Assimilation into the American Identity
By Zac Weathers
If you’ve been born and raised in
to the U.S.A. your identity and the vast majority of your culture is inherently
formed by capitalistic driven consumerism. This mass corporate cultural
phenomenon originated in the United States and is spreading like a parasite
around the world. Growing up in America our cultural lives are shaped by a
constant bombardment of advertising and pop-cultural fads driven by capitalist
corporations. In many countries around the world this corporation-driven
culture is Americanizing the original culture and manipulating the “ethnic
identity” in shape of the American identity. There is a vast
corporation-influenced cultural hegemony taking place in the United States and
around the world due to the capitalistic nature of the U.S. government and the
power of corporations combined with advertising, all encouraging a U.S.
cultural dominance and overall International cultural imperialism.
Stealing Buddha’s
Dinner is a memoir written by a
Vietnamese-American Bich Minh Nguyen. As a young immigrant child, Bich
struggles to find her new American identity while still maintaining her
original cultural identity of her Buddhist Vietnamese roots. Nguyen recalls her
childhood memories through nostalgic memories of food. Nguyen also uses food to
contrast the difference between the two unique cultures. While she is forced to
eat rice and vegetables, Bich watches in envy as other local Michigan girls eat
Pizza and other traditional American processed "delicacies". Going
against her family’s traditional wishes, Bich feels she must assimilate into
the American culture by eating what she thinks an American would eat. However
this American food represents something deeper for Bich, it represents her
integration into American society and her own created American identity. While
Bich pursues her ideal American diet lifestyle, her family drama unfolds and
the reader learns about the hardships of immigrating to a brand new place,
being accepted and finding an identity.
While the book
focuses on one girls struggle to find her new American Identity while pressured
by her family roots to maintain aspects of her original Vietnamese culture, Stealing
Buddha's Dinner reveals through an
uncorrupted immigrant child eyes the vast corporation-influenced cultural
hegemony taking place in the United States. While young Bich merely wants to be
integrated into the American culture, she feels she must do this by indulging
in all corporate America has to offer. This troubling premise brings up the
growing fact that powerful corporate America’s sponsored products increasingly
define popular American culture. Instead of celebrating the culture contributed
to everyday by American cities and individual citizens, most Americans and
citizens around the world celebrate Americas international corporate success of
McDonald's and other large companies, the innovations of Pringles potato chips,
and other such products and fads pushed to the forefront of the public eye with
the power of corporate branding and advertising. I believe we have a rich and
ever-changing culture in the U.S. that shouldn't be defined in the
international eye by America’s corporate success and overall capitalistic
greed. “We should not forget that the differences in cultures make the world a
rich and diverse place. Every individual of each country should have the right
to express his or her own culture. A cultural uniformity would lead to the
extinction of cultures and it would definitely represent a great loss”
(Sevenier, American Cultural Imperialism: Gift or Threat?) I believe finding an
"American" identity should be assimilation with America’s diverse
citizens, not integration to the cultural hegemony of corporate America. But then
again, corporations now are apparently considered people.
Nguyen’s
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is a true story
that almost all immigrants into the United States can relate to in terms of
cultural assimilation. When an
immigrant enters the country they are thrown into a culture dominated by the
things citizens consume so they must make a choice between assimilating into
this consumerism culture or retaining their original ethnic identity developed
by “specific situations and set of circumstances that each individual or ethnic
group encounters” (Le, Assimilation & Ethnic Identity). The things that are
sold to us and everything we consume, be it food, media, fads define the
American identity. While most nations export products, America mainly exports
culture. Hollywood productions are found playing on every screen around the
World! McDonald's restaurants can be found in 123 countries around the World!
These cultural exports are replacing an untold amount of local businesses
contribute to ethnic identity and culture of any region. This capitalistic take
on culture is infringing upon and taking the place of the cultural identity of
ethnic groups around the world including all those immigrate to the United
States.
When a person is
born they are entirely free from cultural influences, with the only
distinguishable factors of newborns being their inherited ethnicity and genetic
information. This concept proves that a cultural identity is in fact formed
through exposure to one’s cultural surroundings, not inherited through birth.
The exposure to the culture a person is originally born into is defined by the
anthropological term ‘enculturation’.
Christian Cultural anthropologists, Stephen A. Grunland and Marvin K.
Mayers connect enculturation with a relatively new anthropological term
defining the increasing process of immigrants assimilating into a new country
and culture, “enculturation is the learning of the appropriate behavior of
one's own culture, acculturation is the learning of appropriate behavior of
one's host culture. One enters a new culture, in effect, as a child and is
enculturated into the new society through the process of adaptation to that
society” (Grunland & Mayers, “Enculturation and Acculturation”). When an
immigrant is acculturated into America they are forced to adapt to culture
dominated by advertising and consumerism. Most Americans all want the same
materialistic things because these items are constantly pushed by massive
corporate-backed advertising campaign seen across the United States and internationally.
Enculturated born in the U.S.A Americans have been exposed to corporate
hegemony since birth, but acculturating immigrants must conform their new
identity to first of all be accepted and secondly thrive in this country where
the things you consume define the citizen.
Young Bich
Nguyen from Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is
forced to acculturate to the U.S. consumerist culture when her family migrates
from Vietnam. Being Buddhist Bich’s family’s original cultural identity is
almost the complete opposite from the traditional American identity defined by
the things a person purchases. Buddhist culture focuses on enlightenment and
selflessness, with no emphasis at all on material things. Bich remembers her
life and family being transformed by the enculturation into the corporate
hegemony of U.S. culture, “To me, life in commercials was real. Commercials
were instructions; they were news. They showed me what perfection could be: in
the right woman’s hands, the layers of a cake would be exactly the same size.
In the right woman’s kitchen, a cartoon rabbit would visit the children and
show them how to slurp down a tall glass of Nestle Quik with a straw. A shaken
cruet would spill a stream of Good Seasons over hills of lettuce leaves.
Commercials had a firm definition of motherhood, which almost all of my
friends’ mothers had no trouble fulfilling” (Nguyen, p.125). Constant
bombardment of advertisement causes Bich to form her personal belief about the
American family. She feels her parents are incapable of adapting to the
“American” way of life that she sees her classmates living and continuously on
television. Bich feels to become accepted she must define her American identity
by the things she consumes.
While some
immigrants maintain their ethnic identity and celebrate their customs long
after living in the U.S., many younger immigrants (take young Bich for example)
are still developing an identity. When immigrating into the United States their
original ethnic identity is lost and replaced with a consumerist identity, void
of cultural customs replaced by advertisements creating capitalistic fads and
traditions. The American identity is defined by consumerism; therefore
sociologists define immigrant assimilation and acculturation into the U.S. “As
the decline of an ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social
differences” (Alba & Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation
and Contemporary Immigration). Sociologists
Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee also mention that ethnic distinction is “embedded
in a variety of social and cultural differences between groups that give an
ethnic boundary concrete significance (so that members of one group think,
‘They are not like us because . . . ‘)” (Alba & Nee).
Italian
Communist writer, politician, and philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
defines cultural hegemony as “The
‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the
general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group;
this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent
confidence) which the dominate group enjoys because of its position and
function in the world of production” (Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks)
Works Cited
Alba, Richard D., and Victor Nee. "Chapter One:
Rethinking Assimilation." Remaking the American Mainstream:
Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), 12.
Grunland, Stephen A., and Marvin K. Mayers.
"Enculturation and Acculturation." Cultural Anthropology Reading.
SNU.EDU. Web. 17 Apr. 2012. <http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/encultur.htm>.
Le, C.N.
"The Fundamentals of Ethnic Identity." Assimilation & Ethnic
Identity: Asian-Nation. Web. 17 Apr. 2012.
<http://www.asian-nation.org/assimilation.shtml>.
Nguyen, Bich Minh. Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.
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