Celebrations of Bureaucracy: Birthday Parties in Israeli Kindergartens

Abstract

In the early world of the Israeli Jewish child, the kindergarten is the dominant molder of experiences beyond the intimacy of the family. The kindergarten initiates the lengthy process by which child is turned into citizen, in large measure through the state system of education. Between the ages of two and six, the great bulk of Israeli Jewish children attend kindergarten on a weekday basis throughout the school year (Shamgar-Handelman 1990). Within the kindergarten, the child participates frequently in two sorts of event that practice aspects of an ethos of statism and citizenship. One that we addressed elsewhere (Shamgar-Handelman and Handelman 1986) is the celebration of annual national and traditional holidays. The other is the birthday party, a celebration of age. In that earlier essay we argued that the implicit designs and practices of these holiday occasions operate to shift the allegiance of the little child from a social order within which the only hierarchy is that of the family to one dominated by the civil collectivity, within which the family is allocated a subordinate place. This shift in the child's perception of hierarchy [however it is accomplished in different social orders] is crucial to the reproduction, from generation to generation, of the hegemony of the modern state. In this essay we discuss the pervasive motif of the birthday party, that of exact age. Ostensibly the party celebrates age for the sake of the personal maturity of the child. The child's passage from one numerical age to another is constructed to mark his growth and ongoing socialization into the norms of the collectivity (Weil 1986).1 Although less obvious, we argue that the birthday party designs experiences of age and ageing that prepare the child for his participation in the bureaucratic ethos of the state. We will discuss three prominent, implicit messages of age and ageing in the birthday party. One is the individuation of the birthday child in terms of a cultural taxonomy of time, that of age, which momentarily fragments the self according to temporal categories. Another is the child's reclassification from one age category to another, in accordance with this taxonomy of time. The third emphasizes the experiencing of time as continuity, for categories of age are shown also to be one's personal past, present, and future. The birthday party inculcates the youngster into a taxonomy of time. This perspective stems from three premises. First, all social order depends for its coherence on systems of social classification. Second, in the modern state, ideas of exact age are good to think, in Levi-Strauss's terms; for they are integral to frameworks of classification used to create social order (Musgrove and Middleton 1981:53). Third, modern bureaucracies invent social taxonomies and apply them