Yankies

To be frank, it has taken me a long time to understand American culture – its norms and expectations.

As I’ve explained, for a long time, I experienced the world in a state of extreme anomie.

I have just made a statement that will be almost impossible for someone who is settled and established in a very historically powerful and continuous setting (USA and much of Australia)  to understand.   That perspective, in-formed by anomie (which is already not a good word, since it has largely limitedly sociological connotations), was mine for the longest time.   And people kept thinking I was putting it on, because surely it would be impossible not to have a social or metaphysical compass.  

So I would base my interactions with Americans online in terms, not of culture, but maybe closer to what YOU would call “the masculine” way of relating – which was through abstract conceptualisations.

I thought this ought to have worked, but there were all sorts of tendencies to send communication off course.  One is that one simply does NOT RELATE in any realm of possibility in a way that is actually devoid of social context.   People are always reading social meanings into things – even when those meanings have not been put there by me.

So I had a lot of interactions, where people kind of implicitly placed me in a certain identity category or a certain attitudinal category.   I only found this out later, when they began accusing me of somehow deceiving them, that they had gone ahead and made certain assumptions about my identity, which were based in American culture and experiences.    I’ve never been there.  I don’t know what all the US cultural categories are like, or even all the historical reasoning behind their existence.   But somehow certain people felt let down and betrayed that I had actually turned out to be myself.    Also, the fact is, they betrayed themselves by their less than rigorous thinking; by making incorrect assumptions about things I’d said (which included ignoring a great deal that did not fit the cultural category they had prepared for me).  

In time, I learned to see more clearly what the social dynamics in the US are like.   But, before this, I had to absorb a lot of strange projections – and, one is naked when in a state of anomie.    One may know who one is intellectually, but culturally one does not know who one is – that is where the lines of demarcation happen to be.   Crossing these lines would mean an error, but it’s unclear where these lines are, without first experiencing the multitude of errors.

Anyway, I eventually realized that a lot of what I had mistaken for intellectual thinking or raw perception was actually folksy thinking and raw categorization (stereotyping).

Such things make me wary.