Cultural Oppression
Every morning I have a pretty lengthy conversation with my mum about everything under the sun. Lately, our conversations have centered around making your own choices and throwing off the various yokes of oppression to which we have been subjected. I always tend to think about this kind of thing, but I have been considering this issue at length lately because I last week's conferences centered around globalisation.
In brief, globalisation has occurred due in large part to ease of travel/transportation, global media and advances in technology. A more and more global media and immigration has created common cultural tastes artistically, socially and politically. As nations we face cross-border environmental problems that require collective solutions and capital mobility - moving money across borders - has increased. All this means is that things like talking on the internet, cheaper travel and ease of shipping goods across borders has made us feel closer to people outside our national borders. Sometimes, and increasingly so, we feel closer to people living outside our national borders.
So, this morning my mum and I talked about the arbitrariness of cultural ties. In our view, and that of several academics I suppose, cultural beliefs and traditions are complete constructs. They don't exist in reality - meaning we have invented them so they are no real basis for association. Living in an immigrant country, like Canada, you see young people struggle between honouring their old cultural ties and allowing themselves to develop and express their new cultural identities. Sometimes, it can be overwhelmingly difficult to satisfy the expectations of your cultural group AND your own conception of what it takes for you to be happy.
Dating, relationships and marriage tend to really bring this out. In Montreal, I think we tend to see this especially with our Italian and Greek communities, who can be very insular. A lot of my friends, who are from or culturally tied to countries like France, Ireland, and Portugal, end up in passionnate and intense relationships with Italians or Greeks. These guys eventually feel pressure from their parents and the cultural community at large to break off the relationships and find a nice Italian, Catholic girl, or a nice Orthodox, Greek girl. From what I have seen, this creates a tumultuous and painful existence for these guys. You can see the stress on their faces as they struggle between casting off old, restrictive cultural expectations to pursue their own senses of who they are and taking the externally peaceful road and trying to find a culturally acceptable mate just to maintain good familial relations. When they take the second, externally peaceful road they end up wrought with inner turmoil. It's very sad to see - the forlorn looks on their faces as they wistfully observe the lives they feel they were meant to live from afar, the adjustments in their physical demeanors where they carry themselves more wearily, like battered and humiliated soldiers who once believed so strongly in the dream that they had been sold only to realize that they were bound by chains from the very start.
Meanwhile, the women feel stilted, arrested as they try rationally to explain away the irrationality of the decision. It's hard for some people who instinctively don't feel cultural pressure (those who are able to brush it aside and go forth forging their own paths) to understand when someone to whom they felt so connected succumb to constructed and artificial cultural rules. The question that always arises from this experience is - what are they afraid of, what is so threatening that they allow themselves to be controlled and fall into line in this way? What is holding them back?
The answer upon which we always seem to settle is fear, self-imposed fear, the imagination of what could happen if you turn off onto an untrodden path. Let me switch gears and express this another way. That I went to Yale is often a source of fascination for other people. There is nothing you learn at Yale that you don't learn at any other university. When I say this people can't believe me. They act as if I was given some secret mystical knowledge during my stint there. Believe me, there are no secret mathematical formulas that they give out in your acceptance package. They say - well, you got it, it's hard to get it, how did you get in? I applied, they accepted me. No special effort was made other than to ask Yale for the application, fill it out, get reference letters, pay the application fee, and send it back. That's it. What I then tell them is, 95% of the people who don't get into Yale weren't rejected, they just never applied. If you don't apply, you can't get in. What stops perfectly smart people from applying? Fear - the fear that they will be rejected from such a "hallowed" institution. It's the same thing with relationships - people fail at them largely because they are afraid to go after what they really want. They settle for what looks good on the surface so that other people won't think that they have failed? But, when does failure hurt the most - when other people think you've failed but you personally feel that you've succeeded? Or, when other people think you're a success but inside you know you're a fraud because you've failed yourself based upon your own expectations, dreams and ideals?
I think I'll leave you with that for now. Kisses.
In brief, globalisation has occurred due in large part to ease of travel/transportation, global media and advances in technology. A more and more global media and immigration has created common cultural tastes artistically, socially and politically. As nations we face cross-border environmental problems that require collective solutions and capital mobility - moving money across borders - has increased. All this means is that things like talking on the internet, cheaper travel and ease of shipping goods across borders has made us feel closer to people outside our national borders. Sometimes, and increasingly so, we feel closer to people living outside our national borders.
So, this morning my mum and I talked about the arbitrariness of cultural ties. In our view, and that of several academics I suppose, cultural beliefs and traditions are complete constructs. They don't exist in reality - meaning we have invented them so they are no real basis for association. Living in an immigrant country, like Canada, you see young people struggle between honouring their old cultural ties and allowing themselves to develop and express their new cultural identities. Sometimes, it can be overwhelmingly difficult to satisfy the expectations of your cultural group AND your own conception of what it takes for you to be happy.
Dating, relationships and marriage tend to really bring this out. In Montreal, I think we tend to see this especially with our Italian and Greek communities, who can be very insular. A lot of my friends, who are from or culturally tied to countries like France, Ireland, and Portugal, end up in passionnate and intense relationships with Italians or Greeks. These guys eventually feel pressure from their parents and the cultural community at large to break off the relationships and find a nice Italian, Catholic girl, or a nice Orthodox, Greek girl. From what I have seen, this creates a tumultuous and painful existence for these guys. You can see the stress on their faces as they struggle between casting off old, restrictive cultural expectations to pursue their own senses of who they are and taking the externally peaceful road and trying to find a culturally acceptable mate just to maintain good familial relations. When they take the second, externally peaceful road they end up wrought with inner turmoil. It's very sad to see - the forlorn looks on their faces as they wistfully observe the lives they feel they were meant to live from afar, the adjustments in their physical demeanors where they carry themselves more wearily, like battered and humiliated soldiers who once believed so strongly in the dream that they had been sold only to realize that they were bound by chains from the very start.
Meanwhile, the women feel stilted, arrested as they try rationally to explain away the irrationality of the decision. It's hard for some people who instinctively don't feel cultural pressure (those who are able to brush it aside and go forth forging their own paths) to understand when someone to whom they felt so connected succumb to constructed and artificial cultural rules. The question that always arises from this experience is - what are they afraid of, what is so threatening that they allow themselves to be controlled and fall into line in this way? What is holding them back?
The answer upon which we always seem to settle is fear, self-imposed fear, the imagination of what could happen if you turn off onto an untrodden path. Let me switch gears and express this another way. That I went to Yale is often a source of fascination for other people. There is nothing you learn at Yale that you don't learn at any other university. When I say this people can't believe me. They act as if I was given some secret mystical knowledge during my stint there. Believe me, there are no secret mathematical formulas that they give out in your acceptance package. They say - well, you got it, it's hard to get it, how did you get in? I applied, they accepted me. No special effort was made other than to ask Yale for the application, fill it out, get reference letters, pay the application fee, and send it back. That's it. What I then tell them is, 95% of the people who don't get into Yale weren't rejected, they just never applied. If you don't apply, you can't get in. What stops perfectly smart people from applying? Fear - the fear that they will be rejected from such a "hallowed" institution. It's the same thing with relationships - people fail at them largely because they are afraid to go after what they really want. They settle for what looks good on the surface so that other people won't think that they have failed? But, when does failure hurt the most - when other people think you've failed but you personally feel that you've succeeded? Or, when other people think you're a success but inside you know you're a fraud because you've failed yourself based upon your own expectations, dreams and ideals?
I think I'll leave you with that for now. Kisses.
posted by Laurelle St. Laurent at 1:14 p.m.
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