https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109689/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
As a european, i found that one hillarious! They reversed all the cliché things, and express a lot of wonder about bizarrely presented austrian culture.
That's a gross misunderstanding of the topic! A Rac's natural lifespan is easily in the twenties, it's just that they're a display of status and virility, so those 5-7 years are actually the time after the original owner sells of the Rac to the less fortunate.
It's quite the irony. An animal held at such high esteem, but only as long as its young and fit, even though its ability to serve its purpose does not diminish significantly after the aforementioned time.
EDIT: regarding lifespan: I have a Japanese Crowned Rac which fell seriously ill at the age of 15 - mostly due to the first owner's mishandling. I can't bring myself to euthanise it though, as in its time it has been a loyal steed.
(Ignore the current user-submitted 'storyline' entry which doesn't represent the film fairly.)
> There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a "listener." This witchdoctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents bewitch their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a curse on children while teaching them the secret body rituals. The counter-magic of the witchdoctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patient simply tells the "listener" all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliest difficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema in these exorcism sessions is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of their own birth.
It's interesting how poorly this has aged.
You'd think reframing your own country's/culture's actions, behavior, politics or religion in intentionally alienated language (i.e. renaming key figures and concepts) would have some more practical examples.
The idea reminds me of the solution to fair sharing of a cake: have the person selected to cut it up go last when taking slices so they're incentivized to make all slices the same size. By being unable to benefit from any bias in the result (and in effect, potentially only being harmed by it) the person is forced to distance their immediate desire to have more cake from the act of dividing up the cake. Masking the country or cultural identity likewise (ideally) allows analyzing aspects of it without introducing in-group bias.
Of course I'm not sure simply spelling everything backwards is sufficient, but the article doesn't elaborate beyond this rather obvious use in satire.
As a result, it comes off as insincere and hard to take seriously, in a "It's obvious what has been done here, and it's really not that clever, and the author doggone well knows it" kind of way. Transparent lexical tricks are not sufficient to create the kind of mental distance or suspension of disbelief necessary.
The quotes in the article don't strike me as inherently satirical. They are an attempt to write in a completely distant fashion, applying the same anthropological rules to US culture from outside as they would any other strange culture.
It's just that modern media has so many examples of satirically exploring our own culture in this way that they inevitably read that way.
For example, in Bones, though Bones herself does not usually do it satirically, she does it earnestly; the satire emerges from the disconnect between her and her colleagues.
It may not be possible to do this sort of thing without evoking satire, but there are many attempts lately to encourage US readers to consider how, for example, the Trump era would have been described by US foreign correspondents if it was happening in another nation.
But then, almost anything reads like satire if you choose to read it as satire. Food packaging for example. "Serving suggestion"
I feel as though there should be a way to apply this depersonalization technique when attempting to de-escalate political and cultural discussions which have seized up due to tribalism.
The rest of the world gets an enormous amount of information from America. I've never lived in the US, but I know all the states. I couldn't write out all the counties in the UK. I know more US supreme court justices than combined from all other countries. I know the presidents going back 100 years, which I can't say I know even for the countries I've lived in for decades. I know some names of people who play the local sports there, the ones that aren't played in Europe. I even know brand names of businesses that don't have a European presence. This is all stuff outside of celebrity culture, where of course you get a huge number of US singers and actors.
What happens when you go to Europe and everybody knows a bunch of stuff about your home country? Does it surprise you? Do you ever run into people expecting you to know how the economy of Sweden was doing in the 90s? Or what the Departements of France are?
I grew up in the Midwestern US, on a farm, miles from the closest town and miles more from the closest city, the name of which would probably only register with people in a 2-5 State radius.
When I moved to New York City after college, I realized I could already name more streets and places in NYC than I could from my childhood. I knew the museums and the bridges, the boroughs, the landmarks; Battery Park and Castle Clinton were right out of Deus Ex. My "home town" didn't have a mayor; I couldn't name one of the nearby city, but I knew LaGuardia and Giuliani.
I'm not actually sure if NYC and LA are overrepresented in American media -- the NYC metro area is something like 8% of the US population, after all -- but because a half dozen cities are the backdrop of so much of American culture even the people who live in one have all the rest, thousands of miles away, to develop that distant familiarity with.
(On the topic of brands, the biggest question New Yorkers had for me, coming from the Midwest, was whether Long John Silver's really existed; the ads saturated New York advertising despite not having any locations within a state or three. Likewise, I'd never encountered a Dunkin Donuts prior to moving to the coast.)
Marx and Lenin wrote about the "idiocy of rural life" but there is an urban idiocy to go with it. Frequently you meet urban people who have no idea where wealth comes from, any more than you'd get an understanding of ecology from looking at a fish tank.
In New York it is a running gag that downstate black politicians are opposed to marijuana legalization because they think some of the business has to be "cut out" for black people because otherwise white people are going to sell all the weed, or that a city councilmember wants to see off-track betting subsidized (not even the racetrack!) to "save jobs".
The hegemony of coverage of the US legal system and politics causes all sorts of weird effects. You get Canadian protestors invoking the First Amendment .. to the US constitution. (The first amendment to the Canadian constitution seems to be the accession of Manitoba?)
Just as you get people wearing NY Yankees baseball caps everywhere, people outwith the US claim allegiance to one of the US political factions, follow along with the games, and get into fights with supporters of the opposing team.
Same with anyone in Europe I meet who speaks English (except for Ireland and UK): its their secondary language. So when I hear someone who's native Spanish speak English, I have compassion and appreciate their effort. For Dutch not so much. Its a relatively small and nowadays insignificant language. We grow up with English, its normal to speak, read, and comprehend English.
What you shouldn't forget is that you're generalizing. Americans refers to people of USA in this context, and USA is a large country, with a lot of cultural backgrounds, and various levels of intelligence. That goes for any country, but this country specifically has over 200 million people, and last 20 years it has become polarized as hell.
Many are mesmerized by it and lots want to travel, but are prohibited due to costs or time from doing so. Other countries are seen as exotic, my wife can probably name a dozen fashion companies from Europe and requests gifts from them for holidays. Going to most places outside of the Caribbean islands, Central and South America, or Canada is outside the limits of many people. Taking a vacation to Europe is often seen as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The language barrier is big, there's usually little need in many states to learn a second language, though in parts of California and Texas that being English/Spanish bilingual is becoming much more commonplace.
I've lived in, and visited many regions on America, and it is not homogeneous. The US is geographically large (many of our states are bigger than most European countries) but relatively sparse with often many different subcultures inside the same state. One place I lived was 1,000 km to the nearest foreign country. Accents in the various parts of the country used to be a lot more distinguishable but that seems to be evening out a little. It can still be difficult for some Americans to understand other Americans.
While many forms of media are commonly consumed by America, a lot of American subcultures are heavily and incorrectly stereotyped in media or ignored altogether. Most of the media comes out of very small regions of New York and California, with most of the details described being at a federal (national) level, which doesn't affect our day-to-day activities very much. Europeans may know a lot about America, but very little about the things which affect you. Most Americans also don't even know much about the rest of America, and many people can't even remember the state I live in, which is quite different from the other states nearby.
The problem is a fan-in vs fan-out problem. It's easy for many countries to look at the heavily broadcasted messages of America, but very difficult for Americans to become intimately familiar with details of other countries especially due to the language barriers. Modern technology has simplified this quite a bit, and hopefully Americans are becoming better informed travelers.
I remember staying at a hostel in Croatia with a diverse group. At breakfast we went around the room saying our names and home countries. There were Germans, Australians, Koreans, French, Brits, Brazilians… and then it got to me and people practically rolled their eyes when I said I was from the states.
For example, when I visit Europeans, it always throws me off a little when someone doesn’t know where my home state is. “Georgia? Is that near New York? Or is it near California?”
There is never the reverse expectation. I have never felt that a European was surprised that I didn’t know a particular state, political party, or news event going on. In fact, I have seen them impressed when I happen to know anything about their home country.
The U.S. is probably better compared to the E.U., or maybe Europe as a whole, in most contexts. It has centralized federal power for some things (like external affairs: diplomacy, war), but its power internally is quite weak sometimes (e.g., domestic enforcement of drug law). It's more like a loose grouping of countries than many people believe.
0:https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-... divide # of passports in circulation by population (~332M). Probably a slight under-estimate because some people counted in "population" might not be eligible for a passport.
The exception is anywhere east of Poland. Then they're shocked I know anything at all.
