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kaigouThoughts here are mostly stemming from watching/reading Gegege no Kitaro and Nurarihyon no Mago, but it's a topic I've messed with before (see here, here, and here). The bottom line is a really obvious one, but I'll state it anyway just so you know where I'm coming from: informal, orally-transferred just-so folklore is a huge foundation of any culture, whether we agree with it, believe in it, or even realize it.
I don't mean iconic national images; those are often loosely based on historical events (and more often than not, shading into myth as the decades and centuries pass), though they can certainly become part of what I'm talking about, in a way. I mean simpler things, tiny things you've probably heard a hundred times growing up, that you never give any thought to, because these are just Things We Say.
Here's one I bet most Americans may've heard: "don't open the umbrella inside the house, or the house'll get hit by lightning." Who the hell even believes umbrellas will cause lightning, even on a clear day? "Don't kill that spider, you'll make it rain!" Oh, right, there's a scientific cause-and-effect. Or any of these, with allowances for regional variations on the quasi-divinational results:
You can call all these superstitions, and utter nonsense, and stuff that's just Things We Say (But Don't Really Mean). You can say, you're an adult and you know none of this is true, but you probably still find yourself repeating the regional variation you grew up with to any child around, when the situation fits. My grandmother knew quite well that a curled hem doesn't bring bad news, but she still repeated it to me, as though it were of equal import along with how to sew that hem properly (and seeing how a hem shouldn't curl if you do it right, I 'spect the "bad news" would be everyone else discovering that you suck as a seamstress).
There are other Things We Say that I'd put in this category, as well, that are broader and the kind of generalized advice we give a younger generation. It's Things You Should Know (To Really Be One Of Us).
...and so on.
If you give it a little bit of thought -- no matter where you're from -- you probably have some version of Things We Say (And Do) that's similar. Maybe your family or region or ethnicity or nationality always builds houses with the door facing the east, or you use Salad Dressing on your sandwiches (Not Mayonnaise And Don't Think Your Guests Won't Know Even If They're Too Polite To Say Anything) or you always go to the nearby shrine on New Year's or you always call home (If You Can't Visit The Least You Can Do Is Let Us Know You're Still Alive) for a certain holiday or anniversary, or that when the windows rattle from thunder but there's no rain it means the devil is beating his wife with a fish-head, or that springtime means scrubbing the boat until it shines for the blessing of the fleet.
If you give it more than a little bit of thought, you'll probably realize you know hundreds of little things like this. Things that say: this is what it means to be Polish-American, or to be From Manchester, or to be A True Nigerian, or even on the small scale to be Part Of This Family. They overlap and contradict and plenty of times they're things you might not even do anymore -- I can't recall the last time I had pepper vinegar on the table, myself (let alone actually put it on anything). Or you don't even really believe -- whatever that means, honestly -- that dead spiders cause rain or that house-elves are drinking the bowl of milk or that thumping in the eaves means the house is blessed with a zashikiwarashi. You just know it, because your parents and grand-parents or older neighbors or babysitters or teachers or classmates told you so, and it's just part of the collection of random and seemingly useless trivia that shapes your unconconscious definition of Things We Say Or Do (That Are A Sign We're ____).
I've included so many because somewhere in the various examples, I hope, you'll see something similar, even if the specifics are different. If there's anywhere you and I overlap on nationality, ethnicity, region, or family [cripes, if so let me continue to live in ignorance], then we'd probably find that we carry similar advice-bits related to the overlaps. On everything else, though, we might have radically different advice-bits on the same topics: what goes on the table when guests are present, what to do when someone is born/dies, when to give gifts and how to accept them, what that strange sound is in the chimney, what it means when a cat stares into an empty corner, what to do with coins you find on the ground...
That does have bearing on the rest, but first a bit about a few stories.
There's a manhwa (sadly incomplete and no news anywhere of it picking back up) called Dokebi Bride. The storyline is relatively simple: Sunbi has inherited shaman-skills from her grandmother, but upon her grandmother's death, Sunbi must move to Seoul to live with her father and his second wife and other child, and struggle with being a powerful, if untrained (and thus unprotected) shaman. The details are phenomenal, the artist-author's research has clearly been thorough (far as I can tell), with a whole bunch of little details from the shaman-grandmother that are very much in the Things We Do vein.
The manhwa is licensed by NetComics -- who, characteristically for them, have absolutely no info at all (or even a note!) about the series' hiatus -- and it's to them I headed to find out more about the artist-author, mid-reading. I wanted to find out if the author was native Korean (and with a pen-name like Marley, it's hard to tell) because the narrative seemed to expect the reader to know none of the folklore. If, say, the average kid growing up in Korea hears these random comments -- dokebi don't know how to wash themselves, the bowl in the kitchen is for the hearth-god, evil spirits are long-time ghosts -- then the manhwa's tone doesn't make sense.
I mean, if you've heard something all your life in random bits and pieces, you don't need to be lectured for four pages about it. It left me wondering: did the artist-author intend an eventual non-Korean audience? Or is this kind of folklore is not part of the random spattering of Things We Do for a child in modern Korea? Or was it all so new to the author that she assumed it would also be completely new even to her urban Korean readership?
Another manga that added to this line of thinking was Kekkaishi, a shonen manga revolving around a boy and girl who hold hereditary positions as guards of a sacred location (incidentally, now with a high school built on the land). The manga introduces each new ayakashi that comes to the land to soak up its power (which must be defeated, naturally, by the boy-and-girl team); the anime takes it even further and introduces every ayakashi and every character -- every blooming episode. (Oi, if it's episode 37 and the viewers still need to be told the main protagonist is named Yoshimori and he's a 15-year old in 9th grade, I'd say there's no freaking hope.)
It took me a few ayakashi to realize that with rare exception, they're all wholecloth from the mangaka's head. I'm guessing that's the reason for the introductions (and, I suspect, the anime tried to smooth this introduce-the-ayakashi intrusion by making it consistent for every character), but what it really did was highlight the number of animanga I've read/watched where there's no introduction. Either you pick it up from context, or you know it already (even if you didn't know you knew it) thanks to those myriad Things We Do details littering your social-personal mental landscape.
Nurarihyon no Mago is like that -- assuming you already generally know, or can pick it up pretty quickly -- and so is Ban Hon Sa, Pahanjip, Tokyo Bardo, even superficially lighter fare like Kannazuki no Miko or Kami Sen. All of those have significant plot-elements related to the supernatural or fantastical, but that's not the only kind of detail that assumes you have cultural experience. The animes for Neon Genesis Evangelion and Shiki both have louder-than-usual cicadas in the soundtrack, almost oppressively so; for the former, it's constant through the series to make you realize how screwed up the seasons are (that it's always the height of summer), while the latter does it to create an auditory impression of summer's heat.
If you know your cultural cues of advice-bits, then you know the families in Kekkaishi are a mix of Buddhism and onmyoji, but the character who ultimately gives the protagonist the most useful advice is a Shinto priest. And if you know your advice-bits about holiday observation, then a story's sense of place can exist from simple background visual clues, like the fact that the pictures flanking the front door are shiny and new, or that there's an evergreen wreath with a red bow on the front door.
An absence can also inform you, even if you've never stopped to articulate what you know, so aren't fully aware that the author doesn't know what you always sort of knew. When I fuss about authors writing stories set in unfamiliar cities who "get it wrong," my fussing is related to that same kind of What We Do awareness: you can get a lot of information from google maps, like street direction or distance, but there's always something you won't get, that you can't know, that signals that you (the author) are Not From Around Here. Maybe it's because your characters don't realize a street is one-way from 4pm to 6pm on weekdays only, or that your characters don't avoid a certain subway exit (or take it and don't complain about an escalator that's four-something floors in height), or that there's a reason to avoid Judicial Square on the first Monday in October.
You can get a lot wrong as an author, and if you get the tiny details right, it's a sign to readers that what's wrong is intentional. Lacking those details, what's wrong is read as just plain ignorance.
All living cultures -- from the macro-level of national to the micro-level of immediate family -- have these advice-bits, and all living cultures' advice-bits are continually evolving. Every new generation and every new bit of inter-cultural exposure and every new bit of technology and even every new bestseller or hit movie or top-forty song is going to have a subtle influence on your collection of advice-bits that you eventually will pass along to the next generation.
Thirty years ago you would've gotten an advice-bit about never accepting a ride from a stranger; now you might get an advice-bit about never accepting an internet chat with someone whose screen-name you don't know. Twenty years ago you might've been startled to find someone had an answering machine; these days, you might find yourself annoyed upon calling a friend and finding the voicemail on the friend's cellphone won't take your message. My grandmother never had a single bit of What We Do when it comes to how to leave a voicemail-message, but my generation is sure giving plenty of it to the next generations coming along.
That's the positive (existant) side of such What We Do messages, and it's something I can see in every story. Even those set in other places and other times (even if they don't exist outside the author's head) contain little bits here and there that indicate a sense of place. I've begun identifying less-experienced (or less-aware or less-particular) SFF authors by the inclusion of advice-bits that are distinctly regional/ethnic; a little bit of extrapolation and sometimes it's not hard to figure out that the rituals around, say, offering a guest some food are fundamentally Italian-American, for instance -- even if the food-names and the ritual-greeting have been changed. The more savvy an author is to these unspoken advice-bits, the more likely I am to find the world-building truly rich and varied (beyond the semi-political who-is-who and who-does-what level); for a this-world story, the more details like this, the more the sense-of-place really envelops the reader.
Of specific interest to me, of course, is where we get into the superstition/supernatural, because my main interest is in the combinations and crossovers between urban fantasy, cultural anthropology, and folklore itself. Somewhere in there, I started thinking about what I'd like to read, if it were available (and, sadly, in my language since I don't think I'll ever achieve Korean or Vietnamese reading skills in this lifetime). If the options were out there, I'd be reading a lot less of Japanese manga. Actually, I think it'd probably drop off my radar almost completely, with only a few exceptions -- and the rest would be replaced with Korean and Chinese stories. For whatever reason, I find those cultures make more sense to my outsider-self -- or perhaps I should say, I find there is more overlap in the what and how of the What We Do, when I compare my Southern-US-derived What We Do to the What We Do in Korean and Chinese stories.
(That overlap, too, is what can make you feel like "hey, we're not so different!" when you travel to another country. It's not always that your cultural bases are, or are not, that different, but that something, I think, in the tones and content of your ingrained What We Do overlaps to some degree with the general What We Do of that unfamiliar culture.)
These What We Do advice-bits are the ground of a culture. I don't mean foundation; I mean ground, as in, what you never notice because it's under your feet and you're not busy looking down, but knowing it means you have secure footing. The more you've absorbed (acculturation, really) of your particular culture(s) and sub-culture(s), the easier you find it to navigate without second thought. You know the fork goes on the left and the knife on the right; you don't think twice about whether your guests are offered food and drink (or none at all); you know when and how you're being insulted or complimented; you can toss off colloquial explanations (ie thunder + no rain) and have no fear you'll upset everyone listening.
Try to think of what it would do to your stories (both written and spoken, fictional and familial) if you didn't have all this in your head, if you'd somehow missed all that growing up -- didn't get it from relatives, neighbors, teachers. You'd still get it from somewhere: books, television, movies, even random comments heard on the street or on the radio, but I think it'd still reduce your collection, in a way.
That's because books (and even moreso for television and movies) are intended for a broad audience; the budgets are just too big to warrant doing a film that's only for People Who Live Here, and from what I've seen, most television producers shy away from strongly-regional stories, on the grounds that people from elsewhere "can't relate" or that the story "won't translate". If you've ever travelled in the US, watch the local news wherever you stay, and listen to the accents: more and more, a flat non-accent is becoming commonplace. Even on the pseudo-local news, I found fewer and fewer talking heads that had anything like the accents I heard when I stopped for gas or checked into the hotel or spoke with the docent at the town museum.
The same, I think, happens with these advice-bits. If you don't absorb (or aren't exposed to) the regionalism, you take the larger, broader, version to fill in the gaps -- the national level -- or you fill in those gaps on a familial micro-level. The latter is what I see with many multi-generational military families, who move so often neither parents nor children have a predominant regional flavor to their What We Do. Many families therefore freely adopt and adapt from every region to fill in the gaps, creating their own What We Do for holidays, birthdays, and explanations about thumps in the roof or just what the cat's staring at.
If, then, we derive these stories/advice-bits of What We Say Or Do from all around us, as part of the process of growing up in a family, a region, an ethnicity, a nation, any of the levels of culture, what if we lose it? What if, instead of the evolutionary slow-process of supplanting older with newer, or of broadening the regional into the national, we ditch it all -- or have it taken away?
[not done yet, just too busy to make this all one post]
I don't mean iconic national images; those are often loosely based on historical events (and more often than not, shading into myth as the decades and centuries pass), though they can certainly become part of what I'm talking about, in a way. I mean simpler things, tiny things you've probably heard a hundred times growing up, that you never give any thought to, because these are just Things We Say.
Here's one I bet most Americans may've heard: "don't open the umbrella inside the house, or the house'll get hit by lightning." Who the hell even believes umbrellas will cause lightning, even on a clear day? "Don't kill that spider, you'll make it rain!" Oh, right, there's a scientific cause-and-effect. Or any of these, with allowances for regional variations on the quasi-divinational results:
A dropped fork means a guest is coming. A dropped spoon means a gift is coming. A dropped knife means bad news is coming.
If you see a white horse alone in a field at dusk, it means someone's going to die.
When a neighbor's family increases (birth) or decreases (death), take food. The more, the better.
A penny face-up brings good luck, but a penny face-down brings bad luck unless you give the penny to someone else.
If the hem of your skirt curls up, kiss the hem before uncurling it, or else you'll get bad news.
If you go too near the water's edge, ____ will get you and drown you.
If someone brings food on a dish to your house, you cannot return the dish empty. (That is: if someone gives you food, you must give food in return.)
Always hold your feet off the floor of the car when you're going past a graveyard. Ghosts only come after living people, and only living people sit upright. (As in, dead people are lying down.)
If you want it to rain, water the garden or wash the car.
If you button your shirt wrong, it's bad luck unless you unbutton it completely and then start over from the beginning.
If the apple has a stem, hold onto it while turning the apple and reciting the alphabet, one letter for each turn of the wrist. When the stem breaks off, the letter you're on will be the first letter of your destined spouse's first name.
You can call all these superstitions, and utter nonsense, and stuff that's just Things We Say (But Don't Really Mean). You can say, you're an adult and you know none of this is true, but you probably still find yourself repeating the regional variation you grew up with to any child around, when the situation fits. My grandmother knew quite well that a curled hem doesn't bring bad news, but she still repeated it to me, as though it were of equal import along with how to sew that hem properly (and seeing how a hem shouldn't curl if you do it right, I 'spect the "bad news" would be everyone else discovering that you suck as a seamstress).
There are other Things We Say that I'd put in this category, as well, that are broader and the kind of generalized advice we give a younger generation. It's Things You Should Know (To Really Be One Of Us).
All Christmas decorations must be down by Twelfth Night.
Never let the sun set on the flag, and never let the flag fall on the ground.
We drive on the ___ side of the road.
Fancy dances (prom, homecoming) means exchanging flowers: boutonniere, corsage.
Honk your horn when you see a car marked "just married"; turn on your headlights when a funeral procession goes by; pull over to the curb to let an ambulance or fire truck pass you.
Send a thank-you note when someone has given you a gift.
Don't talk with your mouth full.
Celebrating Independence Day means going to see the fighter jets on base, then having a picnic and watching fireworks.
Take a small bottle, squeeze in three hot peppers, and fill the bottle to the brim with vinegar. Keep it on your table. It goes on everything.
...and so on.
If you give it a little bit of thought -- no matter where you're from -- you probably have some version of Things We Say (And Do) that's similar. Maybe your family or region or ethnicity or nationality always builds houses with the door facing the east, or you use Salad Dressing on your sandwiches (Not Mayonnaise And Don't Think Your Guests Won't Know Even If They're Too Polite To Say Anything) or you always go to the nearby shrine on New Year's or you always call home (If You Can't Visit The Least You Can Do Is Let Us Know You're Still Alive) for a certain holiday or anniversary, or that when the windows rattle from thunder but there's no rain it means the devil is beating his wife with a fish-head, or that springtime means scrubbing the boat until it shines for the blessing of the fleet.
If you give it more than a little bit of thought, you'll probably realize you know hundreds of little things like this. Things that say: this is what it means to be Polish-American, or to be From Manchester, or to be A True Nigerian, or even on the small scale to be Part Of This Family. They overlap and contradict and plenty of times they're things you might not even do anymore -- I can't recall the last time I had pepper vinegar on the table, myself (let alone actually put it on anything). Or you don't even really believe -- whatever that means, honestly -- that dead spiders cause rain or that house-elves are drinking the bowl of milk or that thumping in the eaves means the house is blessed with a zashikiwarashi. You just know it, because your parents and grand-parents or older neighbors or babysitters or teachers or classmates told you so, and it's just part of the collection of random and seemingly useless trivia that shapes your unconconscious definition of Things We Say Or Do (That Are A Sign We're ____).
I've included so many because somewhere in the various examples, I hope, you'll see something similar, even if the specifics are different. If there's anywhere you and I overlap on nationality, ethnicity, region, or family [cripes, if so let me continue to live in ignorance], then we'd probably find that we carry similar advice-bits related to the overlaps. On everything else, though, we might have radically different advice-bits on the same topics: what goes on the table when guests are present, what to do when someone is born/dies, when to give gifts and how to accept them, what that strange sound is in the chimney, what it means when a cat stares into an empty corner, what to do with coins you find on the ground...
That does have bearing on the rest, but first a bit about a few stories.
There's a manhwa (sadly incomplete and no news anywhere of it picking back up) called Dokebi Bride. The storyline is relatively simple: Sunbi has inherited shaman-skills from her grandmother, but upon her grandmother's death, Sunbi must move to Seoul to live with her father and his second wife and other child, and struggle with being a powerful, if untrained (and thus unprotected) shaman. The details are phenomenal, the artist-author's research has clearly been thorough (far as I can tell), with a whole bunch of little details from the shaman-grandmother that are very much in the Things We Do vein.
The manhwa is licensed by NetComics -- who, characteristically for them, have absolutely no info at all (or even a note!) about the series' hiatus -- and it's to them I headed to find out more about the artist-author, mid-reading. I wanted to find out if the author was native Korean (and with a pen-name like Marley, it's hard to tell) because the narrative seemed to expect the reader to know none of the folklore. If, say, the average kid growing up in Korea hears these random comments -- dokebi don't know how to wash themselves, the bowl in the kitchen is for the hearth-god, evil spirits are long-time ghosts -- then the manhwa's tone doesn't make sense.
I mean, if you've heard something all your life in random bits and pieces, you don't need to be lectured for four pages about it. It left me wondering: did the artist-author intend an eventual non-Korean audience? Or is this kind of folklore is not part of the random spattering of Things We Do for a child in modern Korea? Or was it all so new to the author that she assumed it would also be completely new even to her urban Korean readership?
Another manga that added to this line of thinking was Kekkaishi, a shonen manga revolving around a boy and girl who hold hereditary positions as guards of a sacred location (incidentally, now with a high school built on the land). The manga introduces each new ayakashi that comes to the land to soak up its power (which must be defeated, naturally, by the boy-and-girl team); the anime takes it even further and introduces every ayakashi and every character -- every blooming episode. (Oi, if it's episode 37 and the viewers still need to be told the main protagonist is named Yoshimori and he's a 15-year old in 9th grade, I'd say there's no freaking hope.)
It took me a few ayakashi to realize that with rare exception, they're all wholecloth from the mangaka's head. I'm guessing that's the reason for the introductions (and, I suspect, the anime tried to smooth this introduce-the-ayakashi intrusion by making it consistent for every character), but what it really did was highlight the number of animanga I've read/watched where there's no introduction. Either you pick it up from context, or you know it already (even if you didn't know you knew it) thanks to those myriad Things We Do details littering your social-personal mental landscape.
Nurarihyon no Mago is like that -- assuming you already generally know, or can pick it up pretty quickly -- and so is Ban Hon Sa, Pahanjip, Tokyo Bardo, even superficially lighter fare like Kannazuki no Miko or Kami Sen. All of those have significant plot-elements related to the supernatural or fantastical, but that's not the only kind of detail that assumes you have cultural experience. The animes for Neon Genesis Evangelion and Shiki both have louder-than-usual cicadas in the soundtrack, almost oppressively so; for the former, it's constant through the series to make you realize how screwed up the seasons are (that it's always the height of summer), while the latter does it to create an auditory impression of summer's heat.
If you know your cultural cues of advice-bits, then you know the families in Kekkaishi are a mix of Buddhism and onmyoji, but the character who ultimately gives the protagonist the most useful advice is a Shinto priest. And if you know your advice-bits about holiday observation, then a story's sense of place can exist from simple background visual clues, like the fact that the pictures flanking the front door are shiny and new, or that there's an evergreen wreath with a red bow on the front door.
An absence can also inform you, even if you've never stopped to articulate what you know, so aren't fully aware that the author doesn't know what you always sort of knew. When I fuss about authors writing stories set in unfamiliar cities who "get it wrong," my fussing is related to that same kind of What We Do awareness: you can get a lot of information from google maps, like street direction or distance, but there's always something you won't get, that you can't know, that signals that you (the author) are Not From Around Here. Maybe it's because your characters don't realize a street is one-way from 4pm to 6pm on weekdays only, or that your characters don't avoid a certain subway exit (or take it and don't complain about an escalator that's four-something floors in height), or that there's a reason to avoid Judicial Square on the first Monday in October.
You can get a lot wrong as an author, and if you get the tiny details right, it's a sign to readers that what's wrong is intentional. Lacking those details, what's wrong is read as just plain ignorance.
All living cultures -- from the macro-level of national to the micro-level of immediate family -- have these advice-bits, and all living cultures' advice-bits are continually evolving. Every new generation and every new bit of inter-cultural exposure and every new bit of technology and even every new bestseller or hit movie or top-forty song is going to have a subtle influence on your collection of advice-bits that you eventually will pass along to the next generation.
Thirty years ago you would've gotten an advice-bit about never accepting a ride from a stranger; now you might get an advice-bit about never accepting an internet chat with someone whose screen-name you don't know. Twenty years ago you might've been startled to find someone had an answering machine; these days, you might find yourself annoyed upon calling a friend and finding the voicemail on the friend's cellphone won't take your message. My grandmother never had a single bit of What We Do when it comes to how to leave a voicemail-message, but my generation is sure giving plenty of it to the next generations coming along.
That's the positive (existant) side of such What We Do messages, and it's something I can see in every story. Even those set in other places and other times (even if they don't exist outside the author's head) contain little bits here and there that indicate a sense of place. I've begun identifying less-experienced (or less-aware or less-particular) SFF authors by the inclusion of advice-bits that are distinctly regional/ethnic; a little bit of extrapolation and sometimes it's not hard to figure out that the rituals around, say, offering a guest some food are fundamentally Italian-American, for instance -- even if the food-names and the ritual-greeting have been changed. The more savvy an author is to these unspoken advice-bits, the more likely I am to find the world-building truly rich and varied (beyond the semi-political who-is-who and who-does-what level); for a this-world story, the more details like this, the more the sense-of-place really envelops the reader.
Of specific interest to me, of course, is where we get into the superstition/supernatural, because my main interest is in the combinations and crossovers between urban fantasy, cultural anthropology, and folklore itself. Somewhere in there, I started thinking about what I'd like to read, if it were available (and, sadly, in my language since I don't think I'll ever achieve Korean or Vietnamese reading skills in this lifetime). If the options were out there, I'd be reading a lot less of Japanese manga. Actually, I think it'd probably drop off my radar almost completely, with only a few exceptions -- and the rest would be replaced with Korean and Chinese stories. For whatever reason, I find those cultures make more sense to my outsider-self -- or perhaps I should say, I find there is more overlap in the what and how of the What We Do, when I compare my Southern-US-derived What We Do to the What We Do in Korean and Chinese stories.
(That overlap, too, is what can make you feel like "hey, we're not so different!" when you travel to another country. It's not always that your cultural bases are, or are not, that different, but that something, I think, in the tones and content of your ingrained What We Do overlaps to some degree with the general What We Do of that unfamiliar culture.)
These What We Do advice-bits are the ground of a culture. I don't mean foundation; I mean ground, as in, what you never notice because it's under your feet and you're not busy looking down, but knowing it means you have secure footing. The more you've absorbed (acculturation, really) of your particular culture(s) and sub-culture(s), the easier you find it to navigate without second thought. You know the fork goes on the left and the knife on the right; you don't think twice about whether your guests are offered food and drink (or none at all); you know when and how you're being insulted or complimented; you can toss off colloquial explanations (ie thunder + no rain) and have no fear you'll upset everyone listening.
Try to think of what it would do to your stories (both written and spoken, fictional and familial) if you didn't have all this in your head, if you'd somehow missed all that growing up -- didn't get it from relatives, neighbors, teachers. You'd still get it from somewhere: books, television, movies, even random comments heard on the street or on the radio, but I think it'd still reduce your collection, in a way.
That's because books (and even moreso for television and movies) are intended for a broad audience; the budgets are just too big to warrant doing a film that's only for People Who Live Here, and from what I've seen, most television producers shy away from strongly-regional stories, on the grounds that people from elsewhere "can't relate" or that the story "won't translate". If you've ever travelled in the US, watch the local news wherever you stay, and listen to the accents: more and more, a flat non-accent is becoming commonplace. Even on the pseudo-local news, I found fewer and fewer talking heads that had anything like the accents I heard when I stopped for gas or checked into the hotel or spoke with the docent at the town museum.
The same, I think, happens with these advice-bits. If you don't absorb (or aren't exposed to) the regionalism, you take the larger, broader, version to fill in the gaps -- the national level -- or you fill in those gaps on a familial micro-level. The latter is what I see with many multi-generational military families, who move so often neither parents nor children have a predominant regional flavor to their What We Do. Many families therefore freely adopt and adapt from every region to fill in the gaps, creating their own What We Do for holidays, birthdays, and explanations about thumps in the roof or just what the cat's staring at.
If, then, we derive these stories/advice-bits of What We Say Or Do from all around us, as part of the process of growing up in a family, a region, an ethnicity, a nation, any of the levels of culture, what if we lose it? What if, instead of the evolutionary slow-process of supplanting older with newer, or of broadening the regional into the national, we ditch it all -- or have it taken away?
[not done yet, just too busy to make this all one post]
no subject
Date: 18 Sep 2010 05:04 am (UTC)