I have Italian ancestry and I’ve always found these guys to be cringe, but I also get why they do it . Many people in the United States yearn for meaning and interpersonal connection in their lives. “Being an Italian” provides a prepackaged, very commercialized possibility of community with little effort required - you’re just born to it, so instant acceptance, right?
The reality is often less Soprano’s chic and more “nonno and nonnina were illiterate farmhands who moved to the US for a better life. Nonno died from mystery cancer and all of nonnina’s bones dissolved after birthing her 15th child at 24. Now chew nonnina’s birthday cake for her”.
In no particular order, I have French, German, Dutch, Scottish, Irish, and a teensy tiny bit of “my great great great great grandmother was native American and we actually have the proof but nobody could ever tell without a DNA test so it only gets brought up when talking about obscure family genetic lineage”
Maybe it’s because my family is super midwest-usa-bible-belt, and I never even found out about most of it until a genetics test when I got married to my now wife (we wanted to know if kids would even be a medical possibility with our various issues), but I don’t identify with any of the places my ancestors lived in, so there isn’t a particular culture I’d like to be part of. And to be perfectly frank I’m not sure I want to be part of any culture, I just want to tend to my forest with fair Goldberry my wife.
You do make a good point though, if you’re looking to be part of something or feel particularly drawn to a culture after being immersed in what you think it’s really like, I could absolutely see this happening with 100% sincerity.
On the one hand, as a country of immigrants, there are tons of places where communities settled and brought their culture with them and so have a strong feeling of connection to their ancestry despite their culture today being completely different. The French Quarter of New Orleans comes to mind. On the other hand, we also kinda traded tradition for consumerism. We lack a real sense of history and culture of our own, making it easy to connect more with our hereditary culture than our country’s.
You can also add to this the ease modern technology has brought in communicating with people across the globe. Americans are probably more likely than just about any other country to have distant family connections in other countries that they are in contact with. If you’re French, you probably come from a generational line of French people who lived not far from you (relatively speaking). By comparison, as a kid, me and my parents went on vacation once to spend a week with some distant relatives of ours in Scotland because we have connections to a specific family castle there.
I have Italian ancestry and I’ve always found these guys to be cringe, but I also get why they do it . Many people in the United States yearn for meaning and interpersonal connection in their lives. “Being an Italian” provides a prepackaged, very commercialized possibility of community with little effort required - you’re just born to it, so instant acceptance, right?
The reality is often less Soprano’s chic and more “nonno and nonnina were illiterate farmhands who moved to the US for a better life. Nonno died from mystery cancer and all of nonnina’s bones dissolved after birthing her 15th child at 24. Now chew nonnina’s birthday cake for her”.
In no particular order, I have French, German, Dutch, Scottish, Irish, and a teensy tiny bit of “my great great great great grandmother was native American and we actually have the proof but nobody could ever tell without a DNA test so it only gets brought up when talking about obscure family genetic lineage”
Maybe it’s because my family is super midwest-usa-bible-belt, and I never even found out about most of it until a genetics test when I got married to my now wife (we wanted to know if kids would even be a medical possibility with our various issues), but I don’t identify with any of the places my ancestors lived in, so there isn’t a particular culture I’d like to be part of. And to be perfectly frank I’m not sure I want to be part of any culture, I just want to tend to my forest with fair
Goldberrymy wife.You do make a good point though, if you’re looking to be part of something or feel particularly drawn to a culture after being immersed in what you think it’s really like, I could absolutely see this happening with 100% sincerity.
On the one hand, as a country of immigrants, there are tons of places where communities settled and brought their culture with them and so have a strong feeling of connection to their ancestry despite their culture today being completely different. The French Quarter of New Orleans comes to mind. On the other hand, we also kinda traded tradition for consumerism. We lack a real sense of history and culture of our own, making it easy to connect more with our hereditary culture than our country’s.
You can also add to this the ease modern technology has brought in communicating with people across the globe. Americans are probably more likely than just about any other country to have distant family connections in other countries that they are in contact with. If you’re French, you probably come from a generational line of French people who lived not far from you (relatively speaking). By comparison, as a kid, me and my parents went on vacation once to spend a week with some distant relatives of ours in Scotland because we have connections to a specific family castle there.