Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [128]
New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have always had global moments, incongruous scenes of cultures colliding, but now we are having those moments in Nebraska. Increasingly, our lives are filled with moments that reveal how mixed together our world is becoming. Nebraskans now travel to Machu Picchu and Nepal. At the Fourth of July parade, Latino and Vietnamese children fly the biggest flags. Everyone eats onion blossoms and corn dogs.
The changes have come upon us quickly. We are reeling from culture shock. Yet, we are only dimly aware of how different our world has become. We are now living in a universe of infinite choices. Every act requires an existential decision. Are we Buddhist, Christian, or Jewish? Do we serve bread, tortillas, or naan? Do we use chopsticks or a fork? Do we listen to Los Lobos, the Chieftains, or Didi Kembola? Do we shake hands or bow? Do we watch the Superbowl or World Cup soccer?
In this changing universe of home, we all need a global positioning system for identity. At one time, to be born a Cuban, Japanese, or Inuit was to live a certain kind of life. Identity was totally determined by gender, clan, birth order, and place. There was very little choice involved. Today, identity from sense of place is no longer a given. Demographic clusters have replaced national identity as the great definers. People in these clusters share the same habits, activities, opinions, and tastes, whether they live in London, Milan, Hong Kong, or Lincoln. "Soon the question where do you come from will be as antiquated as what regiment do you belong to?" wrote Pico Iyer. Or, as British sociologist Michael Featherstone put it, "We are all living in each others' backyards."
We need to take care with our words, as they shape our perceptions and experience. We are not living in a global village; rather we're quartered in a chain hotel in a global strip mall. In global shopping malls, the stories and metaphors are not our own, but rather are designed to sell us stuff. Everything is about money. Globalization means the world is for sale and that there is no place left where we can hide.
In our increasingly fragmented "hotel society," we have more freedom and more possibilities of making serious mistakes. All of us must construct our own identities and become experts at cultural switching. Sometimes that leaves us feeling like we are motherless children, or as one friend said, "We need a tribe."
Refugees have much to teach us about staying connected to a "tribe" while moving in many cultural contexts. One of the greatest challenges for refugees is to create a niche that allows them to maintain their ethnic identity and become American. This shouldn't be an either/or, but rather, a both/and situation. Pride in ethnic background shouldn't preclude acquiring a national identity. But as African Americans have long acknowledged, it's difficult to balance racial and ethnic identity with national identity. In 1903 in The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, "The American Negro longs to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging, he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America. ... He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism. ... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American."
Maintaining a both/and identity is complex. As a Mexican American teenager said, "I have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans. It's exhausting."
However, by now all of us struggle to maintain multiple identities. We exhibit multiple personalities, not the disorder, but the coping strategy. We do a lot of cultural switching, and we also do an awful lot of making things new. We all have "designer lives," creating our own ecological niches from our collective identities.
We have a great deal of psychological research that shows the adaptiveness of what social scientists call "bicultural or multicultural identity." Bicultural or multicultural people