is the hope of the future. Urban Tribes is an excellent treatise and a helluva fun read; I give it 4 1⁄2 stars and recommend it to everyone who worries about what's going to end up happening to all those Gen X'ers.

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