Abstract
The integration of cultural systems has gained increasing scholarly and popular attention, mostly negative, in recent decades. This stems from the perception of its deleterious effects on minority populations, which is linked to the multiculturalist and postmodernist movements of the 1990s, and their corollary politics of difference, or identity politics. The main focus here is on groups marginalized on the basis of racial status. Racial status has been ever more predominantly construed as a binary (white/nonwhite) attribution, which in turn essentializes it and imparts to it a quasi-metaphysical character. Race becomes an ontological condition, and a condition of perpetual difference, thus functioning as a cultural prison for minority persons, barring their absorption into the national mainstream. A case is made here for cultural integration from the standpoint of social phenomenology, which lends itself well to the macrolevel interpretation of interpersonal life and social situations as products of the larger structural context. The analysis relies on Alfred Schutz’s discussion of meaning and the social relationships between contemporaries, emphasizing his ideas of the stock-of-knowledge-at-hand, typifications, and anonymity. It is argued that the full inclusion of individuals into national life hinges critically on their integration into, and identification with, the dominant orientation of the larger community—which means their integration into a unified world of intersubjectivity.
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Notes
- 1.
The white and nonwhite designations are used here under erasure (Derrida) to denote their relative (i.e., culturally specific) nature.
- 2.
Regarding minority-group cultural assimilation, the prevalence of assimilationist tendencies may be detected in Gates’s late 1990s’ account of young black culture in London, which he characterizes simply as being part of British “youth culture.” This is the culture of the wiggers (i.e., “white wannabes”) of British culture (1997: 198).
- 3.
In contradistinction to the U.S. situation. Gates’s investigations appear to indicate that being black (i.e., Jamaican, in his analysis) and fully British was a phenomenon that seemed to have reached full fruition by the late 1990s. The situation presented counters the widely upheld premise in racially bipolar models of social organization, of the static nature of cultural divisions and black/white cultural separatism.
- 4.
See the Schutzian treatment of subjective and objective meanings and its political implications (e.g., 1997: 33–38). Groups that will simply not consider any “truth” that does not conform to their interests not only express the fundamental tenet of prejudiced thinking but also demonstrate the operation of power, thus making meaning a key aspect of intergroup political relations.
- 5.
- 6.
What Schutz called “the coherence of experience” (1997: 232).
- 7.
In the 1990s the emergence of what came to be known as ebonics, a dialectal variation of S.E. (Standard English), received a great deal of attention and formal support under the auspices of the politics of identity. This would be interpreted here as minority-group otherness manifested linguistically and supported formally (also see, e.g., Harris, 1997).
- 8.
The notion of being on the same page with someone else in contemporary U.S. culture is roughly equivalent to sharing a stream of consciousness with the other person, to living in the other person’s subjective meaning-context.
- 9.
This applies in societies across the board, but in those which enforce a racially bipolar social organization, such as the U.S., a dual pattern of assimilation of incoming groups, based on the white/nonwhite distinction, has been the prevailing practice. It may be useful at this point to elaborate on the cultural experience of the white ethnics in the U.S. and the groups codified as nonwhite. Where minority ethnic-racial communities are concerned, formal and informal separatism, together with various forms and degrees of discrimination, has a strong psychological effect on the minority persons involved, as manifested, for instance, in problems of identity. These aspects were registered by Clark (1957: ch. 3) in research done at a time when Jim Crow arrangements were still in effect. They had to do with general feelings of inferiority, self-hatred, frustration, and humiliation—in other words, with unnecessary psychological burdens and turmoil centered on the recognition of having inferior social identity. When the minority group is no longer burdened by formally sanctioned segregation and discrimination, but remains culturally segregated, the sense of social dislocation and estrangement—of otherness—of its members does not entirely disappear, even when these individuals experience significant advancement in the formal sectors of social life. That is, this effect may persist independently of the political, economic, or educational placement of these individuals in the social hierarchy. Ultimately, this has a self-perpetuating effect. Insufficient cultural inclusion leads to attachment to subcultural modes of living, continuing otherness vis-à-vis the majority cultural pattern, further cultural exclusion, and so forth.
The assimilative experience and corresponding sense of identity of the white-ethnic groups, expectedly, differ in a significant way in that these individuals tend to be incorporated at all levels of the assimilative process (see also Spinasse, 2008, for a discussion of the assimilation of Germans in Brasil).
- 10.
Given the naturalization of majority and minority ways of living, and the intersubjective recognition (for the population as a whole) of a quasi-metaphysical separation between the white and nonwhite parts of the population, the exchange of cultural traits between them does not conform to the model of syncretism put forward by Bastide (1971). As a rule, syncretized cultural forms would be alien, an aberration, in the separatist social order. To illustrate, when jazz music began to evolve and spread in the U.S. in the first quarter of the twentieth century, this was a highly seductive, sensually overpowering type of musical experience for the young white middle-class set of the time. It allowed for greater sexual intimacy on the dance floor, but everyone understood this to be an expression of black culture, not “American” (i.e., white) culture, which was still wedded to the more “respectable” European-American musical forms (e.g., the fox-trot, the waltz).
The strongly negative reaction on the part of the older generation of white Americans toward black musical culture was revealed in the fact that, no less than Henry Ford, the legendary industrialist, sponsored and funded a folk dance crusade, where such dance styles as the Virginia reel were cultivated. Additionally, as is well known, white musicians gradually incorporated elements of jazz into their own playing style, producing a kind of music that blended those elements with European syncopation. These syncretized musical forms became hugely popular nationwide—for example, Big Band music and swing music of the 1930s and 1940s. As jazz music found its way into the recording industry, and jazz records began to be produced and sold on a large scale (e.g., Bessie Smith’s blues recordings), the music came to be known as race records. This underscores the status of jazz as a phenomenon outside the mainstream of American sociocultural life (i.e., outside “white civilization”).
- 11.
The idea of common ownership of cultural products within a given national community may be illustrated here with the example of Brazilian society. In principle, any member of that society is able to identify with, or claim ownership of, any aspect of the overall culture or subset of it. The cultural elements in question include things as diverse as, for example, the national dance form—the samba, a product of the mixture of European and West African musical traditions; the folk tales of Amerindian origin; the abstract paintings of the Brazilian modernists of the 1920s; the syncretized folk Catholicism, heavily imbued with West African religious influences; the feijoada, a dish which originated in the slave quarters of Brazilian plantations in the 1800s, and is now Brazil’s national dish.
- 12.
In connection with the enduring effect of intergroup separatism in U.S. society, it is worth considering here the remarks by Dollard (1957: 418) who, in the 1930s, draws attention to the subcultural mode of existence for the African-American population and to the fact that “a different kind of collective conscience has been standardized in the Negro group.” In 1908, the second decade of Jim Crow, Charles Francis Adams (cited in Frazier, 1957: 687) presciently addressed the deep-seated character of racial separatism in U.S. society, by stating that African-Americans would be “only partially assimilated” and would not become [culturally] absorbed. At that time, he added, the “Negro” was and would remain “an alien element in the body politic … a foreign substance.”
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Camara, E. (2023). Cultural Integration: A Macrophenomenological Analysis. In: Belvedere, C., Gros, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Macrophenomenology and Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34712-2_10
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