Well there’s a significant Scots element to it too. This thread reminds me of this Onion article. The Onion | America's Finest News Source.
Does it help if previous to Oliver Cromwell the family had a Baronage? Probably not. Uhm. Don’t look at me, anyhow. The family’s from Donegal and Londonderry, near as we can figure, originally. (There’s a thousand years or so between the first and last statements… family history gets interesting, especially with DNA tests.)
Scots culture (at least as it’s popularly portrayed) is a recent invention. All the tartan twirling, caber tossing, bagpipe eating stereotypes were invented by the Victorians.
It’s a common thing. Wicca was invented in 1954. Druids? Possibly as early as the 17th Century, but mostly Victorian.
Of course, if you tell someone that their ancient culture, whose origins are lost in the mists of time, was invented by bunch of bored, middle class layabouts, they won’t be very impressed 
There seems to be a common misconception that something has to be old to be a culture. Ask a bunch 30-something white American Euro-mongrels what Jenny’s phone number is and see how many of them give you the same answer. That’s a culture.
Same stuff can be levelled at Irish culture or indeed any modern culture. The Gaelic revival in the late 19th century etc. set many of the precepts of Irishness for today. All modern cultures are either recent inventions or significant reinventions. These things aren’t static.
This is an excellent point.
Black Irish, of course.
Family history says that drinking, fighting, fighting family, getting involved in generations long arguments, getting involved in generations long fights with family, other families, or other kingdoms, losing said fights, running the hell away, coming back 20 years later, bitching about it, drinking, losing your wife, losing your house, losing your dog… all pretty much authentic tradition.
Sound familiar to anyone?
Sounds like a country and western song.
Exactly the point I made, though you did it much more succinctly.
Please define “plain.” Thank you. What do you find virulent & dangerous about multiculturalism?
What do you know about the roots of country music? Clue for those afraid to click: Music from the British Isles (mostly “Celtic”) but with profound African-American influence, early & late.
What do you think about Brave Combo? This Texas band won 2 Grammies for Best Polka Album–but plays a pretty wide variety of music. The polka has pretty white roots–although it’s popular with Tejano bands, too.
Recent scholarship uses “Celtic” to define a language group. Genetically, the word is meaningless.
Sorry if this message is a bit disjointed. I’m just trying to figure out what you’re driving at. Aside from The Heartbreak of Melanin Deficiency, that is.
My point exactly. There is a strong element of familiarity here that does run through our country.
Woodstockbirdybird: You sure it’s a culture and not just an infection?
At this point, I’m not even sure there’s a difference.
I think of Celtic-ism today as Scots, Irish, and of course Scots-Irish. (I can say this because I am about 1/16 Scots-Irish. :)) It is, perhaps, a touchier-feelier antidote to the culture Jim Webb describes in Born Fighting. That culture, too, is somewhat mythic, but at least it doesn’t ignore the realities of extreme poverty, ignorance, and violence as part of daily life for these long-ago immigrants.
When I first had sould food in a restaurant in the South side of Chicago, I was struck as how much of it was the same dishes that I was familiar with from my southern great-grandparents meals, but much of it was prepared in a way that was more flavorful, with more or unfamiliar spices, or teh introduction of onions or vinegar. As I started to cook more on my own, I found that many of the dishes my mother made, I could make much tastier by following recipes that included different techniques than mom had used. Flour and oil roux transformed gravy. Often it seems that what we accept as white culture is like my mother’s cooking.
The touches I was learning and those employed in making the soul food I had at the restaurant, in the past, were things taught by each generation of cooks to the next, and they are vulnerable to loss if there is a disconnect between generations, or if one generation eschews them for some reason. The disconnect could be as simple as a mother dying young before teaching her children how to cook or someone in the family with a profound dislike of onions. I wonder how much was lost on the push out west, which separated the generations with distance as well as time. Mainstream “white” culture does seem as if much has been left out. I think what we view as non-ethnic white culture is that which has been transmitted not from person to person, but through the mass media or schools, or some other way that removes much of the personal interaction and encourages removal of the more colorful elements.
Perhaps people look down on whites who reach out to ethnic cultures, because they feel that such an acquistion is not authenitic as it doesn’t come person to person. Perhaps that is less disfavored in those who are descended from slaves and also native americans because of the recognition that person to person transfer of cultural traditions was forcefully disrupted and even outlawed and so if the culture is to be known, it must be from secondary sources.
I won’t look down on those enjoying celtic touches in music, and I’d hope that they won’t look down on me for getting my recipes from sources other than my mother.
For some reasson(s) outlined in the very seminal article Our Ancestors, The Gauls a goodly portion of Europe has a hard-on for claiming Celtic (aka Gallic) ancestry.
As lee has put his finger on “authenticity” is big part of the equation.
her finger
Young people find the culture they grew up in boring or otherwise undesirable, investigate other cultures. Film at 11.
Young people from immigrant cultures (especially the children of immigrants) in the US do the same thing. Only when they do it, the mainstream culture is an obvious alternative to their culture to adopt, and it’s called “assimilation”. Kids brought up in the mainstream culture can’t reject their parents’ culture by assimilating, so they look for some other culture to adopt. Sometimes it’s another ethnicity’s culture, sometimes it’s a culture that their family has roots in but doesn’t practice any more, sometimes it’s a youth culture.
The colorful stuff is there, you just don’t notice it because it’s so common. A holiday with several signature dishes (turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, candied yams, and so on) and a parade isn’t colorful? Stringing lights all over your house isn’t colorful? Special holiday songs? A giant lit-up inflatable snowman in the yard isn’t at least as colorful as roasting a whole lamb on a spit in the yard? Wearing an outfit that is only worn once in your life and (for the women) a special headdress when you get married is not colorful?
You don’t know what an Easter egg is? You really don’t know what event Easter is supposed to commemorate?
I’m a whilte person who kind of likes Celtic music but would never claim it to be part of my cultural heritage. My background is 100% Hungarian.
Ed
I’m not smiling bandit and I don’t agree with many of his ideas, and I wouldn’t say multiculturalism is “virulent” or “dangerous”, but it might be said that it favours tokenism over “real” culture. Oftentimes, it tends to reduce “ethnic cultures” to a set of commonly accepted attributes of these ethnic groups that have little in common with how these groups really live today. I believe runcible spoon’s post describes this: he or she’s heard all about Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and Chinese New Year’s as symbols of minority cultures, but how are these symbols really relevant to African-American, Jewish or Chinese cultures?
As well, the main argument against multiculturalism I’ve heard expressed is that it tends to isolate cultures from each other. Basically, it leads to groups segregating from each other and staying all in their own little corner instead of trying to build a common identity together.
Finally, I guess you could argue that multiculturalism causes “unhyphenated” people to feel as though they have no culture. I believe this is sort of what smiling bandit is getting at, and I tend to agree that it happens in some cases.