MCLUHAN BEHIND THE CHUTES:
Probing Rodeo Culture
An essay by Peter Sibbald
Once North America had opened up and newly invented barbed wire had set boundaries around private ranchlands, cowboys should have disappeared soon after. A century later, and not just in the former wild west but here in Southern Ontario no less, there are merely a few working cowboys, yes, but the culture of what Marshall McLuhan calls a “retribalized†people, contemporary rodeo cowboys and cowgirls, is thriving. How can this be explained?
“We become what we beholdâ€, writes Marshall McLuhan. As modernization took root, and unemployed cowboys became more a nuisance than figures of admiration, the wild west shows of Buffalo Bill and others temporarily gave the cowboy a place—if less dignified—to wear his spurs, and a pipeline to hearts of urban audiences, effectively bridging the survival of the tribe through two World Wars and the Great Depression to the early years of television. Coincidently, the shows cemented a formalizing of homegrown working-skills competitions at cowboy gatherings—which had traditionally occurred at round-up time, rodear, Spanish, for to round up—into modern rodeo. As did the Marlboro Man in still photography, the serialized westerns and cowboy movies, which were the preferred content of early television programming, broadcast the iconography of the American Cowboy around McLuhan’s “Global Villageâ€. That icon remains deeply imprinted on the imaginations of boys and girls of the 1950s and ‘60s.
“Specialist technologies detribalize. The non-specialist electronic technology retribalizesâ€, writes McLuhan. Here, in her majesty’s coldest colony, rodeo is largely seasonal and on weekends. Contemporary teens and office workers are not the only tribes to have seized on twenty-first century social networking technologies to strengthen their numbers or depth of identification. Introduced to them myself to keep in touch with the worlds of my teenage children, what did I find when I got there? I had more Facebook “friends†who were First Peoples and rodeo cowboys—already re/tribalized and the earliest adopters of the tools of a parallel digital world—than any other category of users in my own.
McLuhan speaks of relative traits of hot and cool media, the pinnacle of hot being Gutenberg’s movable type—linear, explicit, unambiguous, typically encoding the five W’s, specifications and rules such as those of the rodeo ring—that he says has isolated us from one another. Cool is more engaging, like jazz, spoken word, black & white photography or web 2.0, leaving spaces that invite involvement and interpretation, and it reunites us as a tribe. Finding myself more captivated by the unwritten codes of conduct organizing rodeo cowboys outside the ring and behind the chutes, I have largely avoided repeating the more predictable iconography of the in-ring performance, or “perfâ€: the leather faced tie-down roper with fist triumphantly in the air, the graceful dive of the steer wrestler, the wild first bucks of the bareback bronco rider, body laid-back, legs out (the cowboy must first “mark out†the bronco’s shoulders with his spurs), non-rein hand extended for balance as the kicked-up hind legs of his mount frame his fly-off hat. Paradoxically, while binding us to a shared sense of nostalgia for ‘the other’ or some image from our youth, those images distance the viewer from identification of shared humanity. Also, my practice does not eschew blur, nor worship the tack-sharpness of my photojournalist training, and indeed the unavoidable pristine Saran-wrapped sheen native to the digital capture begs degradation of colour and texture in post-production.
Most of us, most of the time, are unaware of our tribal nature or culture. As we busy ourselves, it washes over us. I am the age now that McLuhan was, fifty-two, when he first published his seminal book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Perhaps there is something intrinsic to middle age that urges one to understand who and what we are and how we organize ourselves, something that instinctively draws me to rodeo and the world of working livestock with its more evident origins in our primal selves. Or perhaps it’s just that I always wanted to be a cowboy. To paraphrase McLuhan, ‘we live in a fishbowl from which it is nearly impossible to view the water; we must be eccentric to see the centre.’ If we choose to seize the reins of our own social destiny, perhaps it is only by observing another tribe, such as rodeo cowboys, so closely affiliated with our urban ones, that we may become conscious of our own competencies. What do we need for our tribe that we can learn from another?
