Shared recitation’s meaning does not survive passage into mature citizenship

Evidence

Hand over heart, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance. The pledge was a puzzlement to me, as I’m sure it is to most students. I had no earthly idea what a republic even was, and was none too sure about God, either. And you didn’t have to be an eight-year-old Indian to know that “liberty and justice for all” was a questionable premise. … But during school assemblies, when three hundred voices all joined together, all those voices, in measured cadence, from the gray-haired school nurse’s to the kindergarteners’, made me feel part of something. It was as if for a moment our minds were one. I could imagine then that if we all spoke for that elusive justice, it might be within our reach. … From where I stand today, though, the idea of asking schoolchildren to pledge loyalty to a political system seems exceedingly curious. Especially since we know full well that the practice of recitation will largely be abandoned in adulthood, when the age of reason has presumably been attained. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 361

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes ch8’s point about how the land recognizes a returned person through ceremony — both treat collective recitation as making minds one, but state ceremony hollows out while the Thanksgiving Address holds. — connects to: Shared ethnicity does not guarantee shared politics among a diaspora; Embodied practices make linguistic resignification alone unable to destabilize norms — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival…, 1130; Bilingual treaties with a shared master text spawned divergent national versions with serious discrepancies — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 197 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Contrasts state-pledge recitation against ceremonial ‘making minds one,’ setting up the Thanksgiving Address as the true collective speech in this chapter.

Broader Connections

• Embodied practices make linguistic resignification alone unable to destabilize norms #corroborates (0.80) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1130
• Bilingual treaties with a shared master text spawned divergent national versions with serious discrepancies #exemplifies (0.80) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 197
• Speech that merely returns another’s words can preserve its own subject-position #qualifies (0.80) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1487
• Shared ethnicity does not guarantee shared politics among a diaspora #complicates (0.75)
• Oral recitation preserved textual authority in pre-print Islamic scholarship #corroborates (0.75) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 421