Reflecting on America

Anthropological Views of U.S. Culture

Clare L. Boulanger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138684348
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351551915
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Anthropologists travel back in time and across the globe to understand human culture but, surprise, there is culture right here in the United States. This second edition of the best-selling textbook and anthology, Reflecting on America, again focuses on how we can recognize the common cultural thread running through diverse American phenomena from heroin addiction and Big Business's efforts to shape the identities of children, to Civil War reenactments and the popularity of burlesque in the Midwest. In addition, this second edition includes chapters written especially for this volume on striptease, Burning Man, The Big Bang Theory TV show, and Groundhog Phil. Written throughout with verve and quirky humor, and offeringQuestions for discussion after every article, this  book is perfect for undergraduate classes in anthropology and American studies. Drawing together twenty-two scholars with expertise in anthropological ideas about culture, Reflecting on America examines what it means to be American.

1
INTRODUCTION: UPON FURTHER REFLECTION

Clare L. Boulanger

 

 

There is a discernible culture, a river, a thread, connecting Thomas Jefferson to Lucille Ball to Malcolm X to Sitting Bull. The panhandler at one corner is related to the pamphleteer at the next, who is related to the bank executive who is related to the Punk wearing a Fuck u T-shirt. The immigrant child sees this at once. But then he is encouraged to forget the vision.

When I was a boy who spoke Spanish, I saw America whole. I realized that there was a culture here because I lived apart from it.

—Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation

The popular impression of “culture” is that it is a timeless matrix in which its practitioners are embedded. Anthropology has been justly criticized, chiefly by anthropologists themselves, for helping to promulgate this view. Today’s anthropologists try to atone by conducting longitudinal studies and employing methods that see well beyond the immediacy of participant observation, but still there is discontent on the part of prominent scholars in the field that has led some to jettison the concept of culture entirely. What is “a culture,” they ask, if it is constantly changing, transformed by developments that erect, realign, and dissolve boundaries that are already tenuous? I maintain, however, that the concept remains valuable as a means of grasping and explaining the continuity that emerges from the shifts of time and context. I maintain as well that “culture” is newly helpful in attempts to understand the wealthy and powerful as they pull even further away from an expanding global majority.

The readings in this book on American culture are sorted into the categories one might find in a classic ethnography—“ecology/economy,” “family life and leisure,” “class and power,” “ritual and religion,” “ideology”—but of course the complexities of culture are not so easily contained, and readers might well wonder why my chapter on The Big Bang Theory isn’t included in “ecology/economy,” or Micaela di Leonardo’s essay on the concept of “home” hasn’t been placed in “family life and leisure.” Frankly, all of the chapters, whether ostensibly about buttons (Grebinger) or commuting (Descartes, Kottak, and Kelly) or heroin addicts (Bourgois) or Groundhog Day (Myers), could all appear under the heading of “class and power,” because the United States continues to dominate the world not only in terms of the amount of resources it commands but also in terms of ideology, especially that hallmark component we call the American Dream. The Dream mesmerizes those within as well as outside the country; it remains possible for a poor American to look at a rich American and think, “That could be me,” even as the income gap widens. This is the myth that the young Richard Rodriguez (1992), quoted above, had not yet absorbed; thus he could see an “Americanness” that Americans themselves often deny (see Chapter 20 [Cerroni-Long]).

All the groups discussed in the chapters that follow are shaped by the American Dream. Whether they have lived it (so they think), whether they are chasing it, whether they are deprived of it (and wondering if they are at fault), whether they believe it is threatened, or whether they believe they are challenging it, they are all in the grip of its power.

REFERENCE

Rodriguez, Richard. 1992. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. New York: Penguin Books.

2
AMERICA—THE VIEW FROM aCROSS THE (REFLECTING) POND

Clare L. Boulanger

The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause; and there are certain truths which the Americans can only learn from strangers or from experience.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Americans are a commercial people par excellence. But of all the consumer goods we sell around the globe, perhaps the most important is ourselves. Throughout our history, despite brief moments of doubt, we have been supremely proud of our values and way of life. Further, we have distributed these generously worldwide, not only through direct colonization but also through such ideological weapons as the Voice of America and a vast array of entertainment products advertising our global preeminence, our wealth, our piety, our happy families, our passion for justice, and our sense of fun. This ideological barrage is a savvy marketing strategy—purveying our ideals softens the ground for the passage of objects that are all the more salable when they embody Americanism. But the strategy works precisely because it is not calculated. We Americans believe in what we sell, and our confidence increases the desirability of our goods.

This trade is ingeniously organized—with every item sold both our economy and our national ego are bolstered. The American way of life is a high-maintenance project; it asks much of us in terms of practical and psychic work and thus must be constantly renewed in both areas. Fortunately, our ethnocentrism is a powerful reality-treatment system. Once passed through its filters, the poverty and filth we observe in other countries disappear in our own. The beggars we pity elsewhere become, on urban U.S. streets, shiftless bums too drunk and lazy to get a job; the government corruption we decry as endemic around the globe is reduced in the United States to a few “bad apples” bobbing to the surface of the political system from time to time; and while we wring our hands about the world’s wars of aggression, we understand our own military actions as just and justified.

Through the prism of ethnocentrism our privileged lives become, simply, natural. We believe (to the extent we are able to think about such things) that our advantages do not stem from the historical and ongoing exercise of national power but from the desire and hard work of individual Americans; hence, anyone in the world who takes up these practices will enjoy a similar level of success. This vision is compelling even to those most insulted and injured by it, both inside and outside the United States. But without benefit of American ethnocentrism, what do outsiders actually see?

Since 2014, I have been teaching at a university in the People’s Republic of China. My students are learning English and have already reached a level that is far better than my Mandarin. Once I got the go-ahead to work on this second edition of Reflecting on America, I thought of giving my students the opportunity to write its lead-in chapter. No other contribution to the book will hold up such a “distant mirror” (DeVita and Armstrong 1992) to our culture, and, in fact, the other chapters demonstrate to American students that it is possible to adopt an intellectually constructive insider/outsider perspective even as a member of one’s own society. Nonetheless, my Chinese students may help American students jump-start their ability to develop, in line with this volume’s subtitle, “anthropological views of U.S. culture.”

Before I could ask my Chinese students to provide material, I had to clear the project with the organization for which I teach and the university at which I teach. These authorities attached the following conditions: my organization would not be identified, my university would not be identified, my students would not be identified. In fact, I cannot identify which students said what, because I had them write in groups and most of what is quoted below is the product of collaboration. I am sure my students understand the value of preserving their privacy even as they might want their names to appear in an American textbook. But when I read them the passages I would include in the chapter, they likely recognized their own groups’ contributions and took a deserved, if secret, pride in their work.

It is perhaps not divulging too much about my university to say that it lies in an inland province that is, for the most part, developing rather than developed. Many of my students come from rural backgrounds. None has visited the United States; in fact, few have traveled to Beijing or Shanghai. However, the students are not ignorant of the world, or even greatly naive. The internet has transformed formerly distant mirrors into the long, infinite tunnel of a mirror facing a mirror. Much of what my students wrote about the United States has the same arch tone American students of the same age might use, and I have tried to preserve this tone in what I quote below. I have also preserved the writing nearly exactly, editing only to eliminate confusing wording. My intention was not to point up my students’ difficulties with English but to avoid, to the extent possible, reworking their views in line with what I think they must have meant.

In keeping with the classic anthropological quest to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, I asked my students (eighty-five in total) to answer five questions on everyday American life. All of the questions began with “If you were an American, …” and continued as follows: “what would you like to eat?”; “what job would you have?”; “what would you do for fun?”; “what would your family life be like?”; and “how would you feel about your country, and why?”

“IF YOU WERE AN AMERICAN, WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO EAT?

Supporters of American meat industries will be happy to know that my Chinese students think of the United States as a land overflowing with animal products, notably beefsteak (mentioned eight times on my three answer sheets), hamburger (also mentioned eight times), and turkey (mentioned seven times), known in China as an important American ritual food. Coffee and various forms of alcohol showed up frequently as favored American drinks. Some sample menus:

For lunch, I would like to eat steak and red wine. I’ll cook some pizza with chicken, tomato sauce, eggs, and butter.

I would like to eat egg tart with hot dogs. And I would like to eat turkey and American big lobster and drink coca cola. It’s very delicious. I would like to eat pasta and all kinds of pie, drink some kind of coffee. And I’d like to eat salmon. It’s very famous in America.

In the morning, I’d like to eat sandwich, hamburger, butter, cake, milk and egg for breakfast. In the afternoon, I’d like to eat beefsteak, pizza, salad, spaghetti, and vegetable for lunch. I usually like to drink wine. In the evening, I’d like to eat turkey, cheese, hot dog, splashed potato, and chocolate for dinner…. After supper, I’d like to eat dessert and fruit. I’d like to eat junk food when I’m wat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction: Upon Further Reflection
• 2. America—The View from across the (Reflecting) Pond
• Ecology/Economy
• Family Life and Leisure
• Class and Power
• Ritual and Religion
• Ideology
• About the Contributors