Like salmon returning to their spawning grounds, young urbanites ritualistically book their holiday flights back home to commune with the people who supposedly still matter the most: family. Or do they? Increasingly, this annual migration is giving way to celebrations with more conveniently located friends, says San Francisco writer Ethan Watters. Watters, 44, coined the term “urban tribes” (it’s also the title of his 2004 hit book) to refer to groups of self-sufficient young adults in cities far from their hometowns. These hip kids are all about hanging out with each other and setting their own agendas—even when it comes to stuffing. But do their tribal get-togethers necessarily exclude family? Not so, says Watters, whom I tracked down recently at the Writers’ Grotto, a “tribe” of writers he co-founded in San Francisco.
Paul Kilduff: When you were an urban tribesman, did you just say, “Hey, Mom and Dad, sorry”? Where are you from originally?
Ethan Watters: Chico.
PK: That’s not that far. That’s not a good excuse.
EW: It’s not. But it’s interesting how those patterns evolve over time because when you’re 21 or 23 and just out of college, and you’re trying to get your life going, traveling anywhere is a little expensive. So you had what we called orphaned Thanksgiving. Because you could say to your parents, “I’m coming home for the Christmas holiday or I’m coming home for New Year’s but I can’t do it now. It’s too expensive to fly on those dates. It’s too hard for me.” And so you always had a few people in the city that stayed around for Thanksgiving. And over the years, and because this marriage delay that I described in urban tribes was so pervasive, you had people living 5 and 10 and 15 years after college in these and outside of families, you had this momentum. So after the fifth year of the orphaned Thanksgiving, [it] actually became the urban tribe celebration about friendships. After the fifth year, parents get invited down to the city. And brothers and sisters can do the same thing. They come to the city for the friendship Thanksgiving.
PK: Oh, okay. So it’s an inclusive thing, you can bring your family into your tribe.
EW: Absolutely. Love, as someone once said, is not a pie. It is something that expands with the amount that you express to the world and certainly the social support within the tribe is not exclusive to the family. There is no reason for it to be in competition with the family.
PK: The subtitle of your book, Are Friends the New Family?—it’s almost like you’re replacing them.
EW: Yes, it’s a provocative subtitle. But the answer to the question is no. Friends aren’t the new family. Families and friends can exist together. [But] some of the things that a family used to do, like help you look for a mate, help you vet that mate, help you . . .
PK: Arrange a marriage . . .
EW: Right, those things are no longer done by your family. They are much more likely to be done by your friends. So you can make the case that sure, friendship groups are doing more things that families once did, but there’s still a reasonable distinction to be made between those two entities. And even though they share their goals and they share some of the mechanisms in your life, one doesn’t have to replace the other. So my provocative subtitle is a little bit of a red herring.
PK: So you could, under the rules of urban tribesmanship, invite your parents from Chicago to your hippie-dippie Christmas celebration.
EW: Absolutely. They’re thrilled by this. I mean, this re-energizes them. They feel like they’ve been included and they just walk away walking on air. And I think they also understand more about the life that their child is leading.
PK: I remember one Christmas, at the last minute, I ran into an old friend of mine from high school. He wasn’t doing anything and it was like, “Hey, you want to come over for Christmas dinner?” It was one of the more memorable Christmases, having a friend come over to a family event.
EW: Yeah. And that same added spontaneity and added joy can be had with the reverse—have the family come at the last minute to the celebration.
PK: The creation of tribes just in general, the distance factor looms large in this. You’re from Chico. You’re down here. That’s still a day’s drive. So how important is that?
EW: I think that’s critical to the dynamics that created the urban tribe. We have tens and hundreds of thousands of people who first go off to college, which is likely a distance away from home, and then they go to a big city. So there’s kind of a two-step removal. You go to college which is outside of your local area and then you go to the big city for the job and you spend five or 10 years trying to figure out that big city before you start a family of your own. I think absolutely distance is key to the need to have that other amount of social capital in your life, another set of networks. The other thing is, when you go to the big city, the need to figure out that big city is huge. You have to figure out how to get a job, how to find a mate, how to navigate this very complex social world and it’s not apparent to you when you arrive from college how to do that. And I think one of the most compelling reasons for the urban tribe that I heard is to increase what social scientists call weak ties. That is, they found that people who do the best in complicated social settings are not the people with the tightest group of friends because your tight group of friends will often share the same information. The people who do the best are the people with what they call weak ties. So this is connections just outside of your social group—the friends of friends being connected with people who, as Malcolm Gladwell called, are our connectors. The urban tribe maximizes not only your tight friends but the weak ties in your group and that, I think, is critical when you live away from your kinship group and outside of where you grew up.
PK: It’s like a survival mechanism, forming these tribes.
EW: It is a survival mechanism, but interestingly, it’s one that happens utterly organically. Like you look at another group—say, for instance, homosexual communities in the ’70s. They’re outside of their homes. They’re in the big city, and you see the same types of groups form. You also see it in ex-pat communities—the same situation: You’re outside of family, you’re outside of kinship networks, and suddenly, these very tight groups form that have this kind of purpose.
PK: Your own experience with urban tribes: Have you turned the corner on that? Are you still as tight with your old urban tribesmen or not?
EW: That’s a very good question. The book ends with me getting married and it basically leaves that question open as to whether the tribe remains a central force in your life. If you invest in your friendship group, that is if you realize that that’s where your social capital lies, it can remain a major force in your life. If you don’t identify it, if you don’t give it the weight it’s due, I’ve seen lots of people walk away and the moment they get married and have a family, they’re like, “Wup! Done with that. I don’t need friends to go out on the town with anymore so I’m moving to Walnut Creek.” My friends have stayed in the city for the most part. Things tend to happen in waves in urban tribes. I was one of the first to get married. Suddenly within the next two years, there were six engagements and three marriages and then two years down the road; there were a bunch of children. So we’re going through these stages again together, getting married and starting households.
PK: One thing that I noticed by getting married and having a kid is that the whole spontaneity factor with guys goes right out the window. “Hey, what are you doing?” And I’m like, “I’m doing the dishes.” My guy friends, they’re very last-minute. Does that impact your relationship with your wife? Because women are great planners for the most part.
EW: That’s so funny that you bring this up, because I thought that was just me. I do miss those days. We had a big Victorian in the Mission where we had four roommates. And it was the house that if you weren’t doing anything on Friday night, just come on over and see what’s going on—that is something that has gone out the window. One of the nice things about the tribes is how they develop over time. This goes back to the question of holidays but [we] did develop yearly traditions that don’t necessarily fall on holidays. There is the Burning Man tradition that we did, there was the houseboat every July. We’d go off to Lake Don Pedro and rent a houseboat. There were certain things that we did on certain people’s birthdays or clusters of birthdays so we always had a big birthday party. So those things survived the transition into the family world better.
PK: Is your wife a better planner or does she make better plans for hanging out with her friends than you do?
EW: Yes. It drives me crazy. It makes me so mad at myself. I think she really does want to see me continue all these relationships and I just have a harder time doing the planning—planning a week out and we got two kids. There’s something different about it for the guy.
PK: Are women’s tribes differently organized? Were they separated along those lines?
EW: In my mind they were not separated. I think the real energy behind the urban tribe is the inclusion of women in this time of life. Men have always had a model for a time period outside of family that they’re off to war or they’re going off into the wilderness. They would separate from the family, establish their own lives and then begin their life. Women, in the history of humanity, most often have gone from family to family in very short order. So suddenly, women are sharing this time between. I think the inclusion of them in this group actually stretched out tribe years, because the time in between becomes a heck of a lot more interesting if you have a cohort of women involved. The inclusion of women in these groups in this time period has given the tribe remarkable staying power in our lives.
PK: Yeah. Did your tribe have a name?
EW: It did not. I have to say, just the fact that I coined this term, urban tribe, I think actually as a marketing tool, that was a tremendous blunder in a way because this is such an organic thing in one’s life and someone like me comes around and tries to brand it and say, “Oh, it’s an urban tribe” and that name is just a little too cute for a lot of people. I think there’s a resistance to it and I actually appreciate the resistance because people feel like these things are just so unique to their world. I admire them pushing that idea away, in a way.
PK: So when you drive into some small town in the future, would you like to see the little signs, Shriner’s, Urban Tribes…
EW: I don’t think it’ll work. People hate to be branded. People hate the idea that their group that feels so organic might be just like everyone else’s.
PK: So what are your holiday plans? Are you going to get together with Po Bronson, Dave Eggers, and Josh Kornbluth, and have a barbecue?
EW: I think I’m going to go home.
PK: You’re blowing off your friends.
EW: I have a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old son and daughter. And so the desire for my mom to see those kids is great.
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Suggestions? Please email Kilduff at thekildufffile@themonthly.com.
See more of what he is up to at http://thekilduff-file.blogspot.com.
Age: 44
Birthplace: Berkeley, CA
Astrological sign: Cancer
First real job: I worked at Chuck E. Cheese when I was in high school and I dressed up as the Chuck E. Cheese rat.
Movie: A screenplay based on Urban Tribes has been optioned by Ira Glass’s production company.
New Book: Watters’s new book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, an examination of the exportation of the U.S. mental health model, comes out next month.
Website: www.urbantribes.net
