So, here’s the first thing you need to know about Ethan Watters’ Urban Tribes – it’s not really about urban tribes.
That’s not to say that he doesn’t spend a sizeable amount of time trying to flesh out the definition of an urban tribe, because he does, and it’s also not to say that the urban tribe as a category isn’t an important part of the book, because it is. In the end, though, Urban Tribes is about two very specific things – marriage, and Ethan Watters.
Now, I don’t want this to come across the wrong way – I don’t think that either marriage or Ethan Watters are bad subjects. In fact, I find both rather interesting, for varying reasons. It’s just that there’s a bit of a bait and switch going on with the title: one might expect more of a sociological study a la Bowling Alone, while the book itself is more of a hybrid expanded-magazine-feature-story/memoir.
Once I realized this and shifted my expectations accordingly, I found Urban Tribes to be a pretty good, thought-provoking read. I definitely didn’t have the same sort of response to Watters and the other “tribe members” he describes as Meg did – I found the descriptions resonant in varying degrees, and kept expecting to turn the page and find a quote from someone I knew talking about one of the tribes I’ve been a part of. The writing resonated with me, from the hyperconscious self-awareness to the tension between being ironic and po-mo while at the same time grappling with real things that can’t be reduced to a wink and a shrug.
So, what is an Urban Tribe? According to Watters, thanks to a combination of influences (among them increasing migration to cities post-college and the idea that we should be marrying our soulmates, and not settling for less), the kids today are waiting longer and longer to get married. While they’re hanging around in a sort of pre-adulthood limbo, many of these people seem to find the support that one draws from family in their friends, forming densely-interconnected groups that Watters dubs “urban tribes.”
In my gut, the idea makes sense and seems to fit with my experiences, but not completely. As someone who’s spent the past 5 1/2 years in a PhD program, I tend to latch on to theories and arguments in everything I read, so naturally my response to Urban Tribes was to push on this theory and see how it stands up.
On the one hand, there’s clearly a sense that the idea of the urban tribe saturates popular culture – there are countless television shows that revolve around tribes, with popular shows like Seinfeld and Friends at the top of the list, not to mention Sex and the City. But here’s the rub – is there something that makes the Friends crew an urban tribe but not the gang from Cheers (who don’t seem to fit the Gen-X, unmarried-and-treading-water-while-enjoying-life demographic that Watters describes)?
The logical conclusion of this sort of thinking is the sort of review that Peter Merholz wrote (and which Meg cited on Monday), which finds the “urban tribe” lacking as a sociological theory. It’s true that Watters’s research is essentially hundreds of self-selected responses by email, and that the exploration of the urban tribe in America is at times less than rigorous.
But hell, Watters himself knows that. The entire first chapter of the book is about how the idea of the “Urban Tribe” grew out of a two-page magazine article and a Good Morning America appearance. When you think about it, Watters’ doing everything possible to keep us from reading this book as a sociological treatise (though he grapples with and critiques Bowling Alone later in Urban Tribes). As he writes when talking about the floods of emails he received after the GMA appearance, “In the end, I had given them little more than the preciously coined phrase ‘urban tribes.’” (p. 61).
That’s the key, really. “Urban Tribe” is just a label that Watters uses to understand his own life, and which seems to resonate with others as they try to understand theirs. In the end, this isn’t a book that’s going to give firm guidance to those between 18 and 40 who’re trying to navigate life between school and marriage/family. This is a memoir by one person trying to do the same thing, wrestling between confidence and self-doubt and generally muddling through alright. For those of us in this boat, reading Urban Tribes leaves us without any rigorous tools to analyze our lives, but it gives us material to think with, to figure out whether our lives are anything like Watters’, and what (if anything) we can learn from his attempts to figure things out for himself.