cultural construction
On of the defining books of my life is The Social Construction of Reality by American sociologist Peter L. Berger and German sociologist Thomas Luckmann. In a straightforward and compelling fashion it makes plausible how the process of communicating culture from one generation to the next affects its social construction and explains both continuity and change. The book has allowed me to make sense of my interest in how cultures interact with their social environments and the technical constraints of their times, and to decompose-to some extent at least-how my own take on the world was manufactured. This puts me in the position that I can actively pull the cultural expectations apart, whether they hail from my own upbringing or from my environment, and reclaim for myself what I find useful or compelling. Sometimes that means no more then reclaiming in my own words and on my own terms what the culture already hands me; in these cases I acquiesce at least consciously. Sometimes it means rejecting the things offered and finding alternate ways for me to fulfill those aspects of my existence.
Of course, such control is not arbitrarily precise; there are fundamental convictions or stances that escape my aspiration to control them at a conscious level. Many of them are unfortunately cultural, such as an uncontrollable distaste for people not maintaining the waiting queue or my insistence on appropriate table manners (after struggling so hard myself to acquire them). Here I cannot do more than be aware of them, but I know that I will probably never move to the level of critical control over them that I pride myself in having acquired. For better or for worse, they form the infrastructure into which some of my reclaimed cultural choices bottom out in. They are the remnants of a Bronx that it is doubtful anyone can take out of this boy.
This whole setup acquires a different flavor when one has children. Now one is no longer on the receiving, acquiring end of the cultural transmission process, but has moved into the position of a generator. Given such a constructivist stance as sketched out here, it is hardly surprising that one wants to take a controlling stance toward the recipients as well, carefully choosing the cultural nuggets worth passing on, all the while looking for the appropriate moment to teach their constructed nature as well. This is especially true when one finds oneself in a situation where there exists a plurality of cultural traditions that offer themselves almost naturally. Consider Jeff Gammage's blog entry in the NY Times entitled Beyond the Lion Dance, where US author Jeff Gammage describes his attempts at communicating some appreciation for Chinese culture to his two adopted Chinese children-to wit: by letting them participate in the lion dance-while introspecting on what these attempts mean.
From the point of view of the history of cultural understanding, this is quite funny. During the 18th century, the German writers were falling over each other belaboring the point that the native German culture was inferior to the dominant French culture, and trying to figure out how to create comparable and competitive works of art that would live up to the level of standards of the French (earlier and later, the Romans and the Greek, or whoever they considered the dominant model). Then, with the time of Goethe and the early Romantics, and the cultural studies of people like Humboldt, this all flipped. All of a sudden, the native cultures became acceptable and no longer in need of either lamentation or defense. While many Romantics still valued the ideals of Antiquity (Hoelderlin) as proto-types, the latter phases of the 19th century made it clear that the "authentic voice of a people", the "genius of a nation" was a self-sufficient artistic concept whose culture could be trusted, followed or imitated. The philosophical stance of Historicism in the vein of Leopold von Ranke, that can speak of all times and nations being equi-distant from God, i.e. equally acceptable in their cultural orientation, is both the height of that sentiment and the preparatory stage for the present day buffet approach to culture, were options and chic dictate what is being composited with what.
That context of discovery of the cultural construct as a good for consumption completely overlooks the context of construction of the cultural stance, specifically its economic and class-social aspects. This becomes obvious when reading the comments of the readers of Jeff Gammage's blog. The actual elements of the cultural stance that are being transmitted are from the economic context and the social class of the affluent: eating meat; learning the piano and the violin; participating in the lion dance, a practice whose origins escape me but if pressed I would attribute to Chinese guild system contributions to the festivities of the city as a display of good citizenship and concern for the welfare of the 'polis'). The challenging use of the Korean silver chopsticks, more slippery than the lacquered or wooden ones, in a single moment separated those with the economic potential to acquire the skill from those that did not have that opportunity.
So not only does this quest for authentic cultural constructs pick up elements that have been resuscitated from different class contexts; some of these elements were never that benign in their context of origin to begin with. I doubt it was only Louis XIV who managed to control his unruly aristocracy by sapping their attention and fiscal strength with an elaborate and expensive court ritual that required their continued attention to stay "in the loop" and their acquisition of politically unhelpful skills at enormous costs. I know how much my daughter would like to learn to dance ballet and tap, but at some point in time dancing skills (and the accompanying dresses and dances) were a device to force landed gentry to splurge on their sons and daughters what they might otherwise have poured into rifles, swords and political mischief making.
Innovating at every moment is asking too much, clearly. Any repetition has the potential to become tradition and one has to eat somehow. The helpful support that structures and forms, whether acquired culturally or reflectively, offer, not only simplify the task of the individual but make collaboration and social co-existence possible. But the very support derives from the elimination of the alternatives. Each cultural construct defines by pushing aside alternative forms of behavior. This is the shady underbelly of cultural constructs, and it needs to be part of the culture that I for one wish to transmit. It can be lessened by identifying the alternatives as the norm in other cultures, and to raise awareness, both in oneself and others, that the number of choices is larger than imagined. It substitutes cultural polytheism for the fascism of mono-culture.
Of course, it is not surprising that I arrive at this stance. The liberal Protestant solution to any problem is an educational one: historical analysis amplifies knowledge acquisition to allow an ordered choice between the alternatives, some of which are then re-discovered as transformations of the received cultural artifacts, preserving the cultural continuity by selective discontinuity. A culture of problem solving.