There are many ways to interpret the drawn-out controversy over the presidential election and its close, but anthropology offers a perspective that carries an encouraging message. PNS commentator William O. Beeman is an anthropologist and at Brown University.

The recent controversy over the presidential election, and its resolution, provides the clearest possible proof that there is a true "American" culture.

We are given to wondering if there is such a thing -- other nations have cultures, but they are all in Africa or Asia. American society, with its multicultural makeup, seems to lack a culture of its own.

But the troubling and confusing results of the election, combined with the concession speech of Al Gore and the reconciliation speech of George W. Bush, mark the country's passage through a textbook cultural process. This is what anthropologists call a social drama. In this process, members of a culture deal with a crisis by reasserting social institutions and cultural values.

The late anthropologist Victor Turner defined this process of social drama as involving four stages which he called breech, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration. Although Turner was a specialist in African societies and did work in Asia and Mexico, his model fits the United States perfectly.

A breech is a situation that causes a break or schism in society. The indeterminacy of the presidential election caused just such a split in the nation.

This breech brings on a crisis of a sort that cannot be ignored. Otherwise, society threatens to come undone. It was necessary to resolve the election to keep American society from flying apart. The existence of crisis was undeniable as the wisest people in the nation became confounded by this turn of events.

Redressive action is the culturally defined process that resolves the crisis. It is wonderful to see that in the year 2000 American culture remains true to its 19th-century roots. As DeTocqueville asserted then, political questions in the United States eventually become legal questions. The redressive actions taken to resolve this crisis began as a set of political questions but ended in the courts. Not all Americans liked the results of the Supreme Court decision that ended the crisis, but they generally accepted it as final.

Finally, reintegration eliminates the breech that originally precipitated the crisis. This can occur in two ways -- by creating a permanent split in society, or by healing. Although a permanent cultural split may still lurk as a threat on the American cultural horizon, for the short term we have experienced a healing. Al Gore and George W. Bush could not have done better cultural work for Americans in their Wednesday night speeches. Gore's conciliatory tone and Bush's outreach to those who oppose him were both the kinds of messages that Americans needed to hear.

We learn something very important about ourselves in situations like this. First, we understand that we do have very strong cultural values as a nation and our emotions are aroused when they are tested. Our national institutions are likewise precious to us. We rise to defend them when they are challenged, and accept the solutions they mete out.