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Reading this article, I don't really get everything under "What About Western Kids?" subheading. Everything listed there you would have found during the fronti
by jimmy1 8y ago
Reading this article, I don't really get everything under "What About Western Kids?" subheading.
Everything listed there you would have found during the frontier days of America (and still do in some parts), so does that make America not western? I don't know it's very confusing. My parents are from Greece from large families and had this exact same experience growing up -- you had to do your part -- and Greece is known as the the birthplace of western civilization.
Again, confusing to me. Western is just some huge bucket now that doesn't really have meaning.
On another level, I can kind of relate to you not knowing what type of "western" you are. On a whole, (this might sound confusing) it's the Roman West that is overrepresented in "Western Civilization", but you also had the "East" western civilization as well, and very much has some things in common with what some people know was "East" (as in Asian), but still distinctly "Western"
But I am with you, I don't know either sometimes.
- jacobolus 8y agoMy ancestors a few generations back who lived in the American west (or a generation or two before that were rural peasants in western Europe), and my rural Mexican peasant friends today live pretty similarly. You could take many stories of white Americans’ own great-great-grandparents who migrated to the US from Europe, change all the names and places (but few of the other details), and the story would be entirely plausibly that of an undocumented Mexican or Central American migrant today. This is one of the reasons that anti-immigrant hysteria is so ironically and tragically hypocritical. I think it would be fair to call frontier America “non-Western” in the sense of the word used by this discussion. Maybe “non-industrialized” would be a better word. jordigh: if you grew up in a middle class Spanish-speaking family in a city in Mexico, you are most certainly “Western” in the sense used here.
- namarie 8y ago> Western is just some huge bucket now that doesn't really have meaning. I sincerely think it just means "northern european" to some people.