Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Production

Culture has two faces. First, culture provides us with an opportunity to exercise our freedom.
We create elements of culture in our everyday life to solve practical problems and
express our needs, hopes, joys, and fears.
However, creating culture is just like any other act of construction
in that we need raw materials to get the job done. The raw materials
for the culture we create consist of cultural elements that either existed
before we were born or were created by other people since our birth.
We may put these elements together in ways that produce something
new. But there is no other well to drink from, so existing culture puts
limits on what we can think and do. In that sense, culture constrains
us. This is culture’s second face. In the rest of this chapter, we take a
close look at both faces of culture.
Symbolic Interactionism
and Cultural Production
Until the 1960s, most sociologists argued that culture is a “reflection”
of society. Using a term introduced in Chapter 1, we can say that they
regarded culture as a dependent variable. Harris’s analysis of rural
Indians
certainly fits that mold. In Harris’s view, the social necessity of
protecting cows caused the cultural belief that cows are holy.
In recent decades, the symbolic-interactionist tradition we discussed
in Chapter 1 has influenced many sociologists of culture. Symbolic
interactionists are inclined to regard culture as an independent
variable. In their view, people do not accept culture passively. We are
not empty vessels into which society pours a defined assortment of
beliefs, symbols, and values. Instead, we actively produce and interpret
culture, creatively fashioning it and attaching meaning to it in
accordance with our diverse needs.
The idea that people actively produce and interpret culture implies
that, to a degree, we are at liberty to choose how culture influences us.
Cultural Diversity
Part of the reason we are increasingly able to choose how culture influences
us is that a greater diversity of culture is available from which to choose. Like most societies in the world, American society is undergoing
rapid cultural diversification. That is evident in all aspects of life, from the
growing popularity of Latino music to the ever-broadening international
assortment of foods most Americans consume. Marriage between people
of different races and ethnicities is increasingly common. Although only
1 percent of African Americans married nonblacks in 1970, 16 percent of
African
Americans married someone of a different race or ethnicity in 2008.
In the same year, nearly 15 percent of all marriages in the United States were
interracial (Taylor et al., 2010). We witness cultural diversity everywhere—
even in the names of movie stars. “Ethnic” names were often Anglicized in
the past. Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis, Allen Konigsberg
became
Woody Allen, Anna Italiano became Anne Bancroft, and Ramon Estevez
became Martin Sheen. In contrast, “ethnic” names for stars are popular
today. Think of Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Lopez, Benicio Del Toro, Jake
Gyllenhaal, and Emilio Estevez (Martin Sheen’s son).
Multiculturalism
At the political level, cultural diversity has become a source of conflict.
The conflict is most evident in the debates that have surfaced in recent
years concerning curricula in the American educational system.
Until recent decades, the American educational system stressed the
common elements of American culture, history, and society. Students
learned the story of how European settlers overcame great odds, prospered,
and forged a united nation from diverse ethnic and racial elements.
School curricula typically neglected the contributions of nonwhites and
non-Europeans to America’s historical, literary, artistic, and scientific
development.
Students learned little about the less savory aspects of
American history, many of which involved the use of force to create a
racial hierarchy that persists to this day, albeit in modified form (see Chapter 8, “Race
and Ethnicity”).
History books did not deny that African Americans were enslaved and that force
was used to wrest territory from Native Americans and Mexicans. However, they did
make it seem as if these unfortunate events were part of the American past, with few
implications for the present. The history of the United States was presented as a history
of progress involving the elimination of racial privilege and racial discrimination.
In contrast, for the past several decades, advocates of multiculturalism have argued
that school and college curricula should present a more balanced picture of American
history, culture, and society that better reflects the country’s ethnic and racial diversity
in the past and its growing ethnic and racial diversity today (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn,
1997). A multicultural approach to education highlights the achievements of nonwhites
and non-Europeans. It gives more recognition to the way European settlers came to dominate
nonwhite and non-European communities. It stresses how racial domination resulted
in persistent social inequalities, and it encourages Spanish-language, elementary-level
instruction
in the states of California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Florida, where
a substantial minority of people speak Spanish at home. (About one in seven Americans
older than age 5 speaks a language other than English at home. Of these people, more than
half speak Spanish. Most Spanish speakers live in the states just listed.)
Most critics of multiculturalism do not argue against teaching cultural diversity. What
they fear is that multiculturalism is being taken too far (Glazer, 1997; Schlesinger, 1991).
They believe that multiculturalism has three negative consequences