On Groups

The Question as posed:

All of us, over the years, have joined many new groups, from new schools or playgroups, to sports teams, jobs, clubs, and various other kinds of groups. Sometimes, we have been pushed into new groups by others (think parents, e.g.), while other groups we have sought out or been invited into.

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Previous Questions that cover relevant territory:
clubbable, community, and tribe
quite interesting to revisit

My first thought: I have never been a joiner, always preferring the margins, or taking as peripheral a role as possible, almost never enacting belonging by going to meetings, let alone by seeking a leadership position: I have proudly practiced active evasion of public responsibilities (once clear of high school). I am constitutionally uncomfortable around conflict, and was tagged by one Acadia colleague as "a moving target" (not meant as a compliment). And in fact people have mostly left me alone to pursue my own [often incomprehensible] interests.

In short, I am not clubbable (an adjectival characterization I surely picked up from British literature)

...friendly and sociable (= enjoying meeting other people and spending time with them), in a way that makes you a suitable member of a club, especially one that people of a high social class belong to:
...He was not, in the conventional sense, a clubbable man.

...Crime writers are pretty clubbable on the whole.

And the current sense makes the blood run cold:
clubbable.com

...and there's an app for that

The exceptions are telling: I have created bogus groups, like the Nexial Institute (of which I am the Grand Panjandrum) and the Acadia Folklore Society (a group that I created on the spot, to reserve a classroom at Acadia for an early presentation of the images that became Bluenose Physiognomy). And my decade of closing the Good Tern (sweep and mop the floors, lick the peanut butter spoons, etc.) and the last almost 8 years as self-appointed caretaker of peninsular roadsides continue my pattern of idiosyncratic participation. I enjoy the puzzling notoriety: keep 'em guessing, don't show no stinkin' badges.

The surrounding society pulses with named groups to which fealty may be owed and displayed: sports franchises, fandoms of people or things, causes. I've dodged a lot of them over the years. I did do Scouts back in the day, right through to Eagle Scout (1958). And I suppose yoga and Convivium are group-like activities, but I haven't allowed them to oppress me. I have perforce found myself in such granfalloons as 'Harvard 1965', 'Malaysia X', 'Stanford graduate students', 'Acadia faculty', 'librarians', 'retirees'. devotees of Home Kitchen Cafe... and had in each instance to figure out how to integrate myself into those groups, and how to enact my membership while preserving my independence.

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Group membership is entangled with identity, never more obviously than during the weeks before an election, when many people DISPLAY their allegiances to political moieties, easily read as contending tribes. Donning the Anthropologist Hat, exploring the great variety of human behavior, one remarks a lot of ORGANIZATIONAL energy and identities declared and defended as people enact membership in groups. It's Kurt Vonnegut that comes to mind for me:

Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons Kindle Notebook

Cat's Cradle Wikipedia

granfalloon Wikipedia
A Kurt Vonnegut Convergence: Indiana University Bloomington
What the Heck is a Granfalloon? Indiana University
Information Granfalloons
The Rise of Granfalloon Politics Brian Klaas
Karass Urban Dictionary
karass via oook.info
Karass - Our Connections Youth First
Sociology of small groups Wikipedia
Types of Groups lumenlearning.com

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Corporate groups like Masons and Elks and Odd Fellows and Shriners come with the whole megillah of shibboleths and Secrets... consider also Rosicrucians, Theosophists, Mormons, Swedenborgians, Quakers, ...Maronites, Druze, Sunni, Shia ...and the varnas and 'castes' of the Indian subcontinent... all groups whose carapaces protect those within.

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By Wednesday morning my thoughts had taken a rather Academical turn, with a cascade of explorations from the vantage point of Sociology —arguably the discipline that has developed the study of groups, and so is a reasonable minehead to begin exploration:

Types of social groups Wikipedia includes a nice [if partial] typology of groups:
  • Basic groups: The smallest possible social group with a defined number of people (i.e. greater than 1)—often associated with family building:
    Dyad: Will be a group of two people. Social interaction in a dyad is typically more intense than in larger groups as neither member shares the other's attention with anyone else. (See also couple.)
    Triad: A group of three people. Triads are generally more stable than dyads because one member can act as a mediator should the relationship between the other two become strained.
  • Family, Household: Small group of people who live in the same home. Family may or may not form clan, fellowship, larger kinship groups, or a basic unit of community. Various cultures include different models of households, including the nuclear family, blended families, share housing, and group homes.
  • Crew or Band: Small group of skilled people with common interest; a rowing crew; a music band; construction crew; subunit of a tribe as band society.
  • Peer group: A group with members of approximately the same age, social status, and interests. Generally, people are relatively equal in terms of power when they interact with peers.
  • Clique: A group of people that have many of the same interests & commonly found in a high school/college setting; most of the time they have a name & rules for themselves.
  • Club: A group that usually requires one to apply to become a member. Such clubs may be dedicated to particular activities: sporting clubs, for example.
  • Cabal: A group of people united in some close design together, usually to promote their private views or interests in a church, state, or other community, often by intrigue.
  • Community: A group of people with a commonality or sometimes a complex net of overlapping commonalities, often—but not always—in proximity with one another with some degree of continuity over time.
  • Gang: Usually an urban group that gathers in a particular area. It is a group of people that often hang around each other. They can be like some clubs, but much less formal. They are usually known in many countries to cause social unrest and also have negative influence on the members and may be a target for the law enforcers in case of any social vices.
  • Mob: Typically a group of people that has taken the law into their own hands. Mobs are usually groups which gather temporarily for a particular reason.
  • Posse: Originally found in English common law, posses are generally obsolete and survive only in the United States, where they are the law enforcement equivalent of summoning the militia for military purposes. However, posse can also refer to a street group.
  • Squad: Generally a small group, of around 3 to 15 people, who work as a team to accomplish their goals.
  • Team: Similar to a squad, though a team may contain many more members. A team works in a similar way to a squad.

My ambivalence about groups and the acts of belonging and joining seems to be very deep-seated, and is surely traceable to 42 Quincy Street 1943-1953, along with my tastes for the exotic and the recondite. I've written about that before and elsewhere [and ought to back-link here... real soon now]. But an image cropped up of a book on my mother's reading pile, sometime in the early 50s:

...and I recognized it as something eidetic, one of the core elements in my vocation as an anthropologist. It was the variety expressed in the graphic that transfixed me, and that has always prejudiced/infected my view of the discipline of Sociology, which I've tended to think of as almost solely concerned with the society and culture of our own People (to be defined variously, but generally American/Western European in the main). I wanted something more exotic, less constrained by doctrine and dogma and ...ethnocentrism (though I didn't learn that word until later ...beware digression into The Ugly American...)

And that led to a thought about the whole Process of considering Questions, and I wrote

Often enough, thinking about Questions puts me through changes...
a phrase which seems a very late-60s locution. So I got derailed into exploring:
Go through the changes Idioms by The Free Dictionary

Three very different takes on 'Changes'

The Archies : She's Putting Me Thru Changes Lyrics Genius Lyrics

Going through Changes Lyrics & Meanings SongMeanings.com

Charles Bradley: Changes

...which got me thinking about the phrase "ring the changes" which I adopted into my lexicon around the time I first read Dorothy Sayers' The Nine Tailors: Changes Rung on an Old Theme in Two Short Touches and Two Full Peals, maybe 1968? Which of course led off into the remarkable and oh-so-English discipline of change ringing (and note the marvelous list of 'English bell-ringing terms on that page!), and to Meaning & Origin Of The Phrase , and Amazon's offerings.

...vary the ways of expressing, arranging, or doing something...

...to do something in a different way in order to make it more interesting...

Pretty far afield from 'groups' until it occurred to me that becoming a bell-ringer required learning, apprenticeship, dealing with other members of the Peal, ... and the practice of change ringing was not so very far from Morris Dancing. Consider what one must do to join such a group.

..and THAT led to wondering if Charles Babbage ever had any truck with change ringing, and THAT led to exploring other novels that deal with change ringing, one being Neil Stephenson's Anathem, which features "a cloistered monastery for mathematicians to signal different ceremonies", which pointed toward the Jacquard loom, and The French Connection popped up... and THEN I got to thinking about The North American Guild of Change Ringers, and thence to Change-ringing Disentangled: With Hints on the Direction of Belfries, on the Management of Bells ... Wigram, Woolmore...

...and backtracking to When Babbage and Dickens Waged a War on Noise Maria Popova, and Charles Babbage and the Vengeance of Organ-Grinders and Charles Babbage's Observations on Street Nuisances (1864) ...

As Kurt Vonnegut says so eloquently, And so it goes...