Addendum 2024

I

last updated this text in 2018. A year later the Corona virus struck the world. Since that time cultural developments around the globe have taken a schizophrenic turn. Some of this was the fruition of long-term events whose consequences were foreseeable, at least in retrospect, but most probably unavoidable. Some of it is, well, just crazy.

So, what's new?

Modern patterns of human migration have their roots in the period following World War Two; the main currents were channeled by the movement of literally hundreds of millions of people from Africa, Asia and South America to Europe and North America (30 million from India alone). This inevitably led to cultural shifts, particularly after these new arrivals fostered second and third generations in the countries to which they migrated. The one exception to this massive shift of humanity was Israel, whose population more than doubled in size frrom the opposite direction, with the influx of new citizens from Europe to Asia.

Unlike previous waves of immigration where absorption and assimilation was the rule, these new migrants arrived with the intention of changing the culture of their new country of residence to conform more closely to their countries of origin. Ultra-religious citizens of Israel frequently do not speak Hebrew, only Yiddish, as they did in the Diaspora of Russia and Poland. 35 million Americans speak Spanish on a daily basis more than they do English, as they did back home in Colombia and Mexico. French is the primarily language in France for a little less that 88% of the population; 3 million of them (5% of the population) speak Arabic as a mother tongue, and Arabs make up 5% of the population of Sweden.

The host countries accepted their new citizens because of ideology, as in the case of the United States, or as a result of political compromises made during the colonial era, as is the case in Europe. But whatever the reasons, this influx of massive numbers of new residents from foreign cultures inevitably led to violent clashes, as they did in the 19th century with the immigration of Catholics to the United States, and these clashes have continued now for almost three quarters of a century.

This is not new, but what has characterized the years since 2018 is the dominant role that these new cultures are beginning to play in their adopted countries. While they were peripheral in the closing decades of the twentieth century, they have become prominent in the early years of the present century. This follows the transfer of power from the first generation, whose lives were ruled by the need to find a place to live and a source of income therefore reducing their role in the public sector, to the second generation, who enjoy the fruits of the labor of their parents and h so have more time to express their voice publicly.

Sometimes these cultural shifts present themselves in seemingly innocuous developments, like the fact that the most common meal in England is now curry, but also frequently in more political confrontations, such as the struggle of Middle Eastern youth in the United States to change the traditional policy of that country toward Israel.

Whether these trends continue and result in major cultural changes or whether they revert to the traditional patterns of absorption and assimilation has yet to be determined, but there is no doubt that their existence has ushered in a world-wide era of uncertainty and anxiety, more than we have seen since the days preceding World War Two. It is a sword with two edges; on the one hand the new arrivals are making their demands known and on the other hand there is increasing antagonism to their presence from the people who were already there before they came. In the past six years this has led to much more extreme forms of both anti-Semitism and anti-immigration activities, and even violence.

Part of the rationale for Brexit was the influx of workers from Eastern Europe, people who it claimed took jobs in Scotland and England therefore depriving those traditional communities of the ability to move ahead economically. When I visited Scotland in 2023 the joke there was that the native language was now Polish, but the antagonism toward foreign workers was real, and the stories of people stopped and prevented from crossing the English Channel were in every newspaper.

The same can be said of the United States toward people crossing the border from Mexico, as well as Muslims from every nation, a product of the attack on the twin towers in 2001. It has awakened anti-immigrant angst as whole in the United States. In 2023, The Anti Defamation league published the following:

In 2022, ADL tabulated 3,697 anti-Semitic incidents throughout the United States. This is a 36% increase from the 2,717 incidents tabulated in 2021 and the highest number on record since ADL began tracking anti-Semitic incidents in 1979. This is the third time in the past five years that the year-end total has been the highest number ever recorded.

The first victim to this new age of anxiety is toleration, the hallmark of the treaty of Westphalia that governed relations between nations from 1648 until now with its famous motto 'cujo regio ergo religio' (whoever the ruler, hence the religion). The essential idea of the treaty was that relationships should be based on respect, not kinship or friendship – we may not like them because they are different from us but we respect their sovereignty over their land and their right to live as they wish (because if we don't there will be constant war).

This seems or be evaporating like morning mist in the presence of aggressive movements (many of them pan-national) that claim that everyone must be like them. Whether it is radical Islam or the western democracies attempt to remake the world in their image or the fundamental Christian campaign to root out homosexuality with conversion therapy and stamp out any woman's right to have an abortion no matter her own traditions or situation, the idea that we may not like them but we can tolerate them seems these days to be the slogan of a bygone age. It is important to note that these movements are not by and large public policies of nations but rather private opinions of organized groups of people who do not directly set national policy but certainly influence it.

Trade barriers have brome harsher in the last few years, the most dramatic expression being the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. More trade sanctions are being employed, whether it is Europe against Iran or NGOs boycotting products from Israel. We not only don't like them, we won't buy from them.

Let's be clear – the jury is still out. Whether the attempts to bring the people of the world closer together through agencies such as the United Nations and NATO or the various trade agreements that still abound have all had their day and we are sliding backward toward division and alienation spiced with Xenophobia is too soon to tell, but there are those walls – one between the United States and Mexico, another between Israel and the Palestinian Union, and one that divides the island of Cyprus in half, among others. The symbolism is heavy. The memories of the Berlin wall coming down amid the cheers of thousands of people almost forty years now seems like a distant dream.

More nations in the last few years show a readiness to exert their influence by force rather than by persuasion. Sudan, Turkey, China and Syria, among others, use such measures against their own populations, and Russia and the Hamas leadership in Gaza determined that violent aggression was the best way to deal with their neighbors. As in all wars of any kind anywhere and at anytime all the belligerents will find justification for pursuing violent means to achieve their objectives but at the end of the day war is just murder, whoever does it to whom.

Quite clearly the glue that held the world together following World War Two, that collection of alliances and treaties that bound both the victors and the vanquished together, is being stretched to a breaking point. The hegemony of the United States is now in question, and many predict that global leadership will shift from the west to the east, to China and possibly India, the two most populous nations on the planet where economic prosperity has fueled the growth of consumers more than anywhere else on the planet in the last few years.

There is a growing disillusionment with democracy that has been expressed in the last few years by the proliferation of totalitarian regimes around the globe, on every continent save North America. It is not a question of ideology but rather of effectiveness. Most people assumed that democracy would bring forth better leadership and a more effective way of making decisions that benefitted the majority, yet this has not been the case for the past few years. The gridlock in the United States government between opposing parties that has existed for over a decade now has resulted in the most ineffective Congress in more than a century. The paralysis of the government in the UK paved the way for Brexit. Democracy in Russia is an open joke. People in Israel were out in the streets protesting their inadequacy of their own government long before the massacre that occurred there on October 7.

In the face of this democratic frustration many in the world are raising the possibility that another form of government might bring better results; that maybe turning over the keys to one man or one party to run everything might be preferable to this constant bickering. This is happening in Europe and South America right now and the Americans are flirting with it.

Again, there are more questions than answers about this; that's the characteristic that defines this age of uncertainty and anxiety. People don't like what the world has become following the pandemic, but there are as yet no clear answers where we should be going or who should take us there.

The Corona virus ushered in the first rise in world poverty in more than a generation. There are 650 million people in the world living in extreme poverty today, a five per cent decrease from when this book was first written. The UN has already reported that they will miss their goal of eradicating world poverty by 2030, but the movement is in the right direction in spite of the Corona glitch.

In his book Sapiens; A brief History of Mankind, Yuval Harari wrote that humanity had more or less solved the three great problems that had confronted it over the ages – famine, plague and war. The last six years have proved him wrong on all but the possibility of famine. Maybe people won’t starve to death anymore, but plague and war have been our almost constant companions for the last six years.

People still travel, but only 4% of the global population did so in 2018. One and a half billion people travelled in 2019, but this plummeted to less than 400 million the following year. It has risen since then, but has still not reached pre-pandemic levels. 80% of the global population has yet to board an airplane. We are still a long way from one world...and yet

In 2016 the number of cell phone subscriptions in the world surpassed the number of people on the planet for the first time. By the middle of 2022 there were more than 8.5 billion cell phones in operation. In contrast to its previous incarnation, the telephone, cell phones not only transmit and receive calls they provide information from a wide variety of sources, in fact every source of information on the planet that has been somehow recorded. You can now access through your smart phone classic movies and vacation videos, birthday greetings and presidential addresses, pornography and cooking classes.

This is the home of social media, and social media has done more than anything else to diversify information. Until only thirty years ago only a handful of people had access to media that would connect them with everyone on the globe; today that access is ubiquitous – anyone can talk to anyone else no matter whom they are or where they are. Before social media if you listened to the news or watched it you might be bombarded by views and opinions that contrasted sharply with your own, but they were points of view which might make you think twice about your own opinions or widen your horizons and increase your tolerance for people that think differently than you. Since the advent of social media you are now able to listen to and watch only those people with whom you agree and the Hegelian formula of thesis - antithesis – synthesis, the process that led to insight and new discoveries, has been disrupted.

By January, 2024, more than 5 billion people in the world used social media, 62% of the planets population. In places where they don't know where their next meal is coming from nonetheless everyone owns a cell phone. The typical social media user accesses on average 6.7 different platforms every month and spends an average of two hours 23 minutes a day doing so, more than 15% of their waking hours. In January of 2024 there were fifteen social media platforms that each had more than 400 million active users.

When you listen to people who only think like you do you become convinced that you are right, first of all because so many others share your point of view and second because nobody presents you with facts or attitudes that conflict with your own so you are free to exaggerate your version of things without interruption, something that is not only inaccurate but also dangerous. Like Lord Acton said, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That is why people of contrasting views no longer debate; as my nephew rightly points out they just stand and shout at each other without any attempt to engage in dialogue. Just look at the demonstrations on the streets of any major city in any country. It makes no difference if it is left or right, progressive or conservative. People are no longer interested in learning what the other side thinks but rather in forcing what they think on the other side and frequently over their objections. Our intolerance of views that differ from our own makes us weaker, and that is a trend that dominates this era of anxiety and uncertainty. That's the legacy of social media.

...One day you leave your village to hunt, alone in the jungle. As you are walking down a trail you see in the distance another human, but a stranger, someone not from your village.

You are suspicious immediately and clutch the bow you have slung over your shoulder slowly with your left hand, making sure your arrows are nearby and dry. In this situation the first thing you want to do is assess the level of threat in the in the immediate environment, in order to determine if you should approach or run away – fight or flee.

On a whim, almost without thinking, you raise your right hand in the air to show the stranger that you are not grasping your bow. Slowly the stranger, twenty yards away, copies your gesture. With your hand in the air you hesitantly approach, and soon after the stranger does the same. The two of you meet in the clearing and' without thinking, maybe as a gesture of relief, you offer the stranger your hand. He takes your hand in his and shakes it.

You have created a culture.

These days the path between the villages is a little narrower and a little more dangerous than it was when I first wrote this book, almost a decade ago. When you walk through the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia it is hard to imagine that the thriving Khmer empire that was once there, managing an intricate network of meticulously engineered canals and fields stretching throughout Southeast Asia. They seem to have disappeared, and when I asked our guide where they went he just shrugged his shoulders.

Maybe we are destined like them to have the jungle cover up the trail we have labored for thousands of years to clear and leave only our ruins behind. Maybe one day a more successful group of beings will find and when they excavate all we have done they will scratch their heads (if they have heads) and ask each other 'what the hell happened to them?'

Time will tell.

Only time will tell.

Hello there everyone, I'm looking to get a new piercing and I am wondering whether the vertical labret piercing (a silver ring on the middle of the bottom lip) may be perceived as cultural appropriation by native Inuit or descendants of atzek or mayan people, on a white guy like me.

What do you think?

hello! i just want to share that the marx madness form has been officially released for 2024. please fill out the form by selecting as many or as little people who you have been influenced by politically. if there is someone you have been influenced by who has not been included, please let me know and their inclusion will be heavily considered.

*note—almost everyone listed can fit into multiple of the categories listed, if you recommend a switch that will be heavily considered for next year

the results will be announced on march 17th, with for the first time a projection to be announced on march 3rd on the twitter account @transjewtalian. if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to let me know. i would really appreciate if as many people filled out the form as possible

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKezALN66JruQBDrYClavD-ZZtwdLyKrBIlHw0lEQSe_Gh0Q/viewform?usp=sf_link

Hi, if any highschoolers have a chance, it would be much appreciated if you could complete this really short anonymous survey: https://forms.gle/m7Bt6tGwjD8PUUNY8. This is for me and my team to write a paper on the subject. Thanks again!

I'm turning 18 in March and I was coming up with ideas for my birthday. I love Mexican inspired dishes so my best friend who is hispanic suggested doing a Mexican cuisine themed potluck. I am nervous because Im worried about cultural appropriation. We got a piñata, pin the tail on the donkey, and Im planning on making mock-tails and playing cards. My friends are each bringing a dish and my mom is making enchiladas. Only 2/8 of us are hispanic. The rest of us are white or black. Is all of this okay?

Hello, we are a group of psychology researchers from the University of Kent, UK. It would be a huge help if anyone from any background who is interested would fill out our quick survey (18+ years old only) about your views of politics, society, and more.

Fill out the survey here: https://universityofkent.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8ICkX7mBre5IGpM

We are posting here because we hope to collect responses from a wide range of political perspectives and backgrounds. Please let us know if you would like a summary of your responses in comparison to others once the data collection is complete.

The survey takes 15-30 minutes to complete, and we are happy to respond to any queries or questions. Please private message us to avoid giving away the point of the study to others.

Thanks for your time.

Edit: The survey is now closed! Thank you very much for your time, we will be sure to post the results up here when they're ready.

I would need your help; I am conducting a methodological research on the topic “Defining masculinity through lenses of Be Manly movement.

My idea is to get 3 or more individual interviews on the views of current situation that is happening in Croatia with the Be Manly movement being on the rise.

Be Manly movement is a an ultra conservative Catholic movement that is happening as opposed to other feminist movements. Croatia, as an Catholic country with the Church coming between the country’s politics, has become one of the most problematic countries for expressing your own identity.

I will copy here my questions and you can try to answer atleast some of them- include your gender/non-binary,age,and country when answering!

Thank you in advance! 🫶🏻💫🌺 Good luck!

1. Considering the Catholic community and Be Manly movement, how would you say, those men see themselves considering their masculinity?
2. Do you think their finding of their “lost“ authority in patriarchal households and wish to make women more modest, comes from their own fragility marked by trying to reach the unexistent ideal?
3. Be Manly Movement claims to be the solution of discovering men their “deeper masculinities“ ; like how to be a good family man and how to find yourself in merely fatherhood terms. What do you think about those claims; do you think that fatherhood should be considered as a “deep masculinity“ or a norm in the terms of affection and kindness? Can you recognize the patterns of affection and nurturing being coded as seconded even in the terms of raising your own children?
4. By this Catholic ideology, the idea of man being tough and a strong leader is being encouraged; do you think there is some other way in which we can provide more fluidity in the term “masculinity”?

On the first Saturday of every month, groups of men kneel in the main squares of many cities across Croatia to “pray for women’s chastity” and a “strong masculine authority in family settings.” This ultraconservative Catholic masculinist movement began in Poland and was later imported into Croatia by influential Polish groups such as Ordo Iuris, which was among the mobilizing forces behind the 2021 total abortion ban in Poland. Pro-masculinist demonstrations in Croatia have been met with female resistance: for instance, the artist Arijana Lekić-Fridrih dedicated a performance to femicide victims, and Ženska mreža Hrvatske (Women’s Network Croatia) organized counterdemonstrations.

Without telling me your ethnicity/culture tell me your favorite artist of the same background as you?

I live in the United States and constantly here people say that white Americans don’t “have any culture” is this true or not? I am not white at all but I’ve always been curious what exactly is there culture? I’m not saying they don’t have any but I am curious what they consider there own culture? I’ve never been looking into to because it’s not my place to say anything because it’s not my culture but what do you think? I wanna hear someone’s perspective on this.

Hi! I found a motorcycle helmet i like a lot that is dreamcatcher theme. I want to be sensitive to cultural appropriation. A little about me: On my dad's side we are English and Cherokee. There is a very old family graveyard that is a mix of English and Cherokee traditional graves. Word is that one of the graves has a dead language on it that nobody knows anymore, it's pretty cool and even though nobody has been buried there since 1902 I might see if I can be buried there. I don't have details of what the Cherokee graves are like... I don't know when the earliest graves from the graveyard are from but I know it was used through the 1800s. I've been told there are "piles of rocks" involved so I'm thinking burial mounds?

Also, one of my ancestors was found as a little Cherokee girl in the woods and made a slave, my family freed her and she married into my family and is like my great great grandmother or something and her English name was actually the same as mine. However, the last few generations of my family are predominately white, but we have very dark hair and eyes from the Cherokee. But on paper I'm white. I'm white-passing. We lost all of our Cherokee culture and I think it's very sad. I'd love to reconnect with Cherokee people and culture.

My question: I found this motorcycle helmet I like and it has feathers and a dreamcatcher. I just really like the design. From my reading Cherokee did use dreamcatchers. I want to respect Native American culture, and am a little wary that wearing this might be cultural appropriation. Opinions?

I want to invite my friends that are muslim over for dinner, and I would make the meal halal, but I know the laws pertaining to food are different than what i might know, so i was wondering what all to avoid or watch out for. My husband and i are not muslim and we drink occasionally, would i need to put the alcohol somewhere hidden? would i need to cleanse my kitchen of haram ingredients? they have explained a few things, and i have done some research, but i want to make sure i don't offend them or make a meal they can't eat and i cant find any information on set customs.

pls disregard spelling and grammar, i am on a phone and struggling to type

As the title suggests I am looking for a model, that addresses the criticism of Hofstedes model of cultural dimensions, that still enables the possibility of comparing cultures.

Is there such a model or is the criticism inherently linked with the urge to compare?

I thought this would be a good place to ask this (white women for context). I recently got brain surgery due to cancer and lost a decent amount of my hair. I also had to have a thin band of my head shaved where a headband would go. Due to this I have all different length hairs growing out of my head (I have extremely long, relatively straight hair other than the regrowth). I want to start sleeping in a silk bonnet (I already have silk pillowcases) to help protect my hair and allow it to grow back. However, I go to the gym multiple times a week and have notice that the combination of sweating and having my hair up has resulted in a significant amount of hair loss. I have tried a bun and find the same issue. The one thing that seems to help is tucking my hair into a hat but it only stays with a beanie and that makes my head incredibly sweaty. I feel like some sort of silk head wrap is the solution but I also feel like all of those would be cultural appropriation in some way? I still have majority of my hair so it is not obvious from afar that I have cancer but wearing my hair up causing more hair loss and having it down while working out isn’t a good option for me due to its length. Does anyone have any advice or solutions?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvRgyF-M-io&t=817s

If this is a wrong subreddit, let me know and I will delete it. If you know any subreddit I should go to, please let me know.

I'm writing a paper on the differences between the cultural values of Estonia and the USA and found quite an interesting remark. The values of both countries are nearly the same, with some variability.

The values for USA are taken from the book "Culture, Leadership, and Organisations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Cultures" (2004) and for Estonia, the data is from a 2003 GLOBE project.

Does anyone know why these findings are so similar? I don't know about the current values and practices, however, they have certainly changed, but no idea how much different they are now.

Below are graphs of my findings, left is cultural values and right is cultural practices. The orange is USA and the blue line is Estonia.

Edit: Here's the link to pictures - https://imgur.com/a/Nv4njxP

cultural Integration and cultural assimilation. People who leave their country to go abroad, if they change their mindset. Do we consider it the former or the latter

Based on a documentary review of primary and secondary sources, this chapter addresses the localisation strategy developed by Netflix in its first decade of implementation in Latin American countries, which has included the opening of subsidiaries in the region’s main audiovisual markets (Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina) and the production of its own content in partnership with local companies in order to feed the segment of titles labelled ‘originals’. To this end, the different fronts of action (agreements with other companies, characteristics of the content offer, in-house production of content, etc.) in which the transnational company has played a leading role are addressed. This chapter pays special attention to the Mexican and Brazilian markets in terms of in-house content production and to the debates surrounding the regulation of the VoD services market. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374884538\_Netflix's\_First\_Decade\_of\_Presence\_in\_Latin\_America

In my daughter's class, there is a family who refuses to celebrate any holidays, including birthdays. The only dietary restrictions they seem to have is eating pork. This is cultural, not religious. They say they do not need a valid US driver's license and for any criminal acts, they will be sent home to be judged.

I'm still hesitant to ask directly and I would love to know how to connect with this family.

Im currently work shopping a game around Martians who come to Earth as refugees and then face the horrors of the earth government facing captivity, experimentation and so forth, the story is one of unity, liberation, freedom and ultimately peace among nations. Im just at a point where I think I could benefit from some notes from a credible cultural expert. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration. Comment/DM for the story in question, also Im looking for someone with some sort of actual work within cultural studies or something like that. Thanks again.

I’m not sure if this is the right sub for this. If it isn’t I’ll delete the post.

I’m working on a novel that takes heavy inspiration from Celtic mythology (mainly Irish, Scottish and Welsh). These include objects, places, and characters who are included in the myths but have names taken from a language I created which is unique to the setting but inspired by Celtic languages as well. I’m not exactly Irish or Scottish though. I’m American, and though my ancestors came from that area, it isn’t MY culture per se. It has just always fascinated me. With that in mind, I’m wondering if this is considered cultural appropriation? And if so, is it harmful for me to take inspiration from these things? I have tried to be respectful to the sources, make things accurate to the time period, and not rely on stereotypes. Is this cultural appropriation?

Hi everyone,

Apologies for the long post in advance but I’m really stuck and could use some pointing in the right direction.I’m applying to university for undergrad and I’m having the most trouble finding the right program/major for several reasons:

1. I simply cannot decide between English Literature, CompLit, or Cultural Studies. And some universities offer a combination of two eg. “Literature and Cultural Studies” or “Literary and Cultural Studies”. I also want to pursue a minor in Philosophy, and want a program with a healthy mix of analytic and continental, not just analytic.
2. I’ve noticed that most US universities' course descriptions are quite opaque and bare. Often they only state the title of each course and a 1-2 line description, not even describing in depth what thinkers we’ll be reading, what books we may be reading, what frameworks we’ll explore, etc. This makes it much harder to sort through programs. How can they expect someone to decide on a $100,000 investment without any course information?
3. Unfortunately these curriculums overwhelmingly differ from Uni to Uni. For example, one Uni’s English program might focus strictly on the text and dead white men canon (thinking like Cambridge or Oxford for an easy example), while another English program may be heavy with critical theory and world literature and film studies - basically a Cultural Studies/almost Complit program labeled as an English program.

A bit about my interests:I have a deep passion for literature, film, critical theory, and philosophy. I’ve r/AskLiteraryStudies, r/CriticalTheory, and r/askphilosophy for years. I’m highly interested in Paul Ricoeur, Heidegger, Deleuze, and Hegel at the moment.I work in the film industry right now in Los Angeles, and one of my long term goals is to write and direct a film. Doesn’t matter if it’s big-budget or indie, successful or not, but that is a lifelong goal of mine. I want to go back and study in order to build a better foundation for myself. Side note you’d be surprised how few people in Hollywood actually care about literature or philosophy lol.

My question: Can someone point me to some programs that might be a good fit for me?

My ideal program is one with a strong foundation in English literature, but with a heavy focus on theory. Ideal program incorporates modules/courses with world literature, critical theory, literary theory, 20th century French thinkers, and continental philosophy. Hence my interest in CompLit… but I only speak some French right now.

A program in the UK that has caught my eye is “Philosophy and Literature” at Warwick University but this program seems to operate a little too much from a philosophical approach and is missing some of what I mentioned above. I think I can find something that’s an even better match for me. I also worry about job prospects back in the US with a UK degree but I remain open to anything. https://warwick.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/philosophyliterature

Sorry for the long post. I'm going a bit crazy doing all this research and so I’d appreciate any help at all.

Thanks!
(edit: formatting got messed up)