C is for Your Cultures

You have permission to write about all the cultures to whom you belong. We all have one, or two, or more cultures influencing our beliefs, how we speak, what we value, and just about everything we touch or think about. Culture is more than we often realize, and less than we should have it be. Define, celebrate, record, and share it.

Family and Community Culture

Your family culture might be stoic midwestern and all about work ethic.  If this is the case, you might draw from your ethnic or geographic lineage to examine if you think this is because your family has lived in Iowa for three generations and probably supplanted the southern European culture your grandmother described about her jovial, expressive family from Italy.

Your community culture might be a blending of expressive immigrant traditions; parades, pierogis, and intricate nativity scenes on the lawn of the church across from the town square, and the whole county turning out for the 4H fair.  

Regional culture and political cultures might clash for you. I know it does for me. Both sides of my family have deep anabaptist traditions and value pacifism, consensus, and simplicity. Northeastern Indiana where my family rooted itself in the 1840s. By the mid 20th century the culture shifted from the previous predominantly agrarian family economy with an influx of factories and corporate bosses who sought to leave the high labor costs and more rigorous regulation of the eastern US who brought in families looking for those types of manufacturing jobs. The workers brought along a plethora of end times focused evangelical believers who helped to splinter the old families of the area who were more universalist and liberal than the newcomers. My old-fashioned farming family instilled a very different set of values than those that governed political leaders and the the chamber of commerce of my small town.

The older I get, the more I see how the changes that swept through middle America actually swept away an older culture that did not know how to preserve itself. That bygone culture is still very much a part of the culture I carry around with me.

The Culture of Art, Music and Personal Expression

If you get the idea that I believe the culture-at-large is changing at an exponential rate, you are correct.

That is why I hope we will all start to record how we know what we know and what the personal filters are through which we sift all the information that slams into us these days. Capture what you know before it is lost.

However, not everything can be traced back to Grandma’s Apple Pie. Trends wash across the land carrying dreamers, the malcontents, and those who simply have itchy feet with them as waves crash and wash away teens and young adults, the unemployed, and those whose homes no longer feel like home to them. After WWII the world felt different, or so I have been told. Women wanted to continue working, people coming back from the war found their simple lives on the farms or in small towns lacked “something” after seeing war and other lands.

Within a few years after the war, beatniks, those calling for civil and equal rights, and people who just wanted to experiment were drifting into urban, intellectually diverse, and sometimes into out of the way places where they could be with others who thoughts were filled with the same thoughts as theirs. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll floated and shimmied through most places in America between 1960 and 1980. Reproductive freedoms, mass market music, and the different perspective that the drugs of the new generations collectively put emphasis on personal freedoms, open expression, and the perceived right to say, sing, write, act, and speak as you wish.

These may not reflect family culture, but cohort culture is real too.

Lots of people living now, perhaps even you, were part of this active reinvention. Only you can tell your stories of what and how your mothers and uncles preserved the rituals and traditions of their childhoods through the moves across the country, the communes they might have lived in, the states across which they hitch-hiked and the different social strata through which they moved due to going to university, or climbing the corporate ladders.

Document the places your grandparents, parents, and you have lived, if you can. Reflect on the cultures that were parts of that home. Maybe Polish table cloths, English pottery, Japanese dolls. What distinct cultural practices faded away or were introduced through the generations that you know of. You may not know a bunch but as you walk through visual memories of these people’s homes, what was placed on their tables, and how they entertained themselves, you may find hints that point to rich cultural histories you really have not explored or documented.

Maybe your culture is coastal and your life-ways depend on the sea. Does this trace to Portuguese fishermen in your family who moved to the East Coast? Or maybe you are “coastal” and you have a very California lifestyle due to your family having lived there since great grandparents left the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma decades and decades ago?

Trace what you know back through how you know it, and to what paths those bits of knowledge point.

There are Hints in Plain Sight

Your personal or family culture may contain all sorts of bits and pieces of information that are parts of a story:

Your paternal Grandma’s potato salad. Did you ever help her make it?

Did your mom hate eating green beans because as a kid she had to eat them every day because her parents could grow them in the garden and preserve them.

Is there a label inside the hat your aunt gave to you. What does that say about where she shopped?

How, your mom sometimes said, “fixin’ to do something.” What region uses that expression?

The type of blankets under which your family slept. If they were old, heavy quilts maybe the bedrooms were not heated.

Open that old family bible and see what family information is recorded in it.

Take notes, record your suspicions, research them. Your culture and the cultures from which you come have left their traces. These fill out and make your stories real.