Actually I have the privilege to have living grand ma who did not belong to western culture. A lot of our grandma and pa in Spain (maybe MIgerus too) lived in isolated towns in Central or Southern Spain.. antrhopologists from England and France came to take details.. and that was INDEED a different culture.

A lot of those people moved to spanish cities.. and the cultural shock was... well... it is lovely to hear how your grand ma explains you a cultural shock... something I have never lived...and something she does not quite understand from ani ntellectual point of view but actually she knows what it is better than I would ever know.

It is great how he uses even now a mixture of words.. or how she does not find words to describe things froma notehr culture/world/experience when at 16 she came to live to Barcelona , suddenly and utterly.

Cry, fear, paralization, lost sensation.. emptiness...and no words...The most important aspect of culture , I learnt from my family, is space distribution/structure , it is the most brutal form of narrative (cities, suburbs, ex-suburbs..) so actually the main differences among us would probably be between born in the city and born in a litlle town.. other than that.. purely subcultures..
an adaptation to thosebecause the basic narratives of western societies reached spanish town arund the 70-80s.

Regarding subculture I like the cosmopolitan left education-is-the-most important-thing for survival and status with a  strong touch of I-love-cities-hate-suburb-love-small-isolated-towns crowd...go figure...

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

But the culture in which I am currently immersed is definitely Central European multiculti.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

I'd like to say, like ATinNM, that I am New Left - but actually I am apolitical, atheist, amoral and ayupmeduck.

Evrything that ever happened to me appears to be an accident. I have tried to make plans and still do have large schemes running - but the only insight I can offer to the culture question, is that it is only the perception of planning that matters.

However much you plan, once you cross the threshold it all changes. So by simply crossing thresholds, you cut out the middleman of doubt.

I suppose it is a continuation of my hippy 60's past - "Go with the flow" ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

I'd also add in some other influences.  I'd say "sub-cultures," but I think there's a corporate culture that isn't so "sub" -- fast food, cars and television spring to mind.  I don't think their influence on me can be minimized, although my upbringing was originally designed to block out the dominant culture at all costs.  I was sent to a very small private school and not allowed to listen to the radio, watch tv, or mix with other kids.  This was, of course, wildly unsuccessful.

Then there are the actual sub-cultures -- I'm familiar with religious fanatics and bikers, two cultures I detest, and then art and music --  cultures that I've sought out and embraced at various times.  

When I was young, because of my isolated upbring and the submersion in all things Scottish, I self-identified as being much more European than American.  This turned out to be a conceit of youth, which I discovered only after spending some weeks in England where I had my first (almost only) real burst of patriotism.

Still, I feel most comfortable around poor people and misfits in any culture.  I get along fine in wealthy circles and feel the most dislocation around middle-class, "normal" people.  I'm also comfortable and enjoy academic circles for some reason.  I give credit to my family for that last -- although I did very well in most of my schooling, it was my family who instilled a love of having really long, detailed, pointless arguments over obscure subjects.  So even without the proper background for it, I like it.  On the other hand, maybe academics fall firmly into the misfit category?

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes

Western->European->Celtic->Scots-Irish->American->Okie->humanist->universalist

My people, the fathers and grandfathers who form the cultural lineage of my family, are of the American branch of those we call the Scots-Irish.  People from Lowland Scotland who settled the Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland at the invitation of a Protestant English king who wanted to supplant the Irish Catholics.  The Troubles began the day they arrived, and continue more or less to this day.  As I understand it, before they were Ulstermen, before they were Lowland Scots, they were the Celts who fought the Romans to a standstill in northern Britain and inspired Hadrian to build his wall.  They have been fighting somebody for as long as they have been an identifiable people.

A couple of English kings later, when the land deal in Northern Ireland had become a good deal more troublesome and a good deal less attractive, rumors of the promise of America attracted a substantial migration to the new colonies.  These transplanted Scots/Irish/Americans tended to settle not in the built up English enclaves along the coast, but to migrate to the western frontier of the colonies, where they were more than happy to fight the native peoples for land to settle on, and when necessary to fight the more Anglified gentry of the coasts whenever their independence was threatened.  When that first great wave of migration crested early in the eighteenth century, that frontier ran roughly along the Appalachian Mountains, where the Scots-Irish culture survives almost intact to this day.  As the American frontier pushed west these folks tended to move west with it.  They embody what we think of as the American pioneer spirit.  Some call it the American spirit of independence.  Up close it sometimes looks a lot more like pig-headed stubbornness.

I only learned most of this quite recently, from James Webb's book Born Fighting.  Until I read Webb's book, I had only the vaguest notions of where my family came from and how we got where we are.  Born Fighting was an enlightenment to me.  Lots of things about my family's story, which didn't make much sense to me before, now make perfect sense.  And some things about my country that didn't make all that much sense to me, now at least make some sense.  For good or ill, a deep stratum of that culture underlies much of what we think of as American culture.  To any European struggling to understand why Americans sometimes do such crazy shit, I highly recommmend Webb's book.  

Oh, and everything from Western to Okie is pretty much what I inherited.  The humanist and universalist bits I've acquired on my own.

We all bleed the same color.

Twee geloven op één kussen, daar slaapt de duivel tussen.

The calvinist family was a family of teachers with a farm background and the catholic family a (lower) middle-class family from a small village. I grew up in a rural village - far away* from both families - which in the mean while has become something like an exurb city. Development all the time. That's one of the few things it shares with Berlin...

*Far away in Dutch terms means over 100 kilometres.

To quote Ian Dury;-
I'm from Essex
as if you couldn't tell
My given name was Micky, I come from Billericay
and I'm doing very well

I am from Essex, but I am not of Essex. I always felt like a stranger there, there is a truth in the stereotype of Essex attitudes that I did not share. When I went to university in Manchester I felt more at home there within a couple of months than I ever did back home.

But more than that, my principal culture is male. It is extraordinary the extent to which the genders co-exist in almost parallel universes. We are brought up with different expectations and behavioural patterns, we are encouraged, trained, en-cultured to be different sorts of people. That's over and above the actual differences in our nature and how hormones impact it.

I notice this now as I discover the extent to which I don't behave properly, I don't react as a woman should. I don't share certain assumptions, I don't have certain points of view. I wasn't brought up as a girl, I didn't imbibe those expectations, I wasn't trained for those behaviours and...well {shrug}

keep to the Fen Causeway