Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)

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Ethan Watters. Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. 256 pp. Softcover. $24.95. ISBN: 1582344418

<1> Outside of the 60s generation, there are few if any generational groupings as well known and discussed as Generation X, the term coined by Douglas Copeland to describe the generation approaching adulthood in the post-Reagan boom-years of the 1990s. As the subject of books (Generation X), movies (Reality Bites, Clerks, Slacker), TV dramas and sitcoms (Seinfeld, Friends, Ally McBeal, Sex and the City), and Prime Time news specials, there is seemingly little new to say about Gen X. It has long since been tagged as a generation blessed with immense cultural and economic freedom but with little direction and even less conviction, a depiction resulting in its portrayal as a collection of morbid, defeated slackers whose petty individual interests have fallen out of line with traditional American goals and community-based values.

<2> This is, of course, why Ethan Watters' book on urban tribes is a valuable read. Rather than take the Gen X cultural narrative at face value, Watters operates from the assumption that such depictions of Gen Xers as directionless (or in Seinfeldian terms, as actors in stories without a plot) signifies "something of a narrative vacuum." Watters critiques most studies of Gen X as overwhelmingly uniform in their inability to offer "shared social narratives" through which group members might fashion a "coherence and meaning to [their] existence." Stemming from this critique of Gen X non/narratives is a book that attempts to materialize a generational narrative in terms that re-connect it to a national community - in short, to provide a cultural narrative where one does not exist. Focusing particularly on the rising urban subculture of never-marrieds - mainly college educated, wealthy (but not yuppie) twenty- and thirty-somethings with income unhinged from familial obligations - Watters redefines a generational anomaly of slackers as a highly influential subculture comprising the dark matter of millennial urban networks. His thesis is twofold: First, Watters argues that the rising network of urban tribes that have come to define Gen X mark a break in traditional networked relationships, from those rooted in familial bonds and civic duties to those organized around interlocked friendships grounded in the compact spaces of cities. Second, Watters finds that the so-called marriage delay of post-college twenty- and thirty-somethings has fueled these alternate urban networks.

<3> The first section of the book, subtitled "Freedom and Community," takes up Watters' focus on materializing the urban tribe as a series of interlocked networks. Utilizing both personal observation of his own San Francisco tribe and the narratives of people throughout the U.S. describing their own particular tribal networks, Watters locates the urban tribe within a particular spatio-historical moment. Urban tribes, he argues, arise from a condensation of a series of (relatively) new freedoms, many of which link back to the marriage delay: freedom from familial restraints resulting from the relocation to distant cities and the putting off of marriage; freedom from money constraints as the 90s economy boomed and individuals did not have to provide for children; freedom from relationship constraints; freedom from social strife and any nationally unifying social movement. Within newly re-urbanizing cities, newly educated and excessively free people had both the means and time to organize new social networks with a 'high clustering co-efficient' of intense intergroup relationships.

<4> In what is perhaps the key chapter within this section, "How Tribes Connect a City" makes an argument for the way in which urban tribes have re-invented the 1950s concept of social capital. Watters offers a critique to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, in which the author makes a case for the decline of community-based civic, familial and recreational activities and organizations that function as the glue holding together communities. While Watters finds that urban tribes are not overtly political or civic, he makes the case that such urban networks perform the task of tying together communities - operating as what he calls the dark matter holding the city together - through a chain of interlocking tribal networks. Because such networks are based upon ties of friendship that do not rely upon traditional organizations, their role as city-connectors are more difficult to track and quantify. They are also, Watters implies, more dense since they rely upon the organic ties of friendship rather than the imposed threads of an organization. So while enrollment in traditional civic groups like League of Women Voters or Knights of Columbus may be down, Watters finds that newer events such as San Francisco's Critical Mass, a monthly gathering of bikers from throughout the city who take over the city's streets, representative of new and intricately interwoven social groupings of different urban tribes. Such gatherings operate, he argues, through inter-group communication - a friend from one tribe circulates the information, which is then picked up by other members of that tribe and circulated out to other tribes - that by its very nature is non-hierarchical. It becomes a community of communities operating without leaders, often even without a stable ideology guiding the gatherings: each tribe, or each assemblage of tribes, makes it up as they go along.

<5> While the first section begins to offer a compelling case for urban tribes as a vital and growing social network of urban dark matter, section two, "Love in the Time of Nervousness," subtly retracts much of the vitality of urban tribes. In these final four chapters and epilogue, Watters focuses on the changing role of relationships - particularly the marriage delay - to the inner workings of an urban tribe. Throughout the four chapters, Watters makes two sequential arguments. He opens the section by arguing that urban tribes provide comfort from "the cultural norms [and] pop-cultural narratives" of being a thirty-something single, which include the assumptions that being thirty, single and living with roommates signified being gay, being single forever, and/or being a slacker. Surrounding oneself with an urban tribe, whose members are likewise older and single, reaffirmed the 'normalcy' of the situation and made those cultural norms irrelevant. The second argument, found most forcefully in the final chapter and epilogue, is that the comfort of being single within an urban tribe contributed to social pressure within the tribe to remain single.

<6> On their own, these arguments contribute to the anatomy of urban tribes begun in the first section of the book. I am, however, a little skeptical of the overwhelming importance Watters places on the marriage delay. Rather than making a case for the growing importance of urban tribes, and in particular their re-working of the narratives of national identity and community building, Watters' intense focus on marriage relegates urban tribes to being merely a group operating as a holding pattern for marriage. That is to say, despite being a tribe composed largely of singles, Watters makes marriage the absent presence that defines urban tribes - its raison d'etre. You enter it hoping to get out, which sounds more like a stage of development - a twenty- and thirty-something adolescence - rather than a series of interlocked groups functioning in place of traditional familial and civic organizations. "One of the paradoxes of the tribe years," Watters contends, "is that the happier and more content one is being single, the more one suspects that a happy marriage might not be in the cards." For Watters, urban tribes do not replace marriage as an endgame, but in fact strengthen the bonds of marriage by allowing potential partners to first explore and develop their own individual interests and economic security.

<7> This is a stance I ultimately find limiting. As Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza might say, this is not to say that there's anything inherently wrong with marriage, but to focus on marriage as a signpost for entrance into a post-urban tribe stage - which is what Watters implies in his epilogue, written he tells us while on honeymoon in Hawaii - significantly limits who has access to the sorts of urban tribe cultural narratives that he claims to want to provide. Not only does the tribal endgame of marriage imply that single forty-something tribal members are somehow not conforming to the cultural narrative he lays down (either slackers, or forever singles - which now has a negative valence - or gay), but so too does it erase the large gay urban populations fashioning alternative communities not reliant upon marriage in the least, either by personal choice or through the draconian restrictions of a conservative nation voting overwhelmingly in both 'red' and 'blue' states to deny gay marriage. Rather than challenge the traditional coupling of nation/nuclear family by tracing the rise of a new and significant cultural group successfully developing its own networks outside of those sponsored, often outright, by our government, the tying of urban tribes to an extended singlehood ultimately makes those state-sanctioned outlets all the more entrenched, all the more vital to a sense of personal and national well-being.

<8> The privileging of marriage within the functioning of urban tribes is a glaring, though not ultimately damning, shortcoming of the book. It is one that grows from the participatory approach heavily grounded in personal observation that Watters takes to the subject. If Watters is unafraid to draw conclusions from his personal experience, he is equally unafraid to show how blatantly wrong some of those conclusions are. "I want to share with you not simply my conclusions," Watters writes early on, "but also the journey, and even some of the detours, I took to find them." This approach allows him to circumvent the trap many writers fall into - namely to come across as an impeccable cultural critic with all the answers worked out. As he readily admits, Watters stumbled upon the concept of urban tribes while trying to make sense of his own socio-cultural position within San Francisco, and one gets the feeling that not only is he still working through what those observations, but so too does he invite us all to reformulate his ideas based upon our own observations and research. The result is a book that reads, in the best possible way, like a first draft of someone trying to help us figure it all out. His unearthing of a largely unseen urban network of twenty- and thirty-somethings with tight intra-tribe connections and a number of loose-affiliation inter-tribe connections presents a crack in the traditional Gen X narrative. It allows for renewed study of the 90s young urban class as a vital center of national activity rather than as anomalous to it.

<9> His book raises as many questions as it answers, and offers lines for future study and inquiry. How have urban tribes de-centralized from the very cities in which they began as members are forced to follow shifting centers of capital around the nation and globe? What intersections do urban tribes have with other, more overtly political, networked groupings, particularly the anti-capitalist globalization movements also attending such tribal gatherings as Critical Mass and Burning Man? Does this suggest that Watters' urban tribes are intensely political in ways he has not yet registered? How do multiple tribal affiliations, grounded either in the spaces of the internet or the spaces of cities such as San Francisco, alter tribal dynamics? Do different assemblages of tribes form unseen 'super-tribes,' a phenomenon vitally important to the Seattle WTO protests? How does the urban tribe network work for the large urban population that is not college-educated, is not friendly with millionaires, is not saddled with surfeits of time and money? How have tribes challenged marriage? These are all compelling questions Urban Tribes points toward but does not have the space to develop. As we begin to revise Watters' opening forays into second, third and forth drafts, these will be questions we would do well to keep in mind.

Danny Mayer

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