Under limited circumstances, American culture permits men and boys to cry in public as an expression of their emotional and psychological state. As a participant observer at the National Debate Tournament embedded with the UC Berkeley debate team as a researcher, I witnessed public male tears in an environment which was supportive and even encouraging of such expression; this provided the opportunity to test the thesis that tears, male or otherwise, are not necessarily natural expressions of universal mental states, but culturally conditioned responses appropriate to specific social settings and conditions. In short, it is safe for boys to cry at the National Debate Tournament as members of the elite debate teams of universities around the country. My findings would indicate that tears convey a multiplicity of meanings: as a means of collective mourning (following loss); identification with hallowed tradition; and, as a public avowal of the finality of a challenge which literally can end a forensic career.
The framework for my fieldwork is intrinsically linked to the theory that emotions are, “constructed primarily by people rather than by nature,” (Lutz, 54). Although I had a clear framework for evaluating the culture of collegiate debate I still faced methodological challenges during my fieldwork.
Many anthropologists such as Scheper-Hughes, Lutz, and Powdermaker discuss the difficulties they faced when trying to understand cross-cultural phenomena. Because they were outsiders, they struggled to develop trust and break down the “dichotomic barriers” dividing the observer and the observed. Their books dedicate many pages to this struggle.
I faced a different methodological challenge in my fieldwork: I am an insider. I personally knew my informants before the time of my study and I was familiar with the culture because I debated for four years in high school and one year in college. I did not debate at the NDT. Instead, I conducted fieldwork – taking on the role of observer and studying the culture of debate. Consequently, I avoided many, though not all, of the struggles faced by cross-cultural anthropologists. Even though I am a debater, I have never been to the NDT before, nor witnessed the tears. In this sense, I was an outsider in that I did not know the emotional and cultural implications of the event before my arrival, but I was an insider in that I was not only welcome to participate, but expected to engage in complete socialization (by doing research for the Berkeley team). Being an insider gave new meaning to the practice of participant observation in the context of my field. I was expected to research until dawn, carry 50-pound boxes of paper, take notes on debates, and report back for squad meetings. Because of this I felt and lived the intensity and emotions that debaters themselves experienced at this defining tournament. I knew the game that the “outsider” would never know. Many people link debate with public speaking and think of great communicators such as Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy; however, policy debate does not involve slow persuasive speaking, rather, it’s a game of strategy and unyielding competition. The students compete in pairs and take turns giving speeches to persuade the judge to vote for their team. Debate is not directed towards an outside audience. Not only do the debaters speak almost incomprehensibly fast, like auctioneers, but the debates are jargon-heavy and near impossible for outsiders to follow. This is the most insular of academic worlds, much of it taking place in the “war room,” which, on this particular occasion, was a suite where we met, researched and comprehensively addressed the relative merits of our argument that United States cotton subsidies keep Third World cotton producers out of the market. Typically, the debaters brought approximately 300 pounds of evidence stored in large plastic tubs that can only be transported with a dolly.
Let us examine how all this energy catalyzes into public demonstrations of vulnerability; i.e., crying in public at the NDT. This information is based on my personal observations and the observations of my informants over the past thirty years of policy debate. This year, I watched two men from Emory University debate their final round. This team was nationally ranked in the top-five, and they were expected to make it to, at least, the semi-finals of the tournament. Instead, they ended their career with a record of four wins and four losses, something no one in the community could have predicted. Because of the intense emotional states of the boys, I did not have an opportunity to interview them, but I saw the round and observed their reactions to their loss. After the judges announced their decisions, both boys immediately put their heads down on the desk. The next time they raised their heads, they both had tears falling down their cheeks. Later on, at the awards ceremony, they were each presented with a speaker award (an award given to debaters with the highest amount of speaker points regardless of their numbers of wins and losses). Upon receiving these awards they again cried.
The way people cry differs among debaters. Unlike the Emory boys, who simply teared-up, one recent graduate from Emory University and winner of the 2007 NDT, “had to keep getting up from the work table to go to the bathroom and cry because it was so embarrassing” and she “basically had a really public nervous breakdown because I was so stressed out.” According to Aaron Kall, debate coach at the University of Michigan, debaters often are forced to cry in public because “the crying is often mixed in with judges trying to give their oral critiques, so debaters are often expected to stay in the room while crying.” Finally, Jim Shultz, an undergraduate senior debater at West Georgia University, testified that he witnessed one senior cry but, “would not say he sobbed or teared-up. It was somewhere in the middle. He put his head down.” Of the 40 or so people I interviewed “putting their heads down” was the most common description of crying at the NDT and was also what I personally witnessed.
I was surprised to discover that men and women did not differ in their expression of emotion at the NDT. The physical expression of their pain through tears was identical and supporters comforted both genders identically as well. This finding was at variance with Lutz’ early observations regarding emotion and culture in the academic environment of the 1970’s in which she realized that emotion among educators was intrinsically linked to women and the concept of femininity. I realized that I would not have a statistical sample to document a gender difference among debaters because at the most competitive levels of college debate women are a rarity. In the elimination rounds at the 2009 NDT, of the 32 people who made it to elimination rounds, only 3 were women. As I said before, crying at the NDT is based on tradition, thus the physical expression of this pain is based on what has been seen in the past and resulted in the conformity of heads down and tearing. This may account for the lack of difference in the male and female crying. In my ethnographic research, I found that debate’s specific cultural application of emotion transcends traditional American gender boundaries – Lutz says emotions are feminine and attributed to women but the NDT represents an open ideological space for men to cry. The image of men crying contradicts traditional cultural assumptions of emotion and, in this specific context; the NDT contradicts and transcends traditional gender boundaries because men and women both cry in the same way and people respond to those tears in a universal way (i.e. there is not a gender divide in the way they are comforted).
Men and women, then, have equal license to weep. But this expression of internal states is not reserved exclusively for combatants. Emotional catharsis is available to all personnel including coaches and, as I observed, judges. At the end of the debate the judge takes between 30-90 minutes to determine a winner. The decision is based on a combination of the quality of evidence provided by each team and the amount of arguments made in the debate. The judge takes meticulous notes during the debate to make sure no argument is missed. The judges, who are coaches and the leaders in the community, feel the power and the pressure of the NDT as well. According to Farra “The NDT is the only tournament where, I think, literally every judge will go over their decision through-and-through to make sure they are making the right decision.” The judges fear making a mistake at the NDT because it is such an important tournament. I witnessed an incredible example of this during my fieldwork. The coach of a prestigious university and former NDT winner, watched the semi-finals round at the NDT this year. As a joke, right after the round ended, one of the judges printed off a fake ballot with the woman's name on it. The judge walked over to her and said “Here is your ballot, we will pass you the evidence when we are done reading it.” He was pretending that she was supposed to have been judging the semi-final debate. Instead of laughing, she burst into tears because she had not been taking notes on the debate and thus could not make a good decision. Because of the intensity and competitive nature of the tournament judges literally fear, to the point of tears, giving a bad decision. The coach in question was inconsolable and, even after the judge told her he was just kidding, it took 15 minutes for her to finally relax.
Public mourning rituals have arisen in the NDT based on the social conditioning that has occurred throughout a person’s college debate career. I have identified four cultural reasons for the experience of tears: First, the community promotes crying by engaging in collective mourning. Second, the community treats tears as an age-old tradition of the NDT. Third, there is a sense of power attributed to the NDT. Fourth, the NDT represents the end of people’s debate careers resulting in a sense of finality.
The first reason for tears is feeling of connectedness and community felt at the NDT. An informant explained to me that, “There is collective mourning. You are surrounded by the specter of social death and major life transitions, and at the same time, there is the large amount of stress the tournament itself induces.” Another informant, Luis Magallon a recent graduate from CSU Fullerton explained, “the NDT offers the ability to have a collective emotional catharsis.” This comment led to my realization that Lutz is right when she argues that emotion is “a social rather than an individual achievement – an emergent product of social life” (Lutz 5). The crying at the NDT is not an individual experience but a social process in which the community mourns together. NDT traditions support this idea of community and collective mourning. When debaters finish their final round everyone stands and applauds for at least ten minutes. One of my informants, Adam Farra, a recent graduate and NDT semi-finalist from the University of Michigan, explained “The NDT is the only tournament where the community really comes together. After your last debate, people buy you drinks like it's their job.” There is a sense of community that enables and promotes tears. The sense of social collectiveness proves that the expressed emotions at the NDT are a result of socialization and a sense of community that welcomes and expects tears. Coaches, friends, competitors, judges and spectators cry together as debaters hear their final decision. People do not cry at the NDT because it is human nature to do so, but rather, the tears are a byproduct of debate culture that has developed over years and years of tradition.
The second phenomenon that makes tears an appropriate response to the NDT is tradition. The tradition and culture of debate shapes the way people emotionally respond to particular events. Speaking as if there is an implicit social doctrine, mapping out appropriate responses for particular events, my informants all recalled how their openness towards expressing their emotions at the NDT was based on what they have witnessed in the past. According to one informant, “in a weird type of way, there is an expectation of crying - perhaps because people have seen it in the past. Everyone sees people who cry every year, so it is certainly okay to cry.” The tears at the NDT represent a type of repetition that is promoted throughout debate society. The great debaters of the past cried at the conclusion of their final debate. This precedent has lived on through generation and generation of debaters. The sense of tradition normalizes the experience of tears. Because it is tradition the Western concepts of tears being a sign of weakness are transcended and replaced with the idea that these tears are a right of passage.
Third, there is a sense of power, of hegemony, ascribed to the tournament. According to the theories of Dreyfus and Rabinow, emotions are “the place in which the most minute and local social practice are linked up with the large scale organization of power” (quoted in Lutz 7). The “local social practice,” in this context, refers to the activity of debate, while the “large scale organization of power” refers to the discourse surrounding the NDT, which casts it as both a final, and defining moment. Because debate society attributes so much power to the NDT, that tournament results in expressed emotion, more specifically tears. Debate society raises the stakes and consents to giving the NDT power. Debate culture attributes power to the NDT by making the NDT a defining experience, one which makes or breaks your debate career. The successes of teams at most tournaments are forgotten, but people in debate always remember NDT results. For example, when judges are listed for the debates at a tournament, students run to their coaches to find out if their judge is “legit,” debate jargon for whether or not they did well at the NDT.
The fourth reason that people cry at the NDT is the finality of the tournament. Debaters, who have often been in the activity for ten years, debate for the very last time. Many of my informants said “it is natural to cry at the NDT because it is an end of an era.” Although it is common, and seemingly universal, for debaters to cry at the NDT it is because of culture that they perceive “an end” as a reason for crying. Many cultures view the culmination of eras (growing up, death) with stoicism, some with joy, some with relief. Western culture, in general and as I have observed, responds to ending with a sense of sadness and nostalgia that manifests physically in the form of tears—in other words, grief and grieving.
Many anthropological works have dealt with the subject of grief in different cultural contexts. These studies show that emotion varies within cultural context and thus cannot be natural or universal, but are a product of the doctrine of their society. For example, in Scheper Hughes’s book Death Without Weeping, she explains that, in Brazilian culture, selective neglect is a common practice. Mothers do not develop a sense of kinship with their children unless they believe the baby is strong enough to survive. When a baby is sickly or weak the mother will neglect the child until he dies. This practice, though considered barbaric in some cultures, is accepted in others proving that emotions are a result or culture as opposed to biology. This is not to say that maternal love is not experienced in Brazilian culture but rather that, “Mother love is anything other than natural and instead represents a matrix of images, meanings, sentiments, and practices that are everywhere socially and culturally produced” (Scheper-Hughes, 341). Emotions, as naturally occurring phenomena, is an easy myth to swallow because “the concept of emotion has been made invisible because we have assumed that it is possible to identify the “essence” of emotion, that the emotions are universal, and that they are separable from both their personal and social contexts” (Lutz 54). This paper seeks to correct this misconception by demonstrating the culturally induced emotions experienced at the NDT.
The feeling of pain, loss and sorrow felt when one loses at the NDT is no different than the feeling of pain, loss and sorrow experienced when one loses at any other tournament, but, our expression of emotion is shaped by the meaning we attribute to an event. Emotion concepts, such as the sadness felt at the NDT, are part of a “local ideological practice, [that] involves negotiation over the meaning of events, over rights and morality…” (Lutz, 5). For example, when I asked one informant to explain to me why people cry at the NDT they said, indignantly, “Everyone has a right to cry at the NDT!” The discourse, produced by debate society, surrounding the NDT results in a sense of entitlement to cry.
As stated in my thesis, the NDT is a safe space to cry. I mean this both metaphorically and literally. When people physically leave the NDT, they leave behind their permit to emote. One of my informants, the top speaker at the 2009 NDT, openly cried in a room full of 70 people after losing his final debate. Three days later, after he had returned home, I sent him a survey asking about his experience at the NDT and how he experienced tears. He was borderline offended that I dared to ask such questions. Upon receiving the survey he called me and said “I can’t believe you would ask such personal questions!” I told him he did not have to answer anything he did not feel comfortable answering and that I would appreciate any information he could offer me. His survey responses deflected my questions with humor. This reflects how emotion is linked to local practices and local ideologies. Upon leaving the location where emotion is acceptable and culturally acceptable, my informants locked themselves into a state of stoicism and rejection of emotion. One debate coach thinks “There definitely appears to be a "comfort zone" at the NDT where students and coaches are more open to express their emotions.” How is it that a man who is willing to cry in front of a 70-person audience loses that openness to tears just three days later? Lutz answers this when she says, “the emotional is, for individual Americans, simultaneously good and bad…[emotion] [is] separately activated or drawn on for particular purposes in different contexts…” (Lutz 58).
My ethnographic research has made it clear that the emotions expressed at the NDT are a result of collective mourning, tradition, power and finality. Though I failed to document gender differences in debate society, I do not believe that gender is not at stake. All participants were seemingly more susceptible to displays of feeling which would have been considered a breach of normal behavior in other settings. Perhaps, the lack of women in the activity somehow enables men to feel they have the right to cry? What would happen if female participation in their community were to increase? I watched as an implicit social doctrine encouraged and served as a catalyst for the collective expression of emotion through tears. My experiences, and the testimonies of my informants, suggest that emotion is “more aptly viewed as the outcome of social relations and their corollary worldviews than as universal psychobiological entities” (Lutz 209). The National Debate Tournament brings its competitors to tears as they argue in their final debate but the debate over social conditioning continues to engage our best investigative efforts.
Lutz, Catherine. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. University of Chicago Press. 1988
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. University of California Press. 1992.
