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Right. For example, there is no one "white culture". I'm white, and there are plenty of white people in my home town with whom I share little to no cultural v
by colanderman 9y ago
Right. For example, there is no one "white culture". I'm white, and there are plenty of white people in my home town with whom I share little to no cultural values. Any conversation about relative values of "cultures" is probably better cast as a discussion about cultural memes (in the original Dawkins sense [1]), with the understanding that the flow of memes tend to follow social contours as clusters, and interact with one another.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
- theseatoms 9y agomeme : atom :: culture : physics I agree that it's best to inspect culture from the bottom up rather than the top down. Start with the most granular units. Is anyone here acquainted with the current sociological orthodoxy or is that population mutually exclusive with HN commenters? :)
- chc 9y agoI think you probably mean "meme : culture :: atom : physics" (i.e. memes have the same relationship with culture that atoms do with physics).
- colanderman 9y agoTo be fair, in the pure mathematical sense of “ratio”, A ∶ B ∷ C ∶ D and A ∶ C ∷ B ∶ D are equivalent statements.
- briantakita 9y ago"White Culture" only exists in the domain of Identity Politics. Remove Identity Politics & you remove the notion of "White Culture", among other socially divisive memes.
- stinkytaco 9y agoThat makes me wonder how many cultures only exist in the realm of identity politics. Certainly there is "culture" that white people are the predominant part of (I'm thinking of the church basement Lutheranism of my childhood as an example), but no one would call that "white culture". What other cultures are a political construction as opposed to a "natural" one?
- gertef 9y ago"White Culture" was invented as a defense of Slavery and Colonialism. Remove racially-based oppression as well as its legacy, and you remove the notion of "White Culture"
- parrellel 9y ago"White Culture" also acts as an easy straw man for those discriminated against and other minorities. Remember there aren't any cultural Eastern Europeans or Appalachians or what have you in the face of the monolith.
- Retric 9y agoYour own culture tends to be invisible. I would say hot dogs are part of white culture in the way that say 'pro life/pro choice' is not.
- lambdaphagy 9y agoRelative to all people living today, let alone whom have ever lived, you probably share rather a high percentage of the variation in cultural values with white people, however construed. Check out this map, for example: http://www.iffs.se/media/1906/culturemap_may2015.jpeg http://www.iffs.se/media/1906/culturemap_may2015.jpeg and notice how Anglos, even when separated by oceans for hundreds of years, tend to cluster in one corner of values-space.
- AstralStorm 9y agoThis is not white culture but Anglo-Saxon. (Ask someone who's Slavic.)
- hprotagonist 9y agowhat in the world is a "traditional vs. secular-rational values" axis? Why is it in linear units between -2.5 and 2.5? I have no idea how to interpret this graph.
- gabemart 9y agohttp://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp might shed some light (I have no prior knowledge, I just searched)
- nyolfen 9y agowould you say there is no such thing as black culture?
- icebraining 9y agoIs there? Does a black person from Brazil share a culture with a black person from Sweden or from Pakistan?
- nyolfen 9y agoi suppose that there is no correct answer to this, but i believe that if there are people who mutually identify in a particular way and share practices and beliefs then it can be said that they belong to a culture
- Blackthorn 9y agoBlack culture exists, at least in the United States, since the USA systematically destroyed any other form of heritage from black people.
- Danihan 9y agoThis seems like an extremely ignorant comment to me. There is a ton of black culture in the South that is uniquely American.
- Blackthorn 9y agoYes, which is black culture, which I literally just said existed in the USA. So what exactly are you disagreeing with?
- nyolfen 9y agothe way your original comment is phrased sounds exactly like you're saying 'there is no black culture in the USA'