After Pomp and Circumstance: High School Reunion as an Autobiographical Occasion

The high school reunion certainly seems like it would be an entertaining social phenomenon to investigate. A group of people gathered in the obligatory tacky ballroom to commemorate their adolescence has been the setting of many sitcoms, as the author, a sociologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, notes in her introduction. For Vinitzky-Seroussi, however, the high school reunion (or ""research site"") is a matter of utter seriousness. Searching for a real significance for the reunion tradition, she is determined to show that behind its veneer of dinner-dance, the reunion is an example of ritualized social control, in which attendees are put on trial according to how successful they are in the present and how that measures up to their past identities. She writes very much in the tradition of sociologists like Foucault, who used specific rituals as examples of the broader societal structure undermining individualism. Vinitzky-Seroussi asserts that each individual has a ""personal identity"" that is in conflict with their ""situated identity,"" or their place among others. The high school reunion is one arena where these two identities are called into conflict. The author then claims that her idea of this clash ""calls the postmodernist claims of fragmentation into question,"" which seems a bit of a stretch. Vinitzky-Seroussi succeeds in scaring the reader into believing that high school reunions are not the innocuous dose of nostalgia we all thought they were, but she doesn't add anything really new to the sphere of identity politics. (May)