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ljwritesCulture in Avatar: The Last Airbender Series:
1. What It Is to Be Free: Aang and the Spirituality of the Air Nomads
2. We Can Do This, Together: Community and Change in the Water Tribes
3. Stand Strong, Stand Proud: Earth Kingdom Resilience and Identity
In this essay I will examine the central tenet of Air Nomad culture, freedom, and how that idea shaped Aang's story. I'll discuss the cases when other individuals in his culture, and Aang himself for that matter, seemed to be acting contrary to that value--and I will try to reconcile the seeming contradictions. In the end, the result will hopefully be a deeper understanding of this now-defunct culture and how it affected the story of Avatar through Aang. Plus, I'll drag Star Wars into it.
The pie-wearing crowd agree.
The two keywords of Air Nomad culture are "spirituality" and "humor." These are two different aspects of freedom: spirituality is freedom from material concerns and worldly prejudices, while humor is freedom from conventional decorum and oppressive social norms. Through freedom the aim was to achieve peace, a detachment from the buffeting winds and waves of the world to reach a higher plane of existence.
Aang, from the first, seems an embodiment of these attributes. Playful and a bit flighty, yet also gentle and kind, he is a breath of fresh air (so to speak) in Sokka and Katara's war-torn village. Humorously undermining Sokka's strictness and hitting on... er, hitting it off with Katara to bring fun and play back into her life, he appears to be from a purer and better world where laughter and exuberance are a strength, not a liability. It's no wonder that Katara senses great wisdom in him, despite his youth and seeming childishness.
But fairly soon we start to see another side to Aang. His grief in the "Southern Air Temple" amply demonstrates that he is a human child who hurts and cries, not some ethereal emotionless spirit-being. Of course he does embody the spirit of world balance, but he is a being of flesh and blood, not air. And that's the point: the Air Nomads strove for detachment not because that was their nature, but because such detachment is against their nature as human beings. This tension between attachment and freedom will play an important part in Aang's story.
In keeping with that tension between reality and cultural ideals, Aang shows facets that are decidedly neither spiritual nor humorous. He blows his lid more than once when loved ones are hurt (Appa in "The Desert" and "The Serpent's Pass," Katara in "The Avatar State"), wrestles with worldly attachment (espetially Katara in "The Guru" and later), and also with anxiety and procrastination ("The Storm," the "Sozin's Comet" arc). Interestingly enough other, more senior monks in the flashback scenes from "The Storm" also exhibit the kind of strict behavior quite unlike what one would expect of the "spiritual, humorous" Air Nomads.
Alex Weitzman points out the contradictions by the adults in his essay The Elements and Their Mismatched Nations, but Alex seems to have missed the fact that Aang himself does not always live up to his cultural ideals. (The only one who seems to do so consistently is Gyatso.) Ideals, quite understandably, aren't always easy to live up to. How does one stay free and light in a world with so much pain and fear?
Monk Grumpy does not approve of your "fun."
So was the Air Nomad culture that Iroh spoke of simply the idealized version that only a few people, say Gyatso, could live up to? It's possible. There's also the fact that each individual has different predispositions and outlooks, and people from the same culture can act quite unlike each other. So the simple answer is that yes, cultural ideals are different from reality, and yes, everyone is different from each other.
But I'd like to make an alternate argument: that Aang and the other monks' limitations, to an extent, arose because of their culture rather than despite it. How could that be? How could a culture that values freedom so highly lead to its members being constrained by fear?
This goes back to the two components of the Air Nomad idea of freedom, above. One is spirituality, and the other humor. Aang has made it clear that compassion is a big part of his spirituality; he was taught about the value of all life, and became a vegetarian as part of those values.* What would the war look like to someone who believed so strongy in the sanctity of life? What would the consequences of failure feel like?
Enter huge wallops of anxiety. The war is not only a terrible, horrible thing that consumes lives like a fire does fuel. It is also a situation that undermines spiritual values and compassion in a scrabble to survive. War is pretty awful to us joe schmoes, but for highly spiritual and compassionate individuals it must be a nightmare.
In that frame of mind I can understand and sympathize with Aang's childhood oppressors, the elder monks who ended up driving him away with their unrelenting strictness. They were not content to stay in their temple high above the world, complacent that their isolation would protect them: no, they knew a terrible war was brewing, and were willing to be the villains if it meant they could stop it.
Do I think they did the right thing? Not really. I think their fear made them short-sighted and oppressive, much like General Fong, the guy who pretended to bury Katara alive to draw out Aang's Avatar state. But I do understand where they were coming from. And I think their actions should be understood in the context of a culture steeped in spirituality and compassion. I think they became unbalanced and distorted their values, forgetting to be compassionate to the boy before them in their compassion for the greater multitudes, but at least it's understandable why they did so.
Now flip around that overbearing determination to stop the war and you get a crippling fear of failure. If you're the one who's responsible for saving the world, and you know the stakes all too well because you have such a high regard for all the people of all nations, and all the other lives that suffer--well, it'd be very easy to fall to pieces under the pressure like Aang did. Aang was experiencing the same anxiety that drove the monks in his temple to be so hard on him.
Different people have different flaws, and so do different peoples. As pointed out in "Bitter Work," Aang had a hard time with facing up to conflict and standing his ground. His instinct in the face of such pressure, a hundred years before "The Boy in the Iceberg," was to run--and he ended up running for a hundred years until Sokka and Katara brought him back. From there his journey would begin in earnest as he struggled to define himself in the context of the way he viewed and reacted to the world, that is his culture: What did the Air Nomad ideal of freedom mean to him, and to a war-torn world? That is the subject of the Part 2 of this essay.
* But not plant life, eh baldie? I'm guessing vegetarianism wasn't actually that common in his culture, given the way he had to tell this to fellow Air Nomad and nun Yang Chen rather than it being taken for granted, and also given how theirs was a nomadic way of life that didn't engage in large-scale agriculture and must have relied on meat to some extent. The temples, on the other hand, probably practiced agriculture in addition to animal husbandry, so vegetarianism would have been more feasible for monks than the general Air Nomad population.
1. What It Is to Be Free: Aang and the Spirituality of the Air Nomads
2. We Can Do This, Together: Community and Change in the Water Tribes
3. Stand Strong, Stand Proud: Earth Kingdom Resilience and Identity
4. Burn for My Belief: The Fire Nation and the Courage of Conviction
5. Subcultures and Conclusion
My account of Air Nomad culture is basically a story of one character, Aang. We know of others such as Monk Gyatso, Avatar Yang Chen, and other monks in flashback scenes from "The Storm," but as far as we know Aang is the last of the Air Nomads. His struggles to find the meaning of freedom and spirituality, while an individual story, is also about the culture he was raised in, its values, perspectives, and flaws. In a very real sense, his culture lives on through him.
5. Subcultures and Conclusion
My account of Air Nomad culture is basically a story of one character, Aang. We know of others such as Monk Gyatso, Avatar Yang Chen, and other monks in flashback scenes from "The Storm," but as far as we know Aang is the last of the Air Nomads. His struggles to find the meaning of freedom and spirituality, while an individual story, is also about the culture he was raised in, its values, perspectives, and flaws. In a very real sense, his culture lives on through him.
In this essay I will examine the central tenet of Air Nomad culture, freedom, and how that idea shaped Aang's story. I'll discuss the cases when other individuals in his culture, and Aang himself for that matter, seemed to be acting contrary to that value--and I will try to reconcile the seeming contradictions. In the end, the result will hopefully be a deeper understanding of this now-defunct culture and how it affected the story of Avatar through Aang. Plus, I'll drag Star Wars into it.
Uncle Iroh: Air is the element of freedom. The Air Nomads detached themselves from worldly concerns, and they found peace and freedom... And they apparently had great senses of humor.
The pie-wearing crowd agree.
The two keywords of Air Nomad culture are "spirituality" and "humor." These are two different aspects of freedom: spirituality is freedom from material concerns and worldly prejudices, while humor is freedom from conventional decorum and oppressive social norms. Through freedom the aim was to achieve peace, a detachment from the buffeting winds and waves of the world to reach a higher plane of existence.
Aang, from the first, seems an embodiment of these attributes. Playful and a bit flighty, yet also gentle and kind, he is a breath of fresh air (so to speak) in Sokka and Katara's war-torn village. Humorously undermining Sokka's strictness and hitting on... er, hitting it off with Katara to bring fun and play back into her life, he appears to be from a purer and better world where laughter and exuberance are a strength, not a liability. It's no wonder that Katara senses great wisdom in him, despite his youth and seeming childishness.
But fairly soon we start to see another side to Aang. His grief in the "Southern Air Temple" amply demonstrates that he is a human child who hurts and cries, not some ethereal emotionless spirit-being. Of course he does embody the spirit of world balance, but he is a being of flesh and blood, not air. And that's the point: the Air Nomads strove for detachment not because that was their nature, but because such detachment is against their nature as human beings. This tension between attachment and freedom will play an important part in Aang's story.
In keeping with that tension between reality and cultural ideals, Aang shows facets that are decidedly neither spiritual nor humorous. He blows his lid more than once when loved ones are hurt (Appa in "The Desert" and "The Serpent's Pass," Katara in "The Avatar State"), wrestles with worldly attachment (espetially Katara in "The Guru" and later), and also with anxiety and procrastination ("The Storm," the "Sozin's Comet" arc). Interestingly enough other, more senior monks in the flashback scenes from "The Storm" also exhibit the kind of strict behavior quite unlike what one would expect of the "spiritual, humorous" Air Nomads.
Alex Weitzman points out the contradictions by the adults in his essay The Elements and Their Mismatched Nations, but Alex seems to have missed the fact that Aang himself does not always live up to his cultural ideals. (The only one who seems to do so consistently is Gyatso.) Ideals, quite understandably, aren't always easy to live up to. How does one stay free and light in a world with so much pain and fear?
Monk Grumpy does not approve of your "fun."
So was the Air Nomad culture that Iroh spoke of simply the idealized version that only a few people, say Gyatso, could live up to? It's possible. There's also the fact that each individual has different predispositions and outlooks, and people from the same culture can act quite unlike each other. So the simple answer is that yes, cultural ideals are different from reality, and yes, everyone is different from each other.
But I'd like to make an alternate argument: that Aang and the other monks' limitations, to an extent, arose because of their culture rather than despite it. How could that be? How could a culture that values freedom so highly lead to its members being constrained by fear?
This goes back to the two components of the Air Nomad idea of freedom, above. One is spirituality, and the other humor. Aang has made it clear that compassion is a big part of his spirituality; he was taught about the value of all life, and became a vegetarian as part of those values.* What would the war look like to someone who believed so strongy in the sanctity of life? What would the consequences of failure feel like?
Enter huge wallops of anxiety. The war is not only a terrible, horrible thing that consumes lives like a fire does fuel. It is also a situation that undermines spiritual values and compassion in a scrabble to survive. War is pretty awful to us joe schmoes, but for highly spiritual and compassionate individuals it must be a nightmare.
In that frame of mind I can understand and sympathize with Aang's childhood oppressors, the elder monks who ended up driving him away with their unrelenting strictness. They were not content to stay in their temple high above the world, complacent that their isolation would protect them: no, they knew a terrible war was brewing, and were willing to be the villains if it meant they could stop it.
Do I think they did the right thing? Not really. I think their fear made them short-sighted and oppressive, much like General Fong, the guy who pretended to bury Katara alive to draw out Aang's Avatar state. But I do understand where they were coming from. And I think their actions should be understood in the context of a culture steeped in spirituality and compassion. I think they became unbalanced and distorted their values, forgetting to be compassionate to the boy before them in their compassion for the greater multitudes, but at least it's understandable why they did so.
Now flip around that overbearing determination to stop the war and you get a crippling fear of failure. If you're the one who's responsible for saving the world, and you know the stakes all too well because you have such a high regard for all the people of all nations, and all the other lives that suffer--well, it'd be very easy to fall to pieces under the pressure like Aang did. Aang was experiencing the same anxiety that drove the monks in his temple to be so hard on him.
Different people have different flaws, and so do different peoples. As pointed out in "Bitter Work," Aang had a hard time with facing up to conflict and standing his ground. His instinct in the face of such pressure, a hundred years before "The Boy in the Iceberg," was to run--and he ended up running for a hundred years until Sokka and Katara brought him back. From there his journey would begin in earnest as he struggled to define himself in the context of the way he viewed and reacted to the world, that is his culture: What did the Air Nomad ideal of freedom mean to him, and to a war-torn world? That is the subject of the Part 2 of this essay.
* But not plant life, eh baldie? I'm guessing vegetarianism wasn't actually that common in his culture, given the way he had to tell this to fellow Air Nomad and nun Yang Chen rather than it being taken for granted, and also given how theirs was a nomadic way of life that didn't engage in large-scale agriculture and must have relied on meat to some extent. The temples, on the other hand, probably practiced agriculture in addition to animal husbandry, so vegetarianism would have been more feasible for monks than the general Air Nomad population.
