The American Cultural Dialogue And Its Transmission

George Spindler, Louise Spindler, Henry Trueba, Melvin D. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781850007746
• eBook ISBN: 9781136615535
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Combines data obtained by a values projective technique over a period of more than 30 years. The purpose of the book is to deal with a process in which all Americans, old and new, and of all ethnic groups and minorities, are caught up - the American cultural dialogue.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is about the culture of the United States of America from an anthropological perspective. Many interpreters of America feel that there are too many subgroups, too many varieties of opinion and lifestyles, too few common interests and experiences, and too little history in common for there to be any ‘American’ culture. In one sense this is bound to be true given the obvious diversity within the American scene. But still, we manage somehow to communicate with each other even if we are often in conflict. We have pursued common goals during historical periods that have become a part of our past and we strive for some common causes today. We have a creed which is often stated and often flouted — that we are all equal and that no one shall be disadvantaged by their race, creed, or color. We have great documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution which lay out in detail many of our ideals.

Perhaps what we have in common is a way of talking to each other about our common interests and our differences. We may express our commonalities as clearly in the framework of conflict as we do within the framework of cooperation. We are in a constant dialogue that can be construed as a cultural dialogue. This dialogue has been going on for some time and about some of the same things, such as individual achievement and community, equality, conformity and difference, honesty and expediency, and success and failure.

We define cultural dialogue as culturally phrased expressions of meaning referent to pivotal concerns such as those just mentioned. These concerns are phrased as ‘value orientations’ but the dialogue expresses oppositions as well as agreements. The expressions occur in public speech and behavior, in editorials, campaign speeches, classrooms, the mass media, churches and religious ideology, and so forth. They occur in private speech and behavior as people accommodate and conflict with each other as spouses, friends, partners, parents and children. The pivotal concerns and the agreements and conflicts centered around them are both in individuals and between persons as social actors in the situations provided them by their society. We have chosen to focus on only certain areas of the American cultural dialogue and much of the data on which our analysis is based has been elicited from college students, though we have drawn from our own experience in America, and that of others, as well.

This book is therefore about the American cultural dialogue rather than simply about American culture. The term ‘American culture’ implies a fixed, static, set of expectations, values, ways of thinking, and ways of behaving. Such a concept of culture does not even always work well for a relatively isolated, self-contained human community. We think of ‘culture’ as a process. It is what happens as people try to make sense of their own lives and sense of the behavior of other people with whom they have to deal. Cultural understandings make communication possible. Many of these understandings are understandings of difference.

To discuss further what culture or cultural dialogue is or is not would be futile at this point. Instead, it seems appropriate to anticipate what we think a book about the American cultural dialogue from an anthropological perspective should be about.

Themes

We propose that there are certain aspects of the American dialogue that have considerable continuity through the last 200 years or so. They emerged before the Revolutionary War and they have continued in changing but recognizable form through to the present. Identifying some of the most important promontories of that continuity will be one of our purposes.

At the same time it is clear that though there has been demonstrable continuity in the American process there is also change. In fact the dynamism of change, particularly technological change, is sometimes considered to be the dominant feature of an American culture. Americans are said to value change. ‘A new broom sweeps clean’ was a meaningful political slogan in the early twentieth century. Americans seem to have great faith that advances in technology will solve basic problems — some of which threaten our existence. We predicate our lives upon the notion that change will occur and that on the whole it will be for the better. Americans are said to be optimistic and future-orientated but even this orientation towards the future is undergoing change.

Conflict and diversity often seem more apparent than continuity. The American population is composed now of more than forty ethnic groups and a very wide diversity of religious identifications. There is also the diversity of small and large political, social and religious movements, regional diversity, social class diversity, and ideological diversity. Difference can always be a source of conflict and the American scene is full of conflict. And yet somehow this conflict does not result in the upheavals that have occurred elsewhere in the world. When Richard Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974, an event that certainly would have shaken most societies to the core, most of us hardly noticed the difference. The student riots and occupations of university buildings in the 1960s and 1970s did not threaten the continuity of our society or its government, nor did our ruling bodies react by killing hundreds of students. At times we actually seem to enjoy conflict and value diversity. At other times conflict and diversity are expressed in highly destructive terms. Nevertheless we manage a surprisingly high degree of communication in the midst of great diversity and wide- ranging conflict.

There is implied in our kind of diversity a working accommodation to it. Small groups of people in America, with some notable exceptions, do not seem to want to obliterate each other. After the election is over most of us accept the dictum of the people. We seem to expect youth to be deviant and express their deviance in hairstyles, costumes, music, and social behaviors that are in some degree irritating or challenging to adults. Yet we do very little about trying to eliminate those behaviors or to make youth conform. Foreign observers are amazed and intrigued by the diversity of the American scene and, despite our reputation as a violent society, our apparent tolerance for any difference that does not affect us personally.

All cultures must be transmitted to new generations if they are to survive. The American cultural dialogue is expressed in manifold forms, in the rhetoric of politics, in editorial diatribes, in the mass media, in advertising, in the symbols of wealth, power, poverty and dissidence. Our schools are an arena for our cultural dialogue and we will be particularly concerned with them and with how change, continuity, diversity, conflict, and accommodation are orchestrated in them.

These basic themes will be present in some form in our analysis of all of the topics we cover in this book. We can mention those topics now, with the understanding that we are merely pointing in the various directions we expect to go rather than providing a blueprint for exactly how things will work out.

Ethnic and Social Class Composition of American Society

Our first task will be to try to achieve some understanding of the ethnic and social diversity of American society. This is not easy to do because this composition is constantly changing and the labels that are used for census data do not always allow a very close approximation of the kind of reality in which we are interested. Nevertheless there are some things that we can say that will provide a backdrop for analysis of the American processes of cultural continuity, change, conflict and accommodation.

Core Mainstream Culture

The term ‘mainstream’ is used widely but carelessly. Who is mainstream? When we use this term are we talking about White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or are we talking about people, irrespective of ethnic origins who practice in their daily lives some common cultural features? Are there subdivisions of the mainstream that are important? We are going to present some interpretations with which not everyone will agree. We will maintain that there are some core values that have been a part of the American dialogue since the beginning and that these have been carried on within a mainstream construction of American culture. We are also going to hypothesize that there is a subset of the mainstream that can be referred to as a referent ethni-class. This ethni-class, we propose, has historical roots and in fact has acquired its referent status due to this historical continuity.

Education as Cultural Transmission

The way any culture maintains itself is through education and the American culture is no exception. The problem is what culture is to be maintained? A look at our schools as they have been historically formed in America suggest that there is a high degree of mainstream conformity and historicity. The major function of education has been described by many analysts of the American scene as the major instrument of the ‘melting pot’. The melting pot idea itself has become very suspect. Americans of different persuasions and ethnicities object to being ‘melted down’ to a conglomerate mass. What is surprising, however, about American society is that so many people do begin to act in predictable ‘American’ ways and acquire the instrumentalities for economic, social, political, and personal survival in our complex society. The schools are by no means altogether accountable and yet they have had an influence. Our analysis will be directed at what this influence is and how it has been accomplished.

The school in America has been accused of being mainly an instrument of the mainstream middle class. We will attempt to see what this can mean and whether this orientation is accountable for the trouble in the schools. Are our schools so heavily culturally loaded with mainstream values that many ethnic groups and social classes find themselves in opposition to the culture promoted in them? Are there ways that we could bring more of the diverse elements of our society into a productive relationship with our economic and social institutions? Why are about 25 per cent of our youth dropping out of school before they acquire a high school diploma? Have we somehow decided to throw away one-fourth of our coming generation? Are our schools designed for failure as much as for success?

Diversity

The notion of diversity keeps coming up in our discussion and will be a very important theme. We have already said that we will try to define that diversity and we have hinted at some of the conflict relationships between diverse elements. One of our major themes will be the conflicts and accommodations that occur between certain mainstream cultural elements and groups and nonmainstream elements and groups, or diversity and opposition. It is possible to think of American society as composed almost entirely of diverse groups in conflict with some hypothetical mainstream culture. If we define the mainstream population as White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and male-dominated, then most groups, including women and children as well as all ethnic groups that are not White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and male, are in some degree of diverse opposition to this mainstream culture. This is possibly carrying the matter too far but for the sake of argument we will present some support for this model of American society.

One particular element of American society that is usually left out of discussions of American culture is the Native American population. These were the people who were here before the rest of us came. They had well established and also very diverse cultures. There were at least some 375 different languages spoken in North America before the Europeans came and this linguistic diversity was matched by social and cultural diversity. Between most of these cultures and the Euro-American culture that developed there were virtually unresolvable conflicts — political, economic, social, ideological, and cultural. In some ways the Native American conflicts and accommodations to the mainstream are an exemplification of the conflicts experienced by other diverse elements and the mainstream. We will therefore spend some time on this complex set of articulations and disarticulations.

We also forget easily that one of the major differences between American culture and European culture is the influence of Native American cultures upon the developing Euro-American society and culture. For example, some of the most distinctive elements of the American vocabulary are words derived from American Indian languages. A major part of our food supply comes from plants domesticated by American Indians (and corn is practically a national vegetable). Some of our concepts of masculinity, of the frontier, and a minority view of our relationship with nature, are heavily influenced by Native American conceptions. Black and Hispanic, as well as Asian influences on the making of America have been profound as well. We have recognized this by inviting Henry Trueba and Melvin Williams to write chapters on the Chicano and Black experience within the American cultural dialogue.

Hinterland Culture

In most treatments of American relationships the country as a whole is cast as though it were one big urban conglomerate or, historically, one vast rural society. We are going to develop a concept that we will term the ‘hinterland’. This is a concept that is not exactly coterminous with ‘rural’. There are hinterlanders living in the city, and there are many urbanites living in the country. The hinterland does tend to be more rural than urban and in one sense it can be thought of as those vast areas between our great metropolitan centers peopled by individuals who are there for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to escape the city. There has always been an intermigration between the city and the country in America, though most often in favor of the city. But recently there has been a sizeable migration of city dwellers to the country. What are they looking for? Are there hinterland values, ideologies, expectations, that are not only different from those most common in the city but in partial opposition to them? Do hippies and ‘hillbillies’ have something in common? Do yuppies and street people, particularly drug hustlers, have something in common? And what about the stubborn people for whom farming is not merely a way of life but for whom farming is life itself? Are there hard-pressed small town values that people try hard to maintain in the face of a flood of alternative views promoted by the mass media?

Movements in American Society

Movement is the keynote of American culture, but here we are thinking of socio-religious movements. Many of the most recent movements have been fundamentalist in character. Some commentators seem to think that fundamentalism is new in America. On the contrary, fundamentalism is partly what American culture has been historically about. Many of the people who came to America, such as the Puritans, were fundamentalists. Whenever America has been in trouble fundamentalism has become rampant. We cannot possibly look at all of the dozens of the fundamentalist movements that have appeared so suddenly and so dynamically over the past twenty years or so but we will examine one or two of them. As we do so we will see that there is not so much deviation from some core values in American culture as one might think.

Future Shock

A special subset of the theme of cultural change has been made popular by a film titled ‘Future Shock’ narrated by Orson Welles and derived from the book by Alvin Toffler of the same title. An examination of this film is instructive. Though it was cast in the mold of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is valuable as a way of entering the American cultural dialogue. If one looks at it as a part of the dialogue and not necessarily an accurate forecast of the future, or even of the problems related to the future and to change, it can be very useful. In this film and in much of the American dialogue about change and the future since World War II there are certain concepts that appear and reappear. The ‘age of anxiety’, ‘overchoice’, ‘prepackaged and plastic’, ‘accelerated pace of change’, ‘nothing is permanent anymore’, ‘the move’, ‘loss of the sense of belonging’, ‘all relationships are temporary’, and ‘the death of permanence’, these phrases and the images they evoke have become a part of our cultural self-concept.

The film shows dramatically and effectively changes that were occurring at the time the film was made and anticipates future changes. Since we have already arrived in a part of the film's future, we have some perspective that was not available when the film itself was made in 1972. The future with humanoids serving us behind the counter of an airport, the installation of temporary body parts, the development of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, a genetic race, is partly already here. A tired man gets up in the morning and plugs himself in for a little shock to get going. He plugs his female partner in to get her up as well. There is marriage between homosexuals. There are young people sleeping together on the beach for a one night stand. Computers seem to run everything.

The images center upon and communicate a sense of anxiety about choice and impermanence. The film and the questions it raises and the images it provides are worth considering because they are not entirely illusory. It is apparent that we are in the midst of rapid technological and social change and that the former sources of security in presumed stable family relationships and communities are threatened.

The question, however, is whether or not this sense of crisis and the anxiety about change and the loss of permanence are really very new on the American scene. When the westward movement was taking place there was little permanence for the people who made the move. The westward movement was in turn preceded by the migration of peoples from the old world to the new, and for them there was little permanence during the process of migration and adaptation. It may be that the permanence that the film and many discussions of this kind seem to assume we once had is an illusion. When Lloyd Warner went to study a ‘Yankee ci...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Authors and Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Composition of American Society
• Chapter 3 American Mainstream Culture
• Chapter 4 Observing America
• Chapter 5 Schooling in the American Cultural Dialogue
• Chapter 6 Conflict and Accommodation of Mainstream and Minority Values
• Chapter 7 Religious Movements in America
• Chapter 8 The American Hinterland
• Chapter 9 Mainstream and Minority Cultures: A Chicano Perspective
• Chapter 10 The Afro-American in the Cultural Dialogue of the United States
• Chapter 11 Final Thoughts
• References
• Index