My Culture [HOT]
Furthermore, within a generation of living in the United States, American culture influenced and changed that cooking. For instance, my Pontian grandmother was initially very confused by the Thanksgiving foods, especially by the tradition of stuffing a turkey, which was unlike anything she had done before. After a disastrous mistake with the bag of giblets, she adapted the flavors and recipes she knew into a homemade stuffing that became a family tradition that continues to be passed down through the generations.
My Culture
These traditions and stories are wonderful to share with others and, in many cases, these stories and traditions turn into and inspire copyright-protected works. That is why the U.S. Copyright Office explored food and culture with the virtual event Copyright Office Presents: Food and Copyright on October 27, 2021. This program centered on food and copyright by showcasing copyright-protected works and authors who focus on the culinary aspects of a culture and use food to tell diverse stories in various mediums, including film, blogs, photography, short stories, and more.
Steve, this resonated with me as I was also raised in a Greek home. My grandparents were from Rhodes, after fleeing Crete years before. Even the way my Mother formed the shape of goudapiethas was dictated by habit under the Ottoman Empire decades before. It was wonderful to read your commentary. My Great Uncle was an Egyptiote at age 10, he eventually brought the family over one by one along with his Egyptian overlay, mingling it with the Rhodian and Cretan existing flavor cultures. Great to be Greek!
The music video starts with a comet crashing into a planet creating a universe and human civilisation as the Earth continues to rapidly evolve further in time. At the end of the video many children from different cultures walk into a building shaped rocket which launches up into space.
Once I got to Purdue in 2018, I was eager for all the new experiences that college would hold. I was becoming friends with people from across the world and I could see the pride they felt in their culture. Campus and communities would come alive for different cultural holidays. Seeing how joyful people were to celebrate their holidays, I wished I had never rejected my Chinese heritage.
Tumpeng is an Indonesian dish prepared for celebrations and festivals to show gratitude. The rice, shaped into a cone, is the centerpiece of the dish and represents the mountains of Indonesia, where the spirits of ancestors and gods reside. The rice cone is surrounded by different Indonesian dishes and vegetables, such as ayam goreng (fried chicken), telur pindang (boiled marble egg), tempeh and more. As one of the participants pointed out, tumpeng is used in Indonesian culture much like how a cake is used in Western cultures. Tumpeng would appear for birthdays, festivals, Indonesian Independence Day, family or community gatherings and other celebratory occasions.
These two events were a wonderful way to learn about new cultures and I encourage everyone to attend an event by one of these amazing organizations. There are so many events hosted for free that are open to all in the Purdue community by cultural centers and organizations across campus.
It's time to change the conversation around cultural appropriation. The term has been reduced to mere internet outrage, and dismissed as a tool devised by the "fun police" to keep people from enjoying Halloween. But the reality is cultural appropriation is a stain on American history. It's the manifestation of one of the earliest, most enduring racist ideals: the belief that people who belong to marginalized cultures are somehow less than human. Once you've dehumanized someone, you can co-opt their culture with ease; their language, dress, and customs aren't worthy of the respect you reserve for your own. On top of centuries of oppression, marginalized groups must now contend with people mocking their identity, right in front of their faces. And when they speak up, critics rush to attack and silence them.
Market Stands This attraction of Connect with my Culture has a market with multiple stands for all cultures, associations and student teams. In order to attract students to every stand we will hand out a passport to all visitors on which they can place a stamp for each umbrella and country they are visiting. Visitors that will visit all the stands can enter our competition to win great prizes!
Food stands Our Cultural Food Stands are a must-visit attraction of the event. We have a stand for a big range of cultures present on the TU/e campus, including Italy, India, Albania and Turkey, just to name a few! You'll be able to taste delicious dishes and traditional beverages. You'll get to experience different cultures also through their habits, earn stamps through their activities and learn about the history and traditions behind them.
Workshop squares and a Central Stage with programming for activities, demonstrations and performances Would you like to show off the best of YOUR culture or association during the event in a demonstration, dance-routine, poetry-slam, in-depth lecture, crash course eccentric habits, music performance, painting class or mind-blowing karaoke? We love both traditional and contemporary performances or just showing what your association or student team is working on. This could be with just one person or with over forty people, we will make it work. There will be 3 workshop areas and a central stage, with multiple slots of max. 30 minutes. Of course, we're also open to any other suggestions which show your community in the best way!
I had learned everything about New Jersey culture and I could no longer appear authentic when I returned home. I was mocked for my Bahamian accent - or rather, my lack thereof. In all of the stores that I shopped at, family and friends always thought it ok to stop me, my sister or my mother and asked what happened.
I felt stuck in between two places, two people, and two cultures. To the students at my school, I was still not one of them and everything that I had tried to learn on the outside was a coverup for my background - about which I would never talk to them. To those in The Bahamas and more specifically my small island community, I could not relate to them either. I was a fake, someone who had not chosen to remember her roots and someone who had chosen to assimilate.
"The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people. So what you read here is not what I've written. It's what I've said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don't really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course, there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule). I'm more concerned with American Indian people, students and others, who have begun to be absorbed into the white world through universities and other institutions. But even then it's a marginal sort of concern. It's very possible to grow into a red face with a white mind; and if that's a person's individual choice, so be it, but I have no use for them. This is part of the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans against American Indian peoples' today. My concern is with those American Indians who choose to resist this genocide, but who may be confused as to how to proceed. (You notice I use the term American Indian rather than Native American or Native indigenous people or Amerindian when referring to my people. There has been some controversy about such terms, and frankly, at this point, I find it absurd. Primarily it seems that American Indian is being rejected as European in origin--which is true. But all the above terms are European in origin; the only non-European way is to speak of Lakota--or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brule, etc.--and of the Dineh, the Miccousukee, and all the rest of the several hundred correct tribal names. (There is also some confusion about the word Indian, a mistaken belief that it refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met "Indio," from the Italian in dio, meaning "in God.") It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master's degree in "Indian Studies" or in "education" or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider. I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I'm not allowing for false distinctions. I'm not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I'm referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and "leftism" in general. I don't believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It's really just the same old song. The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, "revolutionized" physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these "thinkers" took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they "secularized" Christian religion, as the "scholars" like to say--and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer! This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment--that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one--is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive. Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology--and that is put in his own terms--he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel's philosophy in terms of "materialism," which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx' own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx'--and his followers'--links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others. Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But let's look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate. The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue. In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to "developing" a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be "developed" through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open--in the European view--to this sort of insanity. Most important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense of loss in all this. After all, their philosophers have despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through the indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools. But each new piece of that "progress" ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood--a replenishable, natural item--as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific "revolutions." Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. Now there's an "energy crisis," and uranium is becoming the dominant fuel. Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel only at the rate which they can show a good profit. That's their ethic, and maybe they will buy some time. Marxists, on the other hand, can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as rapidly as possible simply because it's the most "efficient" production fuel available. That's their ethic, and I fail to see where it's preferable. Like I said, Marxism is right smack in the middle of European tradition. It's the same old song. There's a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe's tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true. So now we, as American Indian people, are asked to believe that a "new" European revolutionary doctrine such as Marxism will reverse the negative effects of European history on us. European power relations are to be adjusted once again, and that's supposed to make things better for all of us. But what does this really mean? Right now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are living in what white society has designated a "National Sacrifice Area." What this means is that we have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white culture (not us) needs this uranium as energy production material. The cheapest, most efficient way for industry to extract and deal with the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste by-products right here at the digging sites. Right here where we live. This waste is radioactive and will make the entire region uninhabitable forever. This is considered by the industry, and by the white society that created this industry, to be an "acceptable" price to pay for energy resource development. Along the way they also plan to drain the water table under this part of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so the region becomes doubly uninhabitable. The same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and Hopi, up in the land of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow, and elsewhere. Thirty percent of the coal in the West and half of the uranium deposits in the United States have been found to lie under reservation land, so there is no way this can be called a minor issue. We are resisting being turned into a National Sacrifice Area. We are resisting being turned into a national sacrifice people. The costs of this industrial process are not acceptable to us. It is genocide to dig uranium here and drain the water table--no more, no less. Now let's suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek allies (we have). Let's suppose further that we were to take revolutionary Marxism at its word: that it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow of the European capitalists order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This would seem to be a natural alliance for American Indian people to enter into. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is true as far as it goes. But, as I've tried to point out, this "truth" is very deceptive. Revolutionary Marxism is committed t