I moved from a whitebread suburb to a cosmopolitan university in New York, and I remember a street festival there where I came upon an all-male, all-black band led by a redheaded Hispanic woman playing "Hava Nagila" on the steel drums. (A heck of a performance, btw.) It personified everything I loved about my new home.
A lot of questions arise about "loving" a culture or aspects of a culture. I've been told I romanticize NYC, and certainly when I return there for a few days I luxuriate in all the things I love about it and ignore the things I don't. I'm not unaware of them, though.
If you fall in love with some aspect of a culture, and find it charming, or even "exotic" (though what is exotic, except "different, with shiny gloss") -- are you wrong? Yes, the people who grew up in a certain culture will not find its customs or foods exotic, and if you're trying to reproduce their mindset, you've missed. But are you wrong in your own feelings? Perhaps growing up inside a culture and taking its customs so much for granted that you're blind to them and how they compare to others -- perhaps that's the real lack of insight. Maybe the enthusiastic outsider is closer to the mark.
I'm conscious of the different "flavors" of other cultures, as I am their accents, but when it comes to standard American -- the sort of thing you hear from a newscaster -- it comes across to me as no accent, because I can't hear it as anything but normal. This just means that I can't judge how harsh or nasal or -- whatever -- an American accent sounds. Probably that would change if I spent long enough somewhere else. But if someone from another country can hear what I can't, and happens to like it -- well, it may seem funny to me because they're excited about something I take for granted, but why am I right and them wrong?
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A lot of questions arise about "loving" a culture or aspects of a culture. I've been told I romanticize NYC, and certainly when I return there for a few days I luxuriate in all the things I love about it and ignore the things I don't. I'm not unaware of them, though.
If you fall in love with some aspect of a culture, and find it charming, or even "exotic" (though what is exotic, except "different, with shiny gloss") -- are you wrong? Yes, the people who grew up in a certain culture will not find its customs or foods exotic, and if you're trying to reproduce their mindset, you've missed. But are you wrong in your own feelings? Perhaps growing up inside a culture and taking its customs so much for granted that you're blind to them and how they compare to others -- perhaps that's the real lack of insight. Maybe the enthusiastic outsider is closer to the mark.
I'm conscious of the different "flavors" of other cultures, as I am their accents, but when it comes to standard American -- the sort of thing you hear from a newscaster -- it comes across to me as no accent, because I can't hear it as anything but normal. This just means that I can't judge how harsh or nasal or -- whatever -- an American accent sounds. Probably that would change if I spent long enough somewhere else. But if someone from another country can hear what I can't, and happens to like it -- well, it may seem funny to me because they're excited about something I take for granted, but why am I right and them wrong?