and yet language/cultural groups persist somehow. Graeber attributes it to a kind of cultural reflection - people know how the group across the river behaves and so they intentionally differentiate themselves.
Pretty much this. There are many, many cultural shibboleths in the US. Minnesota has intense passive aggressiveness and a lot of shitty food that they enjoy. Texas has... problems. The south has southern hospitality and an incredibly complex system of social violence that is hard to even describe to people who haven't experienced it. The east coast has distinct regional accents and fifty different highly nuanced ways to say "fuck you" with meanings ranging from "i will shit on your corpse" to "i love you like a brother and would you like to come over for dinner with my family this weekend?"
Like i get shitting on America's corporatized culture and franchize bs and entertainment slop, but the persistent idea that america "has no culture" is rubbish based on a deep misunderstanding of what culture is, and presumably a lack of familiarity with the different cultural regions of the us.
Source - studied anthropology, have lived in many regions of the us and hate them all for different regionally distinct reasons.
I guess it's a question of scale. When you have group A differentiating itself from neighbouring group B (in ways which feel significant but which don't quite add up to a communications barrier), and group B is differentiating itself from group C, and group C is differentiating itself frrom group D, what you end up with when you zoom out is a continuum from A to D.
and yet language/cultural groups persist somehow. Graeber attributes it to a kind of cultural reflection - people know how the group across the river behaves and so they intentionally differentiate themselves.
Pretty much this. There are many, many cultural shibboleths in the US. Minnesota has intense passive aggressiveness and a lot of shitty food that they enjoy. Texas has... problems. The south has southern hospitality and an incredibly complex system of social violence that is hard to even describe to people who haven't experienced it. The east coast has distinct regional accents and fifty different highly nuanced ways to say "fuck you" with meanings ranging from "i will shit on your corpse" to "i love you like a brother and would you like to come over for dinner with my family this weekend?"
Like i get shitting on America's corporatized culture and franchize bs and entertainment slop, but the persistent idea that america "has no culture" is rubbish based on a deep misunderstanding of what culture is, and presumably a lack of familiarity with the different cultural regions of the us.
Source - studied anthropology, have lived in many regions of the us and hate them all for different regionally distinct reasons.
I guess it's a question of scale. When you have group A differentiating itself from neighbouring group B (in ways which feel significant but which don't quite add up to a communications barrier), and group B is differentiating itself from group C, and group C is differentiating itself frrom group D, what you end up with when you zoom out is a continuum from A to D.