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164 After our tour of the visible, tangible, and readily countable features of the American landscape in Chapters 2 and 3, we could affirm that the conventional wisdom does have some basis in fact. There has indeed been a pervasive homogenization or, more strictly, a repetitive patterning, a tessellation , of places, of modes of work and consumption. The modern market system in alliance with the state has been triumphant, and decidedly so. The main business of America is business: making things, providing services, getting, spending, and, in collusion with government, arranging spatial matters so as to optimize the accumulation of capital and its profitable investment. But we must also attach to any such statement a major proviso. Other processes have grafted both major and minor modifications onto what would otherwise be a predictable social and economic geography. In a country thickly speckled with aberrations from the expected, as set forth in Chapter 4, demographic change complicates the scenario, especially with the introduction of unfamiliar ethnic groups. The pursuit of pleasure can be ever so fickle in its geographic expression. Then, of course, neither arbitrary corporate/ governmental/individual place-making nor self-conscious place-making submits to systematic formulation. Thus, rather than a smoothly predictable vista, we can begin to characterize the American land concisely, if in admittedly rather ungainly fashion, as a Tessellated-cum-Aleatory Space, or, in less lofty terms, as a flawed mosaic with random patches. But further complicating an already complex scene, what we must consider now are other usually less visible or countable levels or facets of American life that may not be responsive to the forces of homogenization but matter mightily in immediate thought, feeling, action, and personal and place identity and, ultimately, in fashioning grander regional identities. I have in mind cultural attributes that not only are not necessarily obedient 5 Territorial Diversities in the Cultural Realm: Yea and Nay to centralizing processes but can also fail to impede their operation. The Powers That Be are not annoyed by the existence of regional dialects so long as the masses can communicate efficiently via a single language. Similarly, they scarcely notice the preference of some folks for hush puppies as against clams or mountain oysters or for a Queen Anne residence versus a McMansion . Nor do they care much whether customers buy bluegrass rather than the blues so long as they keep shelling out for enough recordings, or whether they attend Lutheran rather than Assembly of God services. There are more important issues to ponder in the counting house. The cultural attributes in question here—with the exception of dress and ornament and folk arts and handicrafts—are at best marginally visible or tangible. We are dealing, then, with patterns of behavior. Thus our imaginary traveler would have to sojourn for protracted periods in a number of localities, observing and listening attentively, before being able to plot the territorial range of these sets of cultural practices, ones that do pry places apart in a serious way. As already suggested, the cultural phenomena in question usually bear significant emotional weight and are not evaluated in dollar terms, unlike dwellings, for example, where affection may be contaminated by monetary considerations. Perhaps we are most deeply involved emotionally with language, religion, and political beliefs. Let us begin with Language None of the cultural attributes we might examine may be more fundamental to defining personal, group, and place identity than this quintessential human acquisition. As we have noted earlier, one of the basic facts about the United States is that it has its very own national language, one of the many more or less mutually intelligible dialects of English, a fact that promotes ethnic self-awareness, especially whenever a Yank converses with a Scot, Jamaican, East Indian, South African, or even a Canadian. “When the Thirteen Colonies became the United States, there were already indications that American English was becoming a separate entity from British English” (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998, 105; also see Montgomery 2003) and also that regional variants of the new colonial tongue had already begun to emerge (Simpson 1986, 101–6). If, as I have also pointed out earlier, printed materials certainly promoted national uniformity in vocabulary, orthography, and grammar, it is not clear how the spoken language attained its past and present form. The circulation of schoolmasters, preachers, statesmen, and lecturers may offer a partial answer. In recent times, of course, phonograph recordings, movies , radio, and television, as well as massive internal migrations of...

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