Page 101 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Identity, Lifestyle, and Subculture 85

shop, a token of a lifestyle that again might be more countercultural in that
it suggests the presence of people who enjoy a European conception of the
pleasures of life. The conservative Protestants of Madison would probably
be less inclined to be sybarites, people who take pleasure in physical taste,
because their Protestant religion encourages self - control as a sign of virtue.
You would be more likely to see a Catholic church in Guilford because
more working - class Irish - and Italian - descended people would live there.
They tend to be middle as opposed to upper class and would be found in
fewer numbers in the much more expensive Madison, where houses values
are decidedly higher because there is more money bidding for them.
Housing prices help to keep the population of the town relatively homo-
geneous. Middle - class Irish people cannot afford to live there.
Ethnic terms are often applied to certain cultures, and that is true of
Madison, where the people who cluster there are often characterized as
WASPs , or White Anglo - Saxon Protestants. This social group is the long-
est - standing European descended ethnic group in the US. For a long time,
their culture was equated with “ American ” culture. Their religious, social,
economic, and political beliefs and assumptions formed an ideological
core, reinforced through government institutions and social policies, that
remained in place in the US for several centuries. Those beliefs were linked
to a particular lifestyle and they fostered particular kinds of identities –
ways of feeling, thinking, speaking, and behaving. WASPs, when they were
ascendant, believed that their religion was superior to all others, and they
sought therefore to “ convert ” others to Protestant Christianity. One could
say they were arrogant and insensitive to the diversity of beliefs. But this
arrogance had its humorous side. When in 1876, they sponsored an inter-
national gathering of religions (with the hidden agenda of converting them
all to Protestantism), the Protestant ministers were surprised to be con-
fronted with equally zealous attempts to convert them to the one right
religion, which of course was Hinduism.
The same sense of superiority or arrogance appeared in other dimen-
sions of WASP culture. They looked down on other ethnic groups who
were not as economically successful because they had less inherited wealth
or who came to America with little other than their ability to labor. WASPs
were notoriously defensive of property (a WASP friend once remarked that
the WASP drug of choice was real estate). This attitude made them reluc-
tant to agree to measures that would assure economic fairness in America;
they supported the violent suppression of labor unions, for example, in the
nineteenth century and fought to make sure their property was not taken