So today in class today, the question, "what is American culture?" was asked but not really answered. So here are my thoughts about what American culture really is:
America is a melting pot
Agata touched on this briefly, but I believe the most significant fact in determining what American culture is, is to recognize that America was founded by immigrants and was the major destination for immigration throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. America is a very young country and if globalization has been occurring for many centuries, I would say that American culture is a product of globalization. People came to America, brought along their own home countries traditions, cuisines, music, religion, etc. American culture has adopted many of those things as its own.
There is not really such a thing as an American ethnicity
Okay, so that statement is not really true, but if you don't count the Native Americans (who have been completely marginalized by society anyways), we can say that there is no such thing as a true pure-bred American. Most people can trace their heritage back to somewhere else and most people would identify themselves with that heritage regardless of how long their family had been in the U.S. (I am of Ukrainian, English, Polish, German, Irish heritage etc.) So if a criteria for culture is ethnicity, then there isn't a singular American culture.
American culture has evolved
While I believe that American culture is a product of globalization and may not have such a long history of tradition as some other cultures, I do believe that there is a distinct American culture. Our culture includes competition, work ethic, hamburgers, Hollywood, ideals of freedom, the American Dream, self-sufficiency, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, very low personal savings rates, democracy, and so many other things. There are distinct differences between the "California surf culture" and the "New England austerity" or the "Midwest friendliness" or "Southern hospitality." There are so many aspects of "Americanism" and so many subsets of culture and they are all allowed to thrive in America. I do not see this as a bad thing.
My point is that why is it so bad for American culture to spread around the world, if in fact American culture was created by borrowing from other cultures in the first place. I know, I know. There are aspects of low culture we don't want to spread, but in general, our culture has become so rich because we have allowed it to be influenced by others, so perhaps other countries could take a page from our book and become more open to the possibility of learning from others. I'm not necessarily advocating other cultures to adopt Americanism but I am suggesting the benefits of allowing other cultures to influence one's own point to the benefits of globalization.
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Excellent points Kelsey. Here's a thing that I started thinking about after class that might have something to do with what you've posted: perhaps that America emerged as "the new world" in a lot of respects might explain, discursively, a distinct logic of the modern and the new that might explain the things we discussed re: ancient history and tradition. Perhaps the novelty is itself a tradition?
Re: the backlash against the spread of American culture. There tends to be a lot of (Marxist-inspired?) paranoia on this front about the big, bad, profit-hungry global giant that is the US, materialism, etc. But is that all there is to it? I think not.
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