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cultural appreciation
Apr. 11th, 2023 09:45 amLittle Springtime is just starting a masters program in early modern Japanese literature at Tokyo University. It means she’s in the Kokubungaku-bu—the National Literature Department—because of course in Japan, Japanese literature is the national literature. She was remarking ruefully to us that the department can attract right-wingers. Not solely, of course! But people with a nationalist stripe can be all about glorious literary heritage, etc. Whereas Little Springtime, who isn’t Japanese, loves Japanese literature without any nationalism or cultural pride whatsoever. (She was born there, though, and grew up with lots of things Japanese, so she’s not exactly in the position of the hypothetical person in paragraph 3 below. But real people are always different from hypothetical people.)
Probably all of us have some part of our heritage (broadly construed) that we love just because! Just because we enjoy the meal, the song, the game, the season, the process—whatever the things are that we love. And there’s no attendant and that makes me better than you or and that’s why my culture is best. But for some people, there can be. When people see the world as composed of competing teams, then when Own Team has something pleasing or pride inspiring, it’s very easy to move to See? See? See how great my team is? Better than those other second-rate teams.
Whereas, when you fall in love with something you encounter from outside your own milieu, that doesn’t happen. On the contrary, instead of saying, “and that’s why my culture is best,” you’re quite likely to say, “Wow, this other culture is really cool; I love this aspect of this other culture.” People being people, there are ways they can take this in unpleasant directions, but the beginning seed is an admiration of something different, of something not-you.
Granting that there are things in life that individuals and cultures keep private and don’t share, I am a big, big fan of enthusiastically sharing the things about your heritage and traditions that you enjoy, so that people who didn’t grow up with them can enjoy them too. And equally, I’m a big, big fan of enthusiastically learning about and enjoying traditions you didn’t grow up with.
Probably all of us have some part of our heritage (broadly construed) that we love just because! Just because we enjoy the meal, the song, the game, the season, the process—whatever the things are that we love. And there’s no attendant and that makes me better than you or and that’s why my culture is best. But for some people, there can be. When people see the world as composed of competing teams, then when Own Team has something pleasing or pride inspiring, it’s very easy to move to See? See? See how great my team is? Better than those other second-rate teams.
Whereas, when you fall in love with something you encounter from outside your own milieu, that doesn’t happen. On the contrary, instead of saying, “and that’s why my culture is best,” you’re quite likely to say, “Wow, this other culture is really cool; I love this aspect of this other culture.” People being people, there are ways they can take this in unpleasant directions, but the beginning seed is an admiration of something different, of something not-you.
Granting that there are things in life that individuals and cultures keep private and don’t share, I am a big, big fan of enthusiastically sharing the things about your heritage and traditions that you enjoy, so that people who didn’t grow up with them can enjoy them too. And equally, I’m a big, big fan of enthusiastically learning about and enjoying traditions you didn’t grow up with.
