Word: communalism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Though people talk about "urbanization" as the process that ushered in modern ills, many urban neighborhoods at mid-century were in fact fairly communal; it's hard to walk into a Brooklyn brownstone day after day without bumping into neighbors. It was suburbanization that brought the combination of transience and residential isolation that leaves many people feeling a bit alone in their own neighborhoods. (These days, thanks to electric garage-door openers, you can drive straight into your house, never risking contact with a neighbor...
...homelife with a work life fairly gracefully, and in a richly social context. When they gather food, their children stay either with them or with aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins or lifelong friends. When they're back at the village, child care is a mostly public task--extensively social, even communal. The anthropologist Marjorie Shostak wrote of life in an African hunter-gatherer village, "The isolated mother burdened with bored small children is not a scene that has parallels in !Kung daily life...
Comments such as "Your wife is left-handed...I know" and jokes like "What did one feminist say to another?" were traded along with bonds, smack dab in the middle of this large communal office. In addition, phrases like "get off you knees" were directed at a salesperson (though gender neutrality doesn't hide much here) trying to gain favor with a particular client. The time women most often came up in conversation was in reference to the women these men were divorcing or divorced from. And if you were lucky, you might hear about pick-up joints with...
...aspire merely to become better analysts while in college, ethnic studies looks like a poor relation to such analytically developed fields as mathematics, biology or physics. But for those who aspire to become better selves, such cultural explorations can be essential starting points for reflection on the nature of communal commitment and personal identity...
Actually, the contemporary poet's situation isn't altogether grim. What it is is complicated, in ways that Moyers rarely plumbs. Poetry readings and workshops, as he triumphantly points out, are flourishing; poetry as a communal, spoken experience--something to be shared with other listeners--seems far more vibrant today than a couple of decades ago. On the other hand, the market for poetry on the page remains dismal, and many trade publishers have abandoned it altogether. (This has led to a surreal situation in which talented poets sometimes find themselves wishing for rejection; they can't even manage that...