¿Qué es la diferencia entre un yoghurt y un gringo?
Or:
What is the difference between yogurt and a gringo?
The answer: The yogurt has its own culture
Or so goes a popular joke about gringos down here in Tico Town.
Like most jokes that describe a certain people (and are not merely, entirely hateful), its appeal stems from having a certain perceived truth. I'm not saying that us gringos don't have our own culture, we do, but it is something that is hard to pin down in specifics. From my perspective, the culture of the United States defines itself in sweeping, conceptual ideas. Independence! Individuality! Enterprise! Boldly selling things no man has needed before (and likely still doesn't)! (Okay, so I'm not funny...) After all those huge ideas that we try to embrace as a people, after all those values and ethical pursuits that have been handed down since the Revolution, that we sometimes manage to achieve and sometimes do not, it seems to get very regional.
Every time I travel people ask me for examples of typical foods in my culture. Quite frankly, I don't know. My family rarely fit into any sort of norm here and college is a terrible example (the college culture is another experiment entirely). People in Costa Rica drink (with respect to beer) primarily two things: Imperial and Pilsen. If it's a good night, someone brought along a six-pack of imported Toña from Nicaragua (a definite improvement on CR's Imperial). But that's really all. At home, I daren't even try to summarize the things that have made appearances in my home(s) alone, and no, it's not because the people there are prone to inebriation, rather, variety is the spice of life. These are just two facets of one side of a culture, but, as Costa Rican culture revolves around what goes in their stomachs, it was what occurred to me first.
So here's my question, directed at all of the (probably three) readers of this blog: What do you think is indicative of your culture? What do people eat? What do they value? How do they dress? What defines who you are and where you came from?
Obviously, there's no right answer, but I'm not even looking for things necessarily on the same track. Anyway, humor me! Go! Write something silly. Write something profound. But do me a favor and write something! I'm really curious about how people think about this when they turn the mirror back on themselves.
I kind of agree with the selling part above. We seem to invent new needs. I would say American culture is bits of everyone else's culture put together and mass produced. In that sense, mass production is also part of our culture, since hand craftsmanship is often a big part of the origin culture.
ReplyDeleteWe are also essentially the center of the world's popular culture.