On page 271 of Patterns of Culture, Benedict claims that "No society has yet attempted a self-conscious direction of the process by which its new normalities are created in the next generation." Immediately upon reading this an exception came to mind that is glaring because I have witnessed it happen with a great degree of amazement in my own lifetime--that is the "new normality" associated with NOT smoking. After reading Benedict's (in my opinion) highly objective and egalitarian cultural treatise, I do not doubt at the moment of her writing that there existed no such obviously concerted effort by a culture to eradicate an activity deeply embedded within its accepted cultural standards. Our generation's complete reversal of attitudes and practices regarding tobacco usage has tampered with some very deep-seated aspects of our current cultural make-up--our fierce belief in the freedom of personal choice, our easy brand of hedonism, our individualism, our self-image as free-agents of our own destiny. Yet in twenty-five years (and I speak from personal history) I have evolved from being an accepted (even admired) chain-smoking, 3-pack a day professional woman to being a social pariah(if I indeed still smoked.) When I started smoking in my mid-teens in the sixties, I was cool and bohemian--smoking was an accepted rite-of-passage. In the mid-eighties, I could walk down the street or into a restaurant in my dress attire with a cigarette in my hand and exemplify the norm, not the exception. As for now?--just admitting this personal example as a case study causes me to view myself in negative light and my daughters (for whom I quit smoking) are almost belligerently anti-smoking. The woman--worse yet,the mother--I described above would be an anathema to them. While our culture still values personal choice, individualism, a healthy dose of hedonism--we HAVE created a new normality (one that involves plasticity, one that embraces new and evolving priorities in our cultural array)which centers on personal health as a desired construct and consciousness of an individual's affect on the health and comfort of others. Maybe I simplify, but so it seems to me!
Ruth
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Ah-a fabulous example that would not have occurred to me. Does this still fit with Benedict's larger concept of "patterns"? The activity does not matter as much as the drive--or the meaning of it in terms of cultural configuration. Are you suggesting that the cultural configuration has not changed? When then accounts for the new normal? Can Benedict's argument help--or is she interested in something else?
ReplyDeletePerhaps your example also suggests a distinction between the concept of culture in early twentieth century American and early twenty first century.