Page 103 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Identity, Lifestyle, and Subculture 87

one particular interest. The culture and the culture ’ s rules especially sup-
posedly apply to all equally. But that is only true of very homogeneous
cultures such as Japan, where one ethnic group, isolated from mixture on

an island can end up identified with the nation ’ s entire culture (to the great
detriment of ethnic minorities such as Koreans). In America, the main-
stream or dominant culture for a long time was WASP culture; they formed
a homogeneous group that controlled the nation ’ s economy and its politi-
cal life. But there were always interlopers coming through the open door
(so that WASPs become associated with closing the door to immigration
over time). Irish political radicals, chased out of Ireland by the English after
a failed revolt against English colonization in the late eighteenth century,

were one of the first to challenge WASP cultural authority. They spoke in
ways that WASPs felt were inappropriate, for one thing, using polemic
instead of genteel, self - controlled speech in journalism, and they proposed
modifications to the settled social order that were disturbing of the idea

that virtue and property ownership were linked naturally to one another.

But the identification of a particular social group ’ s culture with the entirety
of American culture (so that that group ’ s norms became everyone ’ s norms
in the form of such things as rules of etiquette that distinguished civilized
people from ill - mannered people, usually along class lines) endured into
the twentieth century. All other ethnic or class cultures were considered
subordinate to the WASP ideal of genteel speech, proper behavior, and
good manners.
The word subculture connotes a culture within a larger mainstream
culture. With time, WASPs have become a subculture in America because
the mainstream has expanded to include the cultural preferences of many
other social groups, and to a degree, WASPs always were a subculture that
managed through sheer social status to make their particular worldview
dominant and universal, something that seemed to apply to everyone
in American society. The inappropriateness of that assumption became
especially clear when Native Americans were asked in the late nineteenth
century (by a law called the Dawes Act) to give up their own more com-
munitarian culture and to adopt the lifestyle and the cultural norms of the
WASP elite; they were forbidden to wander and hunt and were given farms
and tools and told to become “ striving individuals ” who would succeed
by learning the WASP virtues of industriousness, thrift, and moral self -
control. The experiment failed because WASPs forgot that the cultural
inheritance they relied on to supply them with those virtues from outside
was not present in Indian life. WASPs made the mistake of assuming their