Performing Society

The price you pay for rock and roll is, as the song goes, people try to sell your body and soul. A few weeks back, my mum and I talked at length about performative actions. Something about the talk reminded me of Just An Illusion.

Anyhoo.

LSR Sociology with Dr Anjali Bhatia taught me Doing Gender¹, a paper that argues that we “do” gender by performing what is essentially stereotypical behaviours, both masculine and feminine, in society. Which is why a trans-woman has to constantly perform her “feminine” traits as opposed to a biological woman who doesn’t necessarily need to be “feminine” to be a woman. Bottom line is we play our set-roles in all our social interactions.

It is convulated but so many times we act the way we believe others think we ought to. Very Charles H Cooley and his Mirror Theory. Society is made up of us so it is up to us to ensure it survives, thrives, and evolves. Worshiping it instead, as happens IRL, leads to fundamentalism.

Now don’t get me wrong. Service to society is good. It is, as Julia Zahra croons, the price you pay. Society gives us so much. We always have to give back. We might not like the people we perform for, but we do it because it is reciprocal; they probably don’t like us either. But together, doing what must be done, we maintain society. And Society protects us in turn. Again, reciprocal.

And that’s on performing societal services. My big issue is with performance toward societal Image. Even here, Image is not particularly bad, per se. It is what separates the rice from the chaff. Especially in terms of symbolism, it holds a lot of value. But we take it too far. It becomes all-consuming, reducing us down to an Image.

I think the problem is when in trying to Look Good, some of us exhaust all our goodness to Society and only have reserves of waste left for our own. Children grow up without the warmth and discipline of their parents in their own homes. There, yet, not there. Youths are celebrated for “service” to Society yet perform no household tasks or filial duties because they are there, yet they are not there. What good is that? We need to ask what we contribute to the people who love us and depend on us and want – and deserve – our time. Our lives and actions should not be possible to be reducible to empty performance. But it happens because our energy and our time are finite resources. Something has got to give. 

A wise person prioritises.

My years in government service have taught me that we need to pay more attention to the actual tangible things that affect us – EPIC, Birth Certificates, Tribal Certificates, Land Lease Certificates, or the schemes that enter our very homes like MGNREGS, Golden Card, JJM, Soubhagya... No one knows my village more than me, or at least they should not. What is my village good at, what is interesting about it, who can help me achieve my goal, what could hurt my village. SWOT, you know.

I always think about how progress cannot be imposed but must be grounded, if not altogether organic. But as far as I have experienced, people are not even curious to know what river they get their water from. We do not know what government schemes or non-governmental interventions enter our villages. We do not care for the policies that are being perverted in our names. It remains easy to pull the wool over our eyes. An entire herd of sheep’s worth of wool, I’d say. Because we let it.

As long as we look good. We are so invested in keeping up appearances and holding impressive, even largely empty, titles that we become empty vessels making much noise. And I do mean much.

To be fair, this obsession is not even a Mizoram-specific problem at all. Log kya kahenge? they say in Hindi. Let the log say what they will, though. Right? What will people say? People will never stop saying. We can’t spend our one life, sacrificing all that we hold dear to us at the altar of keeping up with the Joneses. We have to develop substance, be responsible, also probably try to live just one step below our means. When I was pursuing MBA, my professor was very fond of saying that. I liked it. I have kept to it.

In the end, it boils down to one question: What is the price we are willing to pay for Image? Is the deal good? Anyway, my mum said I should blog about this. 

Hence. 

I also introduced her to the Mandela Effect so it is possible I return to that one of these days. That should be more fun than this.

¹Doing Gender – Candace West and Don Zimmerman.