Aren't modes of speech to some extent cultural capital?
To take an obvious example, upper class boys who speak as though they were working class, are trying to assume some of the supposed 'coolness' of being street, without acknowledging any of the negative factors of poverty of income and opportunity.
If you're doing it to avoid being beaten up in a particular situation, that's one thing. If you're doing it outside of such a situation, it's patronising and stupid.
while beer doesn't even exist in China but we have amazing cuisines.
What about when those kids (of today) grow up a bit, do you think they will change the way they speak?
um...
<a href="http://s46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/mistersloane/?action=view¤t=images.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/mistersloane/images.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>
i wouldn't mind losing some of my californian accent and perhaps trying on the age old british affectation so popular in hollywood for a bit.
Ha, 'buddy' sounds (or, in this context, looks) totally American to me - I can't really imagine anyone in Britain using it. But then, I've never been to Inverness.
Tsingtao was a brewry started by Germans.
yeah but it's been in China since 1903!
Tsingtao was a brewry started by Germans and it is a German beer.
They're all inexact: that's the point. You and Danny are engaged in a little power play yourselves here: stating the acceptable limits of identity, validating racial categories, taking as given a monolithic conception of that most mistreated of phrases, "power relations".
I much prefer cultural miscegenation. And incidentally, if Dissensus is anything to go by, so do most people here--including you!
Hehehe.
Random little thought: would people say that addressing people as 'mate' is a marker of either being working-class or approximating towards working-class? In the past it obv would have been one of the two in any situation, but it seems like one of those things that's passed into the general culture and become an almost neutral term.
Myself, I prefer 'buddy' anyway (think that's an Invernesian/North-Eastern thing originally?).
Or are you saying a rich white guy speaking patois is exactly the same as a poor black guy speaking the same?
That's one interesting thing about living in a different country or even city, many people won't be able to decode the 'class' origin of an accent so readily.
Or are you saying a rich white guy speaking patois is exactly the same as a poor black guy speaking the same? That’s ignoring the whole context in which these dialects are spoken within.
That this lesson is easy to forget is shown dramatically by the transatlantic destiny of Michel Foucault. No one was more precise in his analytical decomposition of the tiny ingredients from which power is made, and no one was more critical of social explanations. And yet, as soon as Foucault was translated, he was immediately turned into the one who had "revealed" power relations behind every innocuous activity: madness, natural history, sex, administration, etc. This proves again withn what energy the notion of social explanation should be fought: even the genius of Michel Foucault could not prevent such a total inversion.
They're all inexact: that's the point. You and Danny are engaged in a little power play yourselves here: stating the acceptable limits of identity, validating racial categories, taking as given a monolithic conception of that most mistreated of phrases, "power relations".
I much prefer cultural miscegenation. And incidentally, if Dissensus is anything to go by, so do most people here--including you!
However: back in the early '90s when I wore baggy jeans, listened to hip-hop, and road a skateboard, I was in school in the Netherlands. /QUOTE]
Just an aside - I've never understood why these things have to go together - I love hip hop, but that's separate from what I like to wear and what social activities I like....to me breaking down those kind of connections is real cultural miscegenation, not takin on all the tropes of some sphere you like. ie unpackaging things...
No time to answer in full, but about minority groups that aren't in favour of complete cultural miscegenation and want to protect what they see as their culture? Do cultural/communal rights not count
Just an aside - I've never understood why these things have to go together - I love hip hop, but that's separate from what I like to wear and what social activities I like....to me breaking down those kind of connections is real cultural miscegenation, not takin on all the tropes of some sphere you like. ie unpackaging things...
No time to answer in full, but about minority groups that aren't in favour of complete cultural miscegenation and want to protect what they see as their culture? Do cultural/communal rights not count?