Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (review)

It is now three decades, beginning with innovative studies by Philip Greven and John Demos, since scholars began an intensive study of the American family. They inspired a gaggle of young historians who produced countless essays and books often local, often quantitative, limited to the single ethnic group; and who thus largely failed to place the family within the context of the larger popular culture. That is, they represented the tendency J.M. Hexter has deplored, namely, splitting the past into self-contained tunnels “sealed off from... contamination by anything going on in the other tunnels.” Moreover, culture became a changeless fixture of social life for many of these scholars, and they also neglected to see how it embodied and reproduced the dominant ideology. Elizabeth Pleck cannot be charged with these flaws. She does not view the family as ideologically cosseted, sealed off from contact with the larger network of social institutions and ideology swirling around it. Rather she sees it enmeshed in the stew of life, recognizing the family as but one strand in the whole galaxy of social relations that constitute a society and its culture.

Nor does Pleck consider the family, its traditions and practices as timeless. She emphasizes its cultural rhythms, with new ones evolving as older ones calcified. From the outset, her treatment of national holidays, rituals, special events celebrated by the family is set within the context of ongoing historical processes, often to those in European, Asian or African cultures, or in the colonial period, and especially across nineteenth and twentieth century America. In separate, richly detailed chapters—focused on Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Jewish High Holidays, Chinese New Year, and on birthdays, funerals, weddings as well—Pleck devotes sapient passages to changing gender roles, consumerism, premigration immigrant culture. The last, for instance, explores the conflict between cultural traditions and powerful assimilative tendencies. Until recently scholars have not wrestled with what Raymond Williams termed “residual” or “alternative” cultural expression—such as language, customs, community values—that could stubbornly persist and produce resistance to the dominant culture and ideology. Popular culture, in this view, becomes a field of conflict between contending forces, the dominant and the residual. It is, as Stuart Hall tells us, an arena of consent and resistance where hegemony eventually is secured.¹ Pleck is very aware of this contrapuntal theme; how the dialectic of acculturation is worked out and when it is resisted. She describes some of the many features of premigration culture that were rejected, refined, repaired; and how selected aspects of the world of memory, language, and self-segregation are retrieved. Her observations agree with Michael Fischer’s, that a generational legacy plus ethnic identity “is something dynamicit can be potent even when not consciously taught...something that emerges in full—often liberating—flower only through struggle.”² This “struggle” centers on immigrant efforts to reconcile memory and quotidian realities. It mirrors both the gradual and partial acculturation of newcomers and their resistance to the hegemonic culture. Everywhere one looks, Pleck tells us, Old World social customs were transplanted: Italian cuisine and feasts, Greek and Ukrainian women decorating Easter eggs, immigrant weddings, etc. And everywhere these traditions were eroding or reinvented: arranged marriages were rejected; belief in romantic love was on the rise, reinforced by dime novels, magazines, movies; dress was changing, as immigrant fashions were abandoned, etc.

Acknowledging resistance to hegemonic culture, the gradual and partial acculturation of newcomers, and the dialectical outcome—Pleck anchors the process on a dual overview, the sentimental and the postsentimental. The former is the holiday or ritual “either in or outside the home that centered around consumerism and a display of status and wealth to celebrate home and family”; and the postsentimental is a reaction, which “recognizes, if not celebrates, family diversity as well as ethnic and racial puralism.” (pps. 1–2) Cognizant of the dynamic of sweeping change—in the family, gender roles, immigrant group consciousness, popular...