"A supposedly Western country", somebody is bound to be muttering under his breath as he reads this. Yes, only a supposedly Western country, and I'm frequently amazed at this amazement that comes from people who seem to believe that if one lives in the United States long enough, that one will tend to spontaneously mutate into an Anglo-Saxon, and that if one doesn't, that this is only because one is being difficult about the whole affair. The reality is that the culture one finds here is here because those who came here brought its beginnings with them, and so while asserting that ethnicity is irrelevant in understanding culture may be tres politically correct, the assertion is utter nonsense. In Chicago, only about 40% of the population is "white", "white" being defined so loosely that had Anwar Sadat grown up here, he would have qualified; those 40% are not all purely European, and in many cases, not even partially. Implicit superstitions about the psychic transmission of culture notwithstanding ("Mabel, they'll understand English if you speak it slowly and loudly enough"), this is going to affect the culture that arises, and the Westernness of any of this is highly debatable. Africa is part of what we all are here, because it is part of what many of our neighbors are, and culture will diffuse through a community, even one in which somebody's mostly Sephardic mother was expected to keep a straight face as she, herself, was referred to as a "European". Ahem.

But I digress. The reality is that, however poorly this may fit in with the barely concealed nativist fixations of a few self-styled "progressives", that we do not live in an Anglo-Saxon or even a truly "Western" culture, any more than those living in Latin America do, but in an assortment of blended cultures that combine aspects of those of many civilizations, and that in studying that which is non-western, we get in touch with a part of ourselves. Conversely, as we study it, the point of view we bring to it will not always be as alien a point of view as some would assume it to be. [ continue ]