Bullshit. There are plenty of cross-cultural social constructs.
That’s not even an argument.
And your argument by assertion is?
If by culture you mean 'anything created by humans’, then that’s a trivial definition I’ll willingly concede - but that definition makes the term do no real work and is not how the term is used in social sciences.
Race is socially constructed, but it wasn’t created by culture in the sense of shared tradition or meaning. It was created by law, pseudoscience, and bureaucracy. Calling that ‘cultural’ collapses an important distinction.
If all social constructs are cultural, then time zones, accounting rules, and database schemas are cultural artifacts in the same sense as religion or language - which empties ‘cultural’ of any explanatory value.
And I’m still waiting for your expansion on what ‘European’ and ‘Asian’ culture are…
So how do you define culture? Because i would have assumed accounting rules are part of culture. So I’m using a different definition than you are.
What you describe of your husband’s parents, grandparents, & extended family certainly fits what aged MIL’s parents, grandparents, and extended family are (were) like.
Back when I was newly married into the family ~1990 we went back to the northeast to meet everyone. They weren’t rich, they had not all had 8 kids times 3 generations so the sheer numbers weren’t as overwhelming as in your case, but the cultural isolation and sheer Italian-Americanness of the whole family really stood out. It was a bit like visiting a sitcom.
I expect that now, one or two generations later, they’re slowly losing that insular distinctiveness and joining the “melting pot” that is my culture. For sure the extended family now lives spread across a much larger fraction of the USA, not all concentrated in one corner of one state like the folks of yore were.
That’s probably going to depend on where exactly they live and details of the family - I’m thinking of myself , my siblings and all my first cousins on the Sicilian side. I’m the only one who married someone who is 100% not Sicilian and quite a few of my first and second cousins * married immigrants from either Sicily or Southern Italy. And because it’s no longer 1940, their kids grew up speaking both some form of Italian and English.
* Another piece of culture - I know relatives as far out as my second cousins once-removed ( I don’t know the twice removed because they are all little kids and I’ve only seen photos). When I was a lkid, I was amazed by TV shows that made a big deal about uncles and cousins coming to visit - most of my extended family lived within 20 minutes and I saw them all the time.
For sure assimilation depends a bunch on where they are and how much newbies from the old country are still settling around there. I’m pretty much out of touch with that crew nowadays so anything I would say would be generalized guesswork.
I was amazed by the idea anyone had extended family, much less that they lived nearby and would be seen more than once every couple of years.
Again there are a lot of different lifestyles and culture styles in our vast country. Some might be objectively better in some aspects, most are a mixed bag of up- and downsides, and they’re all interesting in their own way.
As my husband likes to say, everyone in his family is staunchly committed to family. Sometimes pathologically.
He’s got a fun video of his sister’s wedding where he’s panning the entire room and all you can see are people wildly gesticulating as they talk to each other. My husband talks with his hands a lot, which I find annoying when he’s (supposed to be) giving me a foot rub. I’ve learned to pick the right conversation topics that don’t get him too excited.
A pretty standard sociological definition:
The system of shared meanings, symbols, values, and interpretive frameworks through which people understand the world, communicate with one another, and guide action.
Accounting rules? Fail at every part of that
- They’re not meaning-bearing in themselves (they don’t express values, identity or worldviews. e.g. “Profit is good” is a cultural value that exists outside ledgers.
- They’re instrumental, not interpretive - they’re considered better the less interpretation they require
- They are externally enforceable, not internally legitimated. Cultural norms persist because people recognize and internalize them. - if people stop believing in a cultural norm, it fades. If they stop believing in accounting rules, penalties still apply.
- They do not organize identity or belonging - no-one belongs to double entry bookkeeping they way they belong to a culture.
Accounting rules are shaped by culture, but they are technical instruments, not cultural systems. They’re influenced by culture, but they’re not culture in the sociological sense - otherwise the term loses analytical precision.
I don’t want to call you out specifically but.. English isn’t an ethnicity, it’s a cultural identity. People can be English even if their ancestors weren’t, even if they have another identity as well.
It may sound like a silly nitpick, but there is a tendency for Americans to assume that various European nations are homogenous groups of one ethnicity. This is only a small step to declaring they should be homogenous white nations and anyone not white is therefore not a real citizen. Normally they don’t care so much about the English, admittedly, but this is something I have come across a disturbing number of times in Scottish online groups, and they’re adding fuel to the existing right-wing issues.
Sometimes this even leads to claims that, due to their ancestors, the American making the claim (and it is an American every time I’ve come across this) is even more [nationality] than locals who don’t fit their idea of what a citzen should look like, despite never even visiting. The reality is that most places in Europe have a complex ethnic history involving invasions, migrations and mixing, and the current lived culture is what most people care about, and that gradually drifts and changes over time anyway.
Yes, that’s a good point. All I really know is my ancestors immigrated from England and that they were white. And that a lot of them had hard lives.
Whether or not a culture has accounting rules is cultural, though.
Thinking about this — there is something I’d call, maybe, Modern Western Culture? I’m not at all sure that’s the right name for it, as there are, I’m pretty sure, significant areas outside anywhere reasonably considered “Western” which are part of it.
Whatever it should be called, it certainly has accounting rules. It’s basically capitalist, though usually a modified capitalism. While individual people in it may or may not be religious, it assumes that religion has all the basic assumptions of Christianity, and that other religions either are basically Christianity without Jesus or else don’t really count as religions. It assumes that everything other than humans is properly owned by some human or group of humans, that at least most of it is exchangeable for money, and in particular that homes are interchangeable as well as exchangeable for money. It assumes that almost all adults should be employed working for monetary pay, and probably working for somebody else. It assumes that it’s not only reasonable but required to live one’s life according to the exact figures on a clock. I could probably think of more characteristics of it if I spend more time on it.
I wouldn’t call it “white culture”, though. There are too many non-white people willingly in it, and significant numbers of white people not in it or doing their best to get out of it.
As someone who is ‘white’ I deeply reject the term ‘white’ to refer to race or culture, and when I see the people who are ‘fighting for the whites’ then I reject it even more.
I stated previously that what some people to be ‘white’ culture is just descendants of European settlers, which is where Latino people come from. However them and a few others are exclude for no real reason that I can see from a ‘white’ generalization. And IIRC from WWII history the nazi’s had to completely make up a ‘white’ fiction to fit their dumb narratives.
I am an American culturally with my other ‘non-white’ Americans here in AZ.
And when I lived in Asia for a few years they identified me as an American (not as ‘white’), which I matched culturally to the locals.
That’s just my empirical evidence, so I’d say no it doesn’t exist outside of hate groups and nazi fiction.
Sure. That’s not the same thing as saying the accounting rules are cultural. I agree that the decision to adopt accounting rules is cultural. But once adopted, accounting rules operate as technical coordination systems, not meaning systems. Cultural choice explains why they exist, not what kind of thing they are. You’re shifting from cultural contingency to cultural identity. Lots of non-cultural systems are culturally chosen - e.g. whether a society uses SQL databases is cultural - SQL schemas are not cultural systems.
It is directly descended from a culture that did not carve out that exception for (some kinds of) humans, and contains a distinct subculture that still holds that belief.
I agree with that, actually. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
I think that’s connected; though I don’t seem to be able to work out a way to clearly phrase the connection right now.
I’ve said at various times that the USA doesn’t have a society. It has an economy. We all are seemingly much more economically oriented than nearly all other cultures. What “culture” loosely speaking that we do have exists only in the cracks and crevices of our economy. And is strongly conditioned by seeing everything in economic terms.
There’s nothing inherently particularly “white” about this. But for sure the white people benefit from this alignment more than the non-white. Leading to the perpetuation of inequality that @MrDibble has alluded to.
In an economy everything has a price and nothing has a value. Even people.
Does that resonate a bit?
Honestly, I think people here are being disingenuous and overly “woke” trying to tip toe around the perception that there isn’t a identifiable group of music, shows, tv, fashion, and activities that can loosely called “shit white people like”.
By “white” I am specifically referring to white American middle/upper middle class culture.
A perfect example is the movie Role Models. Stereotypical “white people culture” portrayed in the movie includes:
- Paul Rudd
- Sean William Scott
- Elizabeth Banks
- 30-something men who hate their relatively easy jobs
- 30-something men who can
- Starbucks / coffee shops
- Energy drinks
- LARP-style fantasy role playing
- Rock music (specifically obsession with the band KISS)
- Keg parties
When I was seventeen or so, I read an essay by Wendy Rose, a Native American, poet, and anthropologist (“in that order”). She talked about the number of White people that came up to her after public readings to say something like, “I love Native American culture–ha ha, I’m white, so I don’t have any culture.” Rose was like, hey, if everyone from your culture thinks that, maybe thinking that is part of your culture?
And it blew my adolescent mind.
Of course there’s not any one value or symbol structure or norm that every single White person has; that’s not required for there to be a shared culture. And similarly, there’s no one symbol, value, etc. that’s held exclusively by White people; that’s also not required. But Rose is onto something there. Of course there’s a White culture, one component of which is a denial of a culture. Recognizing the culture helps to demistify it and make it visible; and by making it visible, puts it on an equal level with other cultures instead of making it the water in which we all swim.
Then it’s not ‘White culture’ and increasingly less and less of one as the middle class rapidly shrinks.
And the example sounds more like a distinct male subculture. Cultures don’t only exist for one gender.