In other cases, it is less immediate or direct, but no less profound. The first Euro-
pean colonists who came to the New World in the sixteenth century were able to sub-
due the indigenous peoples of North America by superior technology (like muskets
and artillery), by the manipulation of religious beliefs about the potential benevolent
foreigners, and by the coincidental importation of diseases, like syphilis, which killed
millions more Native Americans than the colonists’ bullets. It is possible that other
food-borne diseases, like avian flu and mad cow disease, could have an almost equally
devastating impact on local cultures today.
Intercultural contact need not be accomplished through force. Today, global cul-
tural forms are emerging that diffuse across national boundaries and are incorporated,
unevenly and incompletely, into different national and local cultures. These often
result in odd juxtapositions—a consultant in rural Africa talking on a cell phone or
downloading information from a laptop standing next to a woman carrying a pail of
water on her head. But these are no odder than a scene you might well have witnessed
in many parts of the United States just 70 years ago—cars speeding past homes with
outhouses and outdoor water pumps. Culture spreads unevenly and unequally and
often is accompanied by significant opposition and conflict.Culture in the 21st Century
Concepts such as culture, values, and norms help orient the sociologist, providing a
way to understand the world he or she is trying to study. They provide the context,
the “field” in which myriad individual experiences, motivations, and behaviors take
place. They are necessary to situate our individual experiences; they are the concepts
by which sociologists connect individual biography and history. They are the con-
cepts that we’ll use to understand the forces that hold society together and those that
drive it apart.
Cultures are constantly changing—from within and through their contact with
other cultures. A global culture is emerging of shared values and norms, shared tech-
nologies enabling common behaviors and attitudes. Increasingly, we share habits, fash-
ions, language, and technology with a wider range of people than ever in human
history. We are in that sense all becoming “one.” And, at the same time, in our daily
lives, we often resist the pull of these global forces and remain steadfastly loyal to
those ties that bind us to local cultural forms—kinship and family, our ethnic group,
religion, or community.
The cultural diversity that defines most industrialized societies also defines
American society, and that diversity will continue to provide moments of both
combinationandcollision, of separation and synthesis. Most people are rarely “all-
American” or feel completely like members of one ethnic or racial subculture. We’re
both. To be a hyphenated American—an Asian-American or Italian-American, for
example—is a way of expressing the fact that we don’t have to choose. Sometimes
you may feel more “Italian” than American, and other times you may feel more
“American” than Italian. And then, finally, there are times when you feel specifically
Italian-American, poised somewhere between, distinct and unique, and yet not com-
pletely fitting into either. As Bono sings in the U2 song “One”: “We’re one but we’re
not the same.”64 CHAPTER 2CULTURE AND SOCIETY