Gossip as a Means of Social Control

As I mentioned in a previous post, news travels fast in my training town. And I use the word ‘news’ broadly; anything from the doings of the mayor to the whereabouts of any member of the community to whose husband was seen with another woman is usually known within a matter of days, if not hours. A better term for this ‘news’ might be gossip. What is the difference between news and gossip anyway? Is it about public vs. private information? In this culture, like a lot of others around the world, I think, privacy is not a very important social value like it is in the U.S. Here they are pretty conscious about saving face and people don’t usually just blab out their life problems to acquaintances. At the same time, however, in order to get along with and work with another person, you have to know who they are in a holistic sense. There is no such thing as “just a work relationship.” You can’t be associated with someone’s public persona while distancing oneself privately. (At least that’s what I think now, but we’ll see.) Maybe the difference between news and gossip is whether it’s flattering or unflattering information. Gossip would be associated with the unflattering stuff.

In the sense that gossip is people talking about other people’s dirty laundry, it actually plays an important role in encouraging people to follow the right path in life here. The “right” path, of course, assumes that you’re making a pretty big value judgments about the way that people live. It’s a big change coming from Brown culture, where one had the idea more that people’s different behaviors were just different choices, different paths. Or at least the idea that people had differing worldviews which had them live in different ways. Here, though, a lot of the values behind gossiping about another person have wide consensus. And it makes sense – it could be that I’m around children more now than I have been in a long time, but so many of the things I find myself talking about or hearing about in others seem like relatively clear-cut choices between good and bad: kids going to elementary school, staying faithful to your spouse, not getting pregnant as an unwed teenager. Surely there are still tough moral dilemmas and hot-button moral issues: drinking and migration to the United States (when you have dependents) are among the biggest. But it is interesting to be in a more homogeneous culture where people are going to be duly warned when they start going down a path deemed bad by the majority of the town. This can work very well, I think. I spent a little time earlier in my stay talking to people whom the community deemed unfit for me. Other people noticed and through the grapevine, the word came to me that I should not be spending any more time with said people. I felt a little violated to have my casual conversations scrutinized so much; it seriously violated my notions of privacy and personal freedom. But actually it was very helpful – those people actually wouldn’t have been good people to spend more time with – and the gossip stopped any further involvement which might have affected my reputation and ability to work in town. It was a very effective means of social control on me. I don’t use that term in any kind of negative way. People who studied sociology will know that all societies have some kind of social control, and a healthy amount of social control is necessary to any group. I also don’t find it so bad when people talk about more serious and more cut-and-dry issues than mine such as the three I mentioned earlier. And with regard to those topics, it sometimes definitely seems that gossip is a weapon for good in the fight against wrong ways of living in town.

A side note to that: I’ve had a grand total of three beers in Guatemala and no other alcohol. Drinking is generally seen as OK by Catholics and as a sin by Evangelicals, so I’ve had to steer clear in order to keep my name clean and keep myself in the culture, especially since I’ve been going to an Evangelical church. On the one occasion when I had to drink a beer in town, I went as far as humanly possible away from my house to buy it in hopes of diffusing the talk. So to you friends who said that I wouldn’t ever have to give up drinking here, I think I really may be moving toward having to do it and not drink at all once I’m at my real site.

The third distinction between news and gossip, however, is its veracity. And that’s the problem with gossip as a means of social control; you never know if it’s accurate or not and if you’re blaming an innocent person. People can be very self-serving beneath a thin veneer, and it’s probable that some rumors are made up by those with something to gain from them. But nevertheless they often catch on and become common knowledge in town. And then it becomes a matter of whose word do you trust? Many of your friends and neighbors or the subject of the rumor, be it your husband, child, etc.? Tough distinction. There are no courts of law to settle such disputes. Few paternity tests to determine who fathered a child. So it can certainly be very unjust.

Also, gossip is not very forgiving, and for this it has earned the ire of (at least) the evangelical church. A central tenet of Christianity is that God “forgets” or “buries” our prior sins when we come to God, and likewise we should forget the sins and shortcomings of those around us. But the point of gossip is often to scandalize and isolate bad people to protect the good ones. Once someone is scandalized, it is hard to become clean. And this is certainly an anti-Christian aspect of Guatemalan culture. Jesus sought to bring out the best in people, sometimes through miracles, sometimes affirmation, sometimes harsh criticism, but many of his works were reserved for people who were social outcasts and victims of others talking bad about them. I recently read a biography of Gandhi, and the characteristic of his which struck me most was how much he always assumed the best about people. As someone striving to live the example of those two figures, it brings up an interesting dilemma. Affirming the down and out in rural Guatemalan communities would be a serious manifestation of the Gospel in today’s world, yet my ability to contribute to Guatemalan communities in general (a.k.a. the down-and-out globally speaking) depends on my being respected by them and associated with the right people.

The social pressure to “conform” (I guess that’s how we’d say it in America) makes it so that people who want to live alternative lifestyles usually geographically resituate as well. The two big magnets are Guate, the capital, and the United States. Some people want to move north just as much for the adventure and the freedom to explore life in a less restrained fashion than for the money. At some point, I’m going to write an entry all about the U.S. here. Our country is ever-present in the minds of people here in Guatemala.

Having people know about all your business is kind of fun, though, too, at least when you’re staying within the boundaries of the community. The mayor, for instance, knew that my fellow trainees and I were going on a hike in the local mountains, so he sent a guide from City Hall with us and then arranged to have a segment of a cable TV show taped in the mountains while we were there. This led to my being interviewed on TV for about five to ten minutes in muddy clothes. Second, we just finished the national holidays, which were great fun. The highlight of the holidays, at least in this town, is the election and crowning of the town queen. For those from Pasadena, it’s pretty similar to being crowned Rose Queen. There’s a pretty serious beauty pageant element, but the cultural element is all about promoting Mayan traditions and culture. Each of the candidates gave a speech in Spanish and Ka’chiquel (the area’s native language) about Mayan traditions, prophecies (2012!), the need to preserve the Mayan languages, the oppression of the indigenous woman, etc. I came away very impressed with the girls, especially given that they were on showcase in front of thousands of people in a culture where women rarely take leadership roles or speak up in any kind of mixed group setting. Anyway, the night of the coronation a well-known ranchera band came to play after the ceremony. For the first few songs, the queen and her court, for lack of a better term, dance with local dignitaries. I was invited to be one of those dignitaries and had a great time dancing on stage in front of thousands of people and on TV! I had never danced to ranchera music before, so I have no idea how I looked, but I feel pretty comfortable with it. Then I got invited to the mayor’s VIP party following the dances. It was very strange, but at least it kept stroking my ego :/