Thursday, 22 June 2006: Jewish-American: Chosen People in the New World.

Dominant culture moment: Ken Fisher

Dominant Culture Moment

Objective IV: to identify signs of the ‘dominant culture’ to which immigrants assimilate in terms of class, ethnicity, gender or family life, and religion. “What kind of culture do immigrants assimilate to?”

 ++Examples of the Dominant Culture++

Visions of America:

            1.) Hollywood:

                        “The streets of Piotrkow resembled Hollywood.  You never saw so many stars.” (p. 202)

            2.) Ingrid Bergman / Tyrone Power:

                        “I supplemented my fantasies with movies.  My mother was Ingrid Bergman and my father, Tyrone Power.” (p. 204)

To Begin With:

            1.) New York Times:

                        “Every one of them read the Daily Worker, the Freiheit, and the New York Times religiously each morning.” (p. 77)

++The Dominant Culture: A Self Sustaining entity++

Lost In Translation: A Life in a New Language

            1.) Dominant Culture as an invisible entity.

                        - In the most ordinary, interstitial gestures – secretiveness about money, or a reluctance to let sadness show – I sense the tyranny of subliminal conventions.  Where my friends suppose they’re voicing their deepest beliefs, I whiff the dogma of intellectual fashion; in the midst of a discussion, I cease seeing the face of one person, and start throwing myself against the wall of an invisible, impregnable, collective force. (p. 221)

            2.) Dominant Culture is always changing.

                        - “Being American means that you feel like you’re the norm,” one of my friends tells me, “and the Northeast is the norm that sets the norm.”  An ironically timed statement, since we’ve entered a period during which these very friends of mine will try to unwrap, unravel, and demolish every norm passed on to them from their parents and the culture at large; for a while, they will use their inheritance and their sense of entitlement for that most luxurious of rights, the right to turn down one’s privileges; for a while at least, they will refuse to inherit the earth. (p. 220)

            3.) Dominant Culture warps perception.

                        - “There’s a world out there; there are worlds.  There are shapes of sensibility incommensurate with each other, topographies of experience one cannot guess from within one’s own limited experience. (p. 222)

            4.) Unmarking during assimilation: The Dominant Culture’s featureless faces

                        - “I think my friends often suspect me of a perverse refusal to play along, an unaccountable desire to provoke and disturb their comfortable consensus.  I suspect that the consensus is trying to colonize me and rob me of my distinctive shape and flavor. (p. 220)

                        - “I have to learn how to live with them, find a common ground.  It is my fear that I have to yield too much of my own ground that fills me with such a passionate energy of rage. (p. 221)

Question:  My hypothesis, created during this week’s readings, is that the dominant culture is an entity designed to sustain and protect itself by staying out of the attention of its populace while maintaining a position to distort their perception of things.  Do you believe this to be accurate?  Does the dominant culture position itself in a manner that it can operate unseen, and alter our perceptions of other ‘worlds’?