INTRODUCTION: MELTING POT, STEW POT, OR SALAD

(note: glossary for chapter is included in Unit Summary

Unit Goals and Objectives

1. STUDENTS WILL KNOW THAT THE UNITED STATES INCLUDES HAWAII, PACIFIC TRUST TERRITORIES, PUERTO RICO, AND THE VIRGIN ISLANDS, AND BE ABLE TO LOCATE U.S. TERRITORIES ON A WORLD MAP. THEY WILL KNOW WHEN THE U.S. WAS ESTABLISHED AS A NATION, AND WILL BE ABLE TO IDENTIFY MANY DIFFERENT “NATIONS” (INCLUDING INDIAN PEOPLES) THAT CONTROLLED WHAT IS NOW U.S. TERRITORY.
   
   
2. STUDENTS WILL BE ABLE TO IDENTIFY AT LEAST THREE BASES ON WHICH PEOPLE CREATE SOCIOCULTURAL IDENTITIES.
   
   
3. STUDENTS WILL BE ABLE TO DEFINE AND CORRECTLY APPLY KEY CONCEPTS THAT ANTHROPOLOGISTS USE TO UNDERSTAND SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY.
   
   
4. STUDENTS WILL BE ABLE TO DEFINE AND DEBATE AT LEAST ONE PUBLIC POLICY ISSUE RELATED TO ISSUES OF DIVERSE CULTURAL AND SOCIAL IDENTITIES.
   

People use several metaphors to talk about American cultural diversity: Is the way the many peoples who make up this country best characterized as melted together, as an iron furnace melts together different metals to form a new, stronger, metal? Or does the metaphor of a stew work better, to indicate that peoples keep their unique cultural forms, but add their flavors to one another, all bound together by a common broth? Or is the United States more like a salad, where each cultural group retains its unique identity, barely interacting with others except insofar as many different peoples are thrown together? Which metaphor makes the most sense to you? Or do other metaphors make more sense?

How do Americans understand the nation’s cultural diversity? This course takes, as a basic premise, that there can be no singular answer. The United States is a society in which the citizens share in defining their common destiny. Therefore, Americans will probably always argue about how they (we) define their (our) nation.

At one point in U.S. history the dominant group, which had migrated to America from England and other northern European countries, defined the country as a “melting pot.” They believed that national unity required adherence to common cultural assumptions, or norms . They believed that newcomers to the country should assimilate to these norms, which they understood those derived from America’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage. Until the 1960s, most the U.S. educational policies (at least in the mainland United States), aimed to acculturate others (immigrants, American Indians, African Americans, Hispanics) into these dominant cultural forms. This sometimes took the form of forced assimilation, as when the U.S. government took American Indian children from their homes and, in boarding schools, forced them to speak only English and dress and behave in normative “American” ways.

Some people always disagreed with the conviction that America is a melting pot where immigrants shed their past and become “modern.” In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement fundamentally challenged it. First people of African ancestry, who by definition could never become “white,” then American Indians and Mexican Americans, argued that the United States has never been one culture. Women observed that they could never conform to a male-defined norm, at least if we were to give birth to future generations.

Many argued that the United States, as a nation, should seek new ways to create national unity, ways that allowed, and perhaps even encouraged, the widest range of cultural diversity.

This course challenges you to take up this question. Its ground rules are simple: You are citizens of this nation, or interested visitors, if you come from another nation. You will be the people who decide whether the United States is a melting pot, stew pot, salad, or some other yet-to-be imagined society. You inevitably participate in the discussion.

This discussion is crucial to our future as a polity, and to how we treat one another day to day. As a polity, the government and all its agencies enact and implement laws and policies. Laws can define who can and cannot marry, where people can live, who has access to jobs, who may immigrate to this nation and the terms of citizenship, the languages that may be used in official communications, and many other aspects of daily life. Therefore, government policies have enormous power in promoting the cultural distinctiveness of various peoples who live within the United States, or encouraging assimilation to a single, normative standard.

No matter what policies the government enacts, in daily life every person meets people from different backgrounds. Your business, profession, or job will inevitably require you interact with people whose cultural backgrounds are different from your own. The success of your business or job may rest on your ability to relate well to people from diverse backgrounds and cultures.

Because you participate in the building of American society, you need tools to understand this work. The tools are conceptual, analytic, and ethical. Let’s begin.

DIVERSITY

When we speak of “diversity,” what do we speak about? People are different: their physiognomy (hair color and texture, complexion, height, weight, etc.), their inborn talents and personalities, their goals and aspirations. This course does not deal with human physical or biological diversity. Research by anthropologists and other behavioral scientists has found no connection between the physical attributes of peoples in different regions of the world and other personal attributes. Nor does this course deal with the ways individuals differ from one another in their personalities and talents; that is more properly the realm of psychology.

This course deals with cultural and social diversity. Unlike studying physical diversity, sociocultural anthropologists look at the ways that people behave as social beings. Unlike studying individual talents and personalities, the differences we take up characterize groups or whole categories of people. We look at how groups of people differ from one another in the ways they interact with one another and with people outside their groups. It looks at people as sociable beings, who conform more or less to the communities within which they live.

Social groups or communities form in many different ways. Sometimes a group of people create a common set of goals and then define themselves as separate and distinct from others. Amish, for example, follow a religious creed that requires them to stand apart from the rest of society. Gypsies, or Rom, and Irish-American Travelers refuse to assimilate to the larger society, strongly protecting their community boundaries.

Sometimes a group is defined by others who, if they have the power to make it stick, use those differences to exclude or discriminate against those they define as different. In continental United States, for example, Euro-Americans defined African-Americans as a subordinate group and, for most of this nation’s history, denied peoples of African ancestry access to full participation in the society Euro-Americans governed. The video and article by Jane Adams (see text and http://www.siu.edu/~jadams/mississippi_delta/race_frame_pg.html) document the ways different Mississippians have understood and reacted to the “color line” in Mississippi.

In the United States, the attempt to create a national society that recognizes our cultural diversity is quite recent. We now speak of creating a multicultural society. This concept developed as an attempt to recognize that different groups of people have very different cultural traditions that place them in different positions within American society. However, as Robin Kelley (“The People in Me”) observes, many Americans are polycultural: they have inherited diverse cultural traditions, so that they do not easily “belong” to any singular “culture.” Kelley’s life experience indicates that “culture” is a fluid, ever shifting thing.

Whether people choose their group identity, or it is thrust on them by more powerful groups, group or collective identity is rooted in common, shared experiences. These shared experiences create a history that is distinct to that community. These distinctions, of experience and of history, mark one community as different from another. Sociologist Robert Bellah calls these communities of memory.

Shared national background creates one of the most powerful bases of common sentiments. So do common experiences of oppression and discrimination. Women, for example, are half the population, but by virtue of their exclusion from many aspects of society, throughout America’s history they have formed as a group with a common identity.

Some social groups exist more in the analyst’s eye than in actual practice. For example, in the late twentieth-century, few Americans experience solidarity with others on the basis of class. Yet people’s life chances are deeply influenced by which social class they were born into.

One’s religion can provide a powerful, supportive community, as can one’s place and type of work.. Men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, join gender-specific organizations and form bonds based on their shared experiences as men or women or according to their sexual orientation. And so forth—the list of possible cultural identities an individual may enjoy is nearly endless. We easily switch cultural codes, behaving “appropriately” in different groups and cultural settings.

Differences in cultural forms do not necessarily mark individuals as members of distinct groups. The dominant American culture has formed out of a merging of the many different European cultures. Like the dominant American English language, with its many regional accents, individuals differ a good bit in many specific cultural practices. African Americans differ in cultural practices in different regions of the South, and between North and South. These differences often lead to misunderstandings between individuals: cultural differences are perceived as individual difference, and can be misinterpreted. For example, Southerners and rural Midwesterners tend to greet people they meet as they walk or drive along, and chat with strangers. Many Northerners and city people avoid looking directly at strangers they meet. They may find Southerners’ affability irritating, while Southerners may find Northerners’ behavior cold and unfriendly, or even hostile.

Virtually everyone belongs to more than one cultural group, each with its own history, cultural codes or norms, and sense of solidarity. At any given time, a person may be from a rural region, Catholic of German ancestry, a woman, a single parent, and work in a factory. Or a person might be of Choctaw ancestry, from the hills of Mississippi, a man, and a school teacher. Each of us experience many cultural identities, and for the most part, move more-or-less easily from one to the other. We often don’t think of some cultural differences as “identities,” but rather view them as “feeling comfortable” with specific individuals, or “not liking” others.

Many times, groups enforce loyalty: Many (though not all) religions are exclusive; ethnic groups often require a powerful loyalty to “one’s own.” Men and women, no matter how equal we appear legally and in many social arenas, continue to separate according to biological differences. So our ability to shift cultural identities is limited, both by our own flexibility and desires, and by the willingness of others to allow us to join their groups.

The United States, as a nation created by immigrants, is in many ways unique. History is the story people tell themselves about who they are. We begin this course, then, by briefly surveying the history of the peoples who make up this nation. It is a story of those who first lived in these territories, the many American Indian tribes, the Polynesians and Micronesians. It is a story of the Europeans who explored and settled these lands, fighting with one another for supremacy. It is the story of the Africans who were sold into bondage and shipped across the Middle Passage to live as chattel slaves, emancipated and, finally, in the mid-20th century, achieved civil rights, if not full social equality. And it is the story of peoples from around the world who migrated to find a better life and, with those who came before, built and continued to build this nation.

The readings for this Introduction address issues of the relationship of the historically dominant culture to the many other cultural groups that live under U.S. governance. Robin Kelley (“The People in Me”) writes of the dilemmas of being many different ancestries and ethnicities, in a society that automatically tries to classify individuals by their physical appearance. Suzanne Oboler argues that “Latinos” or “Hispanics” exist as a particular ethnic category only because the United States government has classified them in that way; in “Latino’s” daily lives, their backgrounds in different countries, different classes and ethnic groups, speaking different languages, make them as different from one another as they are similar. Adams examines the concept of “race” and other forms of social difference, based on fieldwork in Mississippi.

Before sketching the history of the conquest and settlement of the region occupied by the United States, it is important to note that people have always crossed the boundaries of their own ethnic, national, racial, or other groups. We have many ways that we seem intuitively to be able to communicate across cultural divides. We share gestures of good will, like smiling (although we may smile in culturally-prescribed ways at culturally prescribed events). We speak complete languages, even if those languages are mutually unintelligible. We seem to have a curiosity about people who are different from us. We have an apparently innate ability to interpret cultural codes that are different from our own, and to communicate across the differences.

Nonetheless, we are all culture bound: No individual, no matter how broad the experience, can avoid interpreting other’s actions through the lens of their own experience and knowledge. Such

interpretations will sometimes, unintentionally, misjudge another’s actions or intentions. Ethnocentric is the term used for a person who believes their own culture is superior to others.

Many people advocate that we should prize our cultural diversity as part of our national heritage. They argue that different cultures do the “work” of living equally well, and that we must find ways to understand and appreciate cultures other than those we are born into. This is termed “cultural relativism.”

Some people believe that cultural relativism requires them to suspend all judgments of other people’s cultures, whether those judgments are moral, ethical, or practical. This sort of definition has led some to argue for example, that a father who kills his daughter because she disobediently dated a boy has to be understood within his cultural system, and not punished in a U.S. court of law (such a case occurred in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1989; the parents were convicted for stabbing their daughter to death because she was becoming too westernized)(1). While such a radical relativism is unacceptable to most people, this course will take up a number of cases which are likely to challenge your deeply held beliefs: Should homosexuals be allowed to marry their same-sex lovers? Should Christian Scientists be allowed to keep their children out of the dominant medical system, even if it causes their child’s death? Should American Indians and Inuit (Eskimos) be given an exemption under international treaties and allowed to hunt whales? Should animal sacrifice be allowed as part of religious practices?

You will not be urged to adopt any particular position, but rather to understand the arguments that support different perspectives. “Relativism,” in this course, means understanding; it does not require acceptance of beliefs and behaviors that one believes to be wrong.

Reaching across to people other than oneself is always challenging. It is sometimes uncomfortable. It is often exhilarating. It can give one deeper knowledge of oneself. In a nation as diverse as these United States, our cultural differences bind us together as closely as our similarities. It behooves us to develop the intellectual tools with which to understand our differences.

The story of the history of the United States cannot tell us how to live together with respect. It does remind us of the breadth of our diversity.

continued

© Jane Adams 2004