a warning: these won't be well-composed, just stream of consciousness thoughts. I apologize for what I'm guessing will be an unneccesary amount of hyphens and parenthesis.
the first field report of the year, then, is on subjective culture - that is to say, a group's way of percieving its own social environment. I've been asked to write here about my own United States culture, and how I think of it.
First, it's obviously difficult to group the entire population of the United States into one culture, so I'll be focusing on my own smaller cultural group. but what is that, exactly? I've heard before that white people in the United States have no culture, but rather a dearth of culture, a void filled up by NASCAR and bad country music. however, my hatred of Kenny Chesney and songs about tractors and football and small towns means that I can't relate myself to that group either. so perhaps my cultural group is even more specific than "white americans"... "white, upper middle class, east-coast living americans"? I never thought so much about regional identity in the United States until I moved time zones and now spend the majority of my year going to college in small town Wisconsin.
when people in the United States think of regional cultural differences in our country, stereotypes are bound to emerge. are these stereotypes in any way true, or are they pure exaggerations? at what point does a personality trait shared between many members in a cultural group (for example, the percieved kindness, warmth or friendliness of people living in the American midwest versus the percieved assholeness and coldness of the American east coast) become a cultural practice? in our class today we talked about percieved characteristics of "Americanness," coming from both fellow Americans and from people looking in from the outside. most of these characteristics made the American people, in comparison to other cultures, pretty much just look like a country of jerks. our "time is money" sensibility, our need to get ahead and be competitive, the (again, percieved) fact that we put many seemingly arbitrary things to other cultures (position at work, salary, hobbies) above our families. again, these "American" nation-spanning ideals seem to be more like regional "east coast" ideals, though perhaps I'm just buying into the stereotype.
the interesting part of this was that we as young achieving Americans were proud of these ideals, ideals that other countries might find shameful (the common practice of putting your old people in a retirement home, for example) upholding that other omnipresnet ideal of "America is the best country in the world". for a reason. because we have the drive to succeed that overpowers the things that don't matter, e.g., family? and it's true, though my Argentine host family recoils at the thought of moving out at the age of 18 to live across the country, independence and the idea of self-worth, self efficacy, and as Emerson put it, self reliance, are the parts of our culture I'm most proud to exemplify while a "cultural ambassador" for the United States abroad.
