Please join us for the next installment in our "No More Than A Page" series. This series gives an opportunity for faculty and advanced graduate students to receive feedback on their research in process. Presenters provide attendees with a one-page summary of their current research and attendees engage in a lively discussion.
This installment will feature Emily Bianchi, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies.
At the Shaker community in New Gloucester, Maine, Brother Arnold Hadd tells “monastic memories,” anecdotes that reanimate the words and actions of the “the good, the bad, and the indifferent” characters who have contributed to the life and faith. He regularly compared these stories to “gossip.” I examine how gossip aids the Shakers in their attempts to express their love of God by practicing radical love in a community of imperfect people. The Shakers demonstrate that gossipers do not merely evaluate people according to their secondhand deeds: gossiping can increase our understandings of each other and the conditions of the world.
Emily's Page of Research
Amusing, Salacious, and Serious:
In Support of Gossip, a Case Study From the Sabbathday Lake Shakers
The Shakers are a monastic Protestant sect that live according to the tenets of celibacy, community of goods, and confession, and they separate themselves from the World through a schedule of work and worship. In continual conversion—"the Resurrection Life”—Shakers strive to “die to self.” They attempt to discipline themselves of all ungodly human natures. Brought together only by calling and commitment, Shakers demonstrate their love of God by practicing radical love in a community of imperfect people, some of whom, Brother Arnold Hadd suggests, are “pretty unlovable.”
The last active Shaker village is Sabbathday Lake (SDL) in New Gloucester, ME. There, evaluative talk about absent others is the primary mode of communication. In addition to prayer and Church testimony, and interspersed with talk of the weather and plans to work away at the list of chores, the predominate genre is...gossip. It comes in two forms. The first is daily news. Stories about the amusing and frustrating words and actions of others provide information and entertainment. Shakers call the second type “monastic memories,” a vernacular history comprised of anecdotes that reanimate the words and actions of current and passed Shakers.
As a folklorist and ethnographer, I have studied with the Shaker community for seven years. I documented and analyzed Brother Arnold’s repertoire of monastic memories which recounts events from the 1890s onwards. Archival documents contain anecdotes dating to before the establishment of SDL in 1783.
While for folklorists, monastic memories fit well within the analytic category of local character anecdotes, Brother Arnold regularly compared them to gossip. The anecdotes depict an action or interaction that represents one aspect of a Shaker’s personality, a character trait that epitomizes the Shaker for the community that knew them. In commemorating personal character, listeners are invited to evaluate themselves in comparison to community members, past and present. These stories often dramatize what is wrong to demonstrate what is right, and so tend to be both amusing and salacious: attributes shared with gossip. In a community designed to promote spiritual growth, however, people progress, and Shakers resist the constraints of a genre that values the storyworthy over the acknowledgement of ongoing spiritual work, no matter how incremental or imperfect.
Gossip is at once considered entertainment, looked down upon, and feared for its capacity to stigmatize its subject. Ethnographic studies have considered how groups balance gossip’s positive and negative functions and control its expression. Gossip creates solidarity, but at the expense of the one gossiped about. Gossip illuminates communal ideals, but it can act to perpetuate entrenched powers. Gossip can allow for performances that gain social status, but, when done poorly, one can develop a reputation as a gossip.
At the same time that it is feared, gossip has been disregarded as trivial, unfairly maligned as women’s speech. It is considered idle—lacking meaning—and domestic—lacking broad relevance. Reappraisals of gossip focus on its counterhegemonic potential as a check on power and a source of solidarity for marginalized groups.
But gossip does not have to be heightened or justified to be taken seriously. It is a conversational mode slipped into and out of in daily interaction, widely accepted as a universal human activity. In daily gossip, one story begets another as participants in the conversation collaboratively construct a picture of someone’s character, including competing hypotheses on meanings of and speculations on motivations for an action by situating it in the subject’s life story. Gossip can aid participants in coming to not a normative evaluation, but a contextual and complex moral judgement built from particulars. It is this situated co-construction of knowledge and moral meaning that has been underdeveloped in ethnographic studies.
Shaker gossip demonstrates the potential of gossip to enlarge our knowledge of one another. Shakers argue that the goal of gossip should not be merely to try people according to their secondhand deeds, but to increase our own understanding of others and the conditions of the world. Gossip, done well, allows for sympathy alongside judgement. If continual conversion is an incremental work of “rising up,” progress can only be understood when actions and interactions are contextualized within an individual’s life.
But gossip does not only aid us to better understand others. It can also force us to reconsider our responses to them. By testing our hypotheses and biases through gossip and self-reflection, we may change.
I suggest, exemplified by the Shaker case, that the encounter and acceptance of difference, the recognition of the fallibility of not only others but oneself, can act as mechanism for both self-transformation and social change. This is what Brother Arnold, quoting Father Divine of the Peace Mission Movement, meant when he called community “a rock tumbler.” “Those rough edges don’t smooth unless they bump against another.”
This event is free, open to the public and welcoming to everyone. Co-hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion, the Department of Comparative Studies and the Humanities Institute.
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