Social Bonding

As soon as I saw all the barn swallows all lined up along the electrical wire near my house in Korea I thought of the lines of people waiting to pay their respects to the recently departed queen of Great Britain and Commonwealth. A friend in London had sent me pictures of her all-night vigil at the Palace of Westminster, and it was clearly a powerful experience for her, above all, one that gave her a profoundly meaningful feeling of belonging, of bonding with others and with her heritage. As she wrote: “the Queen was extraordinarily in our lives.” Today’s post ruminates on the importance of social bonding in relation to the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner’s ideas about structure and anti-structure and society.