[In honor of the very strange ritual that is Groundhog Day, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such quirky and fun traditions, including Phil himself on Friday. I’d love to hear about quirky traditions you’d highlight in comments!]
On the very
American balance between the local and the national.
First, it’s
important to note that I’m not nearly enough of an American Exceptionalist not
to recognize that people all over the world throw/toss/hurl strange things in
quirky communal traditions, and, as this Paris
Review essay traces, have long
done so. That essay does a good job thinking through why this might be such a
common human activity, although because it focuses on the admittedly numerous examples
that directly involve throwing animals and/or people (and/or throwing things at
animals and/or people), it’s a bit more interested in the meanness factor than
I would say is the case for today’s American quirky tradition: pumpkin chunkin
(or chuckin, but who can resist a rhyme?!). Unless you want to argue that
pumpkins have feelings (in which case Halloween is quite the horrific tradition
as well), nobody is hurt when we gather together in the sacred ritual of seeing
who can hurl a pumpkin the furthest solely by mechanical means.
I don’t
have a lot to say about the specifics of that tradition, although the Crossbows
& Catapults fan in me is excited to note that many pumpkin chunkers use catapults or similar
devices such as trebuchets. But in any case, my goal in this week’s series is
to use these particular traditions to raise and think through some broader
AmericanStudies topics, and when it comes to pumpkin chunkin I think an
interesting such topic is the balance between the local and the national. As
you might expect, most pumpkin chunkin contests are connected to specific
places and their local traditions, such as the ongoing annual contests in places
as disparate as Lake
County, California and Bald Eagle
State Park, Pennsylvania (among literally countless
others). But at the same time, almost every year since 1986 the US has
hosted the World Championship Punkin
Chunkin (WCPC) contest the weekend after Halloween—for many years it took
place in Delaware, and after a hiatus in the late 2010s this Fall the event
triumphantly returned and was held
in Oklahoma.
While I
very much do not believe the Civil War had anything to do with “states’ rights,”
there’s no question that the debate
between state sovereignty and the US Federal Government has been a defining
and ongoing one in American history. I get that that debate has real stakes,
and that the
10th Amendment is frustratingly ambiguous enough to make for
seriously conflicting opinions on what is and is not state and federal power. But
at the same time, one of the things I like most about the United States is that
it is this huge place (one of the biggest nations in the world, both in size
and population), with so many distinct settings and spaces, communities and
cultures contained within it; and yet at the same time they are all linked to
one another, part of a federalist system in which in various important ways and
moments they come together. That is, there’s not just room here for pumpkin
chunkin at a small state fair and punkin chunkin at a world championship—the presence
of both events is the essence of American community and identity.
Next
quirky tradition tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other traditions you’d highlight?
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