6 What Is Important to Us?
What is important to us?
Let’s get back to that big question that led us down the rabbit hole of “What is Divine?”: What unites us? We looked at the unity of not being divine but what about the smaller-scale unities of communities? See what I did there? 😉
Humans like to group themselves based on the similarities they share with certain people. These are our communities, based on geographic, religious, ethnic, social, etc. similarities. We develop communities based on hobbies like sports and music, age group, or careers. These communities often form around a set of values, or priorities, shared among members of the community. For example, many suburban communities based on geographic membership often share values of household maintenance, security, or social engagement. LGBTQIA+ communities often share values about representation, support, and activism. These values define what is important to communities. Beauty ideals, as discussed in “What is Beautiful?”, can factor into these values. It is clear that different communities may prioritize different values.
The importance of solidarity
Remember our discussion of social norms in “Who Am I?” Such norms are imperative to communities, so much so that norms are sometimes values, such as politeness in public settings. Norms also instruct community members about what is expected of them. Not everyone follows the norms, but they wouldn’t be called norms if it wasn’t normal to follow them. The fact that some people don’t follow norms can be dangerous to the cohesion of a community. Sociologists and anthropologists call this cohesion ‘social solidarity’. If there are too many ‘bad apples’ (according to the expectations of ‘good apples’), cohesion/solidarity can suffer and communities may not work like one hopes.
Among several groups of people of West Africa (Fig. 6.1), the loss of social solidarity is an ever-present threat (as it is in most societies). It is so important to maintain social solidarity that several societies developed a way to combat the danger of norm-breaking through a men’s group known by many names. Among the Bamana, this men’s group is called Kòmò, often called the Kòmò society. Like in Maasai and Astrolabe Bay cultures discussed in “Who Am I?”, portions of a society organize around a common goal, like initiating young boys or girls into adulthood. These internal groupings are, confusingly, referred to as societies, like “Greek Societies” (sororities and fraternities) often found on college campuses. Different societies’ goals vary. The goals and inner workings of the Kòmò society are very secret. The visible actions of this men’s society come in the form of public events where masked performers act out the finding and destroying of ‘evil’ (those practices that defy social norms in the opinion of leaders). Oftentimes these performances include characters that clearly depict unwanted behaviors, such as drunkenness.
The kòmòkun (Fig. 6.2) is the mask of the Kòm