Contemporary American Culture today is largely de-centered and has lost a sense of itself as something that serves the interests of the individual in adaptation to everyday life. American culture was autochthonous to America--it was not merely an import from Western Europe. It was born in the forests, towns and farms of the old West. It is about as much, and as little, Western European, as for instance is Hispanic culture south of the border. In fact, it can reasonably be argued that Hispanic culture is more strongly Western European and "white" in orientation than is traditional American culture--Hispanic culture came from one place--Spain, and to a lesser extent, Portugal and Africa. American culture came, from the beginning, from many different places--Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Africa. Certainly we inherited the English language and protestant British culture, but it was an inheritance adapted to the frontier of the American West from the very beginning of its inception, and thereby transformed in character to what it had been in the old world.

I decry today the loss of American culture, being as it is "sponsored" out of existence by the mass media, radically "diversified" and pluralized by massive immigration of foreign populations, and under continuous assault even by its own government as often "incorrect" and therefore undesirable in form. I put the blame for this primarily, squarely and unequivocally upon the American government itself, that has consistently demonstrated a consistent lack of responsibility for the collective, long-term interests of the American people, as demonstrated by a long history of policy making that has consistently sold out the interests of the lower and middle classes of American society for the interests of the wealthy and of foreign interests. This track record of consistent irresponsibility, culminating in events like 9/11 and its anti-climatic aftermath that has witnessed the greatest flood of immigration in the entire history of the United States, reflects an embedding of conflict of interest in government to the point that the average politician today cannot clearly separate the public purposes, values and good of the collective from the special and private interests of the few or the "special" minority groups who behave as special interest groups. Any effort to introduce public reform to government to improve the situation meets with stiff and unswerving resistance from the ranks of government. Fraught with double standards, hung up on spurious racial and ethnocultural issues, unable to face its own contradictions, the Government and its administrative bureaucracy has largely put itself beyond the possibility of public reform or subject to collective social action.

American society has been sold like an old whore on a street corner to the highest foreign bidder. Foreign citizens are commonly given front of the line privileges and preferred screens of opportunity in hiring and promotion, always at the expense of other qualified Americans. This has been allowed to go on under the guise of "Affirmative Action" 

A basic lesson a cross-cultural anthropologist used to learn, eventually, was that one's own culture is always more or less transparent to one's own critical scrutiny. I guess one cannot see one's own forest for the proverbial trees that block the view--in this case the trees are one's own subjective experience, basic aversions and appetites, habits and associations, implanted from birth and built-in from childhood.

Only when returning from fieldwork in which one has become steeped in another cultural world, another alien reality, does one suffer and suddenly sense the disjointedness and dissociations of reverse culture shock--it is then that all that one took for granted no longer appears necessarily so.

That the contradictions and logical consequences of American culture are invisible to most Americans themselves should be received as only a common place, cliche and unremarkable truism--a matter of stubborn everyday fact.

If I had in hindsight to summarize what I felt to be the main central characteristics of traditional American culture, and its main facts or aspects of expression and elaboration, I would say the following:

  1. Christian, mostly protestant in religious orientation.

2. Capitalist and mostly conservative in economic and structural orientation.

3. Preoccupied with mobility, money and the acquisition of material symbols of social status.

4. Democratic in political orientation.

5. Staunchly Individualistic and marked by a fundamental schism of character that is embodied by the superman myth.

6. Compulsive in character which compulsion demonstrates itself in terms of a preoccupation with time and punctuality, with youth and health, with appearances, with hygiene, competition and patterns of material acquisition that borders on hoarding.

To add to this basic framework, I would claim that modern American culture, that has undergone the stresses and storms of modernization more so than perhaps any other society in the world, can also be characterized by the following aspects:

Hollywood, Television and Movies,

Disneyland and Theme Parks,

Restaurants, Fast Food, and dining out

Suburbs and Suburban Living, with grocery stores, and a full range of service industries,

Shopping Malls

Automobiles and Freeways

Sports

Band & Folk Music

The American Military

I would add to this the role that is being played increasingly by computing and the web, though it is not quite clear how this will eventually play out in being adopted as a fact and facet of American cultural life.

I would say as well that there are several central symbolic constructs or key concepts that are dominant themes of American cultural life. These would include:

The concept of money

The concept of race

The concept of individualism

Of course, a good anthropologist also learns the hard way in the field that for every rule one proposes, there are myriad exceptions one disposes. This is no less true for American culture as for any other culture on earth, but in the case of the complexities and heterogeneities of the varieties of the American experience, I would say it is especially the exceptions that outline the rule.

I have undertaken somewhat belatedly this set of essays, after years of rumination and stewing on the central issues they represent. I wanted to write this book several years ago, but always kept putting it off by one diversion or another. And every time I brought myself to the task, it seemed both that I was not quite ready for it, and also that much of the subject matter was too close to home, too sensitive, too saddening in many ways, to be thoroughly objective about it all.

There are major questions and problems today that have been the subject of daily conversations for several years running. There is increasingly a sense that most people prefer to talk about these issues, on one level or another, however they feel most comfortable in dealing with it. There is a sense as well that America is changing radically and irreversibly, that much of what was traditional about American culture is yielding rapidly, becoming irrelevant, by an acculturative onslaught that is the product of globalization. The transformation of American social life and culture seems to be complete and in this sense--total. And, perhaps most unfortunate of all, much of this transformation was self-induced, allowed, deliberately instigated, "planned" and perhaps unnecessary. If we are to see globalization in world perspective, then we must start with America first and foremost, for it is here especially that the central issues and contradictions of globalization are playing out.

There are a few other remarks that need to be made before proceeding with my essays. Traditional American ethnoculture is at least 350 years old, and its baseline was the small New England Colonies that were founded precariously on the Atlantic seaboard with their backs up against a vast, unknown, and mostly wild and hostile wilderness. Since then, numerous important historical and social events had a transformational and shaping influence on American culture. We may say that American ethnoculture is distinct to the North American continent. It is not British culture displaced, or Western European, or WASP, or anything else. It is unique and distinct to itself--it is historically native to Historical North America, forged on a receding frontier.

Secondly, we may say that no simple stereotype or even set of stereotypes, as I have listed above, is sufficient to the task of characterizing and fully describing American ethnoculture. American ethnoculture is exceedingly complex, variegated, multi-faceted, dialectically and ethnically divergent, and heterogeneous in origin.  The main language remains, of course, English, as Americans have been typically, stubbornly mono-lingual. Spanish is, paradoxically, a rising second language that is gaining functional integration in the system for a variety of interrelated reasons, not the least of which has been a tremendous influx of Spanish speaking populations over the last three decades.

American culture today can be said to be teetering on the verge of a cross-roads, and its future is uncertain and its social situation marked by a chronic and pervasive sense of insecurity shared by all but a fortunate few whose privileged wealth and circumstances lift them from the common lot of most Americans today. I think, for myself as an anthropologist, the real question today is not the melting pot or the salad bowl--it is really one of the critical achievement of cultural integration, marked by symbolic and constructive orientations and adaptations to the larger world, or the relative lack or even impossibility of it.