All the Small Things

Sometimes I feel like it's cheating to go to Europe for an "intercultural experience." Austrian and American cultures really aren't that different -- on the surface. We consume the same products and lifestyles (thanks global capitalism!), think on the individual level, believe in progress (we're Westerners, after all), and have a strict concept of time. It takes time to recognize cultural differences between Austria and America, because they're hidden below the surface of this hegemonic Western consumption-oriented cultural facade. That's why I'm here for five months, instead of two weeks. And during my first week of classes, some of these small differences made themselves clear.



I shopped a class called "Black British Literature," in which the professor showed us a picture of the Black fiction section of a bookstore in East London. "Why do you think this exists?" she said. "We would never see an Austrian bookstore with a section for Turkish fiction in German." Everyone laughed at that suggestion. The idea that different races have different literary traditions, so common (but not uncontroversial, obviously) among English speakers, is unheard of in the German-speaking world. It's tempting to say that's because German-speaking countries haven't dealt with immigration until rather recently, but that's all together false. There was, of course, a minority Jewish population in central Europe since the Middle Ages, but there was also migration from Eastern Europe during the industrialization of the nineteenth century. So I don't have a brilliant analysis of why racial cleavages run so much deeper in English-speaking societies. But I thought the Austrians' astonishment at something I considered totally normal was interesting nonetheless.

Today, I experienced the opposite situation. I was meeting with members of my research group for a youth sociology class, and we got into a typical sociologists' conversation in which we make up completely ridiculous research topics and cloak them in high-brow theoretical language. (It's great to finally be back with my people; sociology students are fricking awesome.) I made a joke about the Harvard class "Loitering," in which you "stand in the vicinity of culture and watch it take place." Sounds totally ridiculous, right? But my Austrian groupmates didn't find it funny at all. "Yeah," they said, "that makes sense. It's what you do in a coffeehouse." Viennese coffeehouses, in which ordering one drink gives you license to sit, read, and people watch all day, are an element of Austrian culture with their own natural and social history. The act of loitering, which to Americans sounds like "bumming around" / not participating in capitalism (gasp!), is here considered a normal and natural part of social life, and it makes sense to study it sociologically.