A Trip to Middle America vs. Cultural Relativism (pt. 1)
Jun 29th, 2009 by Micah Tillman | Start the Discussion |
Just returned with The Wife from a very long weekend away. Had a wedding to attend and some friends to visit in the process.
It was the first same-sex wedding ceremony I’d ever been to.
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I was intrigued by how the officiant tweaked the language and structure of the ceremony — especially with regards to the fact that the officiant could only say “by the power vested in me by [insert denomination here],” rather than “by [insert denomination] and by the state of [insert name].”
(See here for my feelings on wedding ceremonies.)
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I was intrigued by the one nominally-Catholic family who brought their children to the ceremony because they thought it was important that they see such a ceremony when they were young (a ceremony which the couple in question no doubt had not seen when they were young).
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I was intrigued by the rural setting of the wedding, where one was as likely to meet folks wearing basketball shorts as folks wearing mullets in the local (HUGE) Wal-Mart.
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I was intrigued by the type(s) of friends the couple in question had collected over the years, who all came to the wedding from different parts of the country.
Not only were their various places of extraction diverse, but so were their educational levels, their marital/relationship statuses (“stati”?), and religious backgrounds.
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I was intrigued by the contrast between the couple and their friends on the one hand, and the locals on the other. And by the contrast between the couple and their friends on the one hand, and “the locals” amongst whom the couple currently lives.
(The two sets of “locals” are radically different, at least ethnically, and probably ideologically as well — at least in general, given voting patterns for the two locales.)
And I was intrigued by the contrast between the couple and their friends on the one hand, and myself on the other.
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As we travelled to and fro across the country for this wedding, I observed the various cultures we travelled through. In some places it was obvious that farming was the “local industry” and racing the local pasttime.
In other places it was obvious that farming was the local industry and boating or fishing the local pasttime.
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In other places it was not at all obvious what the “local industry” was, even though the stores were larger and had a greater selection than any stores I had ever seen before. This was all the more shocking because the places in question appeared to be middle and lower-middle class.
I observed the differences between the college and non-college towns, the differing “ethnic makeups” of the areas, and differences in lawn- and parking-lot-care (specifically regarding how such “care” affected the apparent economic vibrancy of an area).
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Oh, and did I mention the music?
In the car, The Wife and I listened to Gogol Bordello and PFR, Avenue Q and Mozart’s Requiem.
At the wedding festivities, we heard more Gogol Bordello, along with lots of classic R&B, funk, bluegrass, country, 80′s metal, etc.
I’ll have some thoughts on all this later. . . .
