I attended a dance at the Eagles Lodge in South Range on April 9th with my good friend and teammate Dillion Hueckstaedt. Surprisingly they were not playing polka that night, it was the band Country Drifters which had two male singers and one female vocalist. I picked this activity because it was an event that me and Dillion could both attend and check it off our list of final papers. Plus we liked the idea that we could go to an event that was local and go on a little drive out to South Range. The South Range Eagle’s lodge is in downtown South Range, Michigan. It is nestled right on M-26 and a large electric sign beacons people who drive by. The sign advertises Bingo on Wednesday nights and dances on every Sunday except for major holidays…show more content… There was a clear lack of youth at the dance and it was targeted and ran for older adults. The youngest people there besides myself were in their late forties. You can see the remnants of the dance culture where community dances were the largest social function in towns. To borrow an anthropological term, the Eagles lodge is like a social network of people. “A set of relationships activated for a particular end.” The particular end of this network was for people to get together and have a good time. There was everything you needed there in order to have a good time: gambling; the company of others; food, drinks and alcohol, music and dancing. What else do you need to have fun? “A network is a person-dependent kind of social system which depends on continuous activity to be reproduced” The continuous activity in this case is the weekly dance and bingo put on and hosted by the Eagle Lodge and the Women’s Auxiliary. The group is so close knit that people notice when regulars at these events are missing. If they are missing and they haven’t heard anything they go check on them to see if they are okay. The regulars at these events care about each other. It is almost like kinning, one big family who looks out for each other at the
