Yes! We Have No Bananas
Some societies have more taboos than others, perhaps due to the longevity and strength of a shared cultural tradition
When my wife and I traveled to China last summer, I found myself thinking about a subtle but meaningful distinction between Chinese and American culture. I’m no China expert, and China has a number of ethnic minorities (i.e., not Han) with their own cultures and histories. But there’s no question that “Chinese culture” exists and that a lot of cultural practices and attitudes are shared across wide swaths of Chinese society.
Japan similarly has a widely shared, particular culture. For example, it’s considered poor manners to take a bite out of a piece of nigiri sushi. (The chef at a fancy sushi joint in America even scolded me for it once!) There’s an idea, not really present in America even in higher-end places, at least in my experience, that dining at a restaurant is like being a guest in the chef’s home. Therefore, more is expected of the customer.
There are other aspects of Japanese culture you may read about: the intricate, ritualistic tea ceremonies that look so much like a Catholic Mass that some people speculate the ceremony is actually partially derived from it. The funeral custom of handling the postcremation bone fragments of the deceased with pairs of chopsticks, passing them by chopsticks from mourner to mourner—which creates the taboo against passing food from one pair of chopsticks to another at a dining table.
China has its own analogue to that (actually, this taboo exists in several Asian countries)—never stab the chopsticks into a bowl of rice, because (explanations differ) either bowls of rice are so offered to the deceased, or the upright sticks resemble incense burned at funerals. If you read about this online, you’ll see how it plays out in real life—a kid might get smacked for accidentally invoking the funeral custom during dinner, or (the one that concerns me) a clumsy American might offend a Chinese elder.
I find these taboos interesting because they evidence a very deep, long, highly developed culture, in which something like a funeral ritual is widely known and shared, to the point that basically everybody recognizes it and understands the “rule” against doing a thing that resembles it. I can’t even think of a funeral ritual, much less an example of how a person might accidentally invoke one at the dinner table, in America. Which makes me wonder, why is American culture so thin and lacking in these sorts of shared touchstones, ideas, rituals, images?
Taboos, and really culture in general, aren’t created or designed. To ask, for example, why two straight trees next to each other don’t call to mind the funeral incense would be to miss the point. Culture might seem arbitrary, but that’s not really correct; it makes sense from within the conception of the world that it comes from. To someone raised within a culture, that culture’s customs, beliefs and taboos might not even be perceptible.
American Taboos?
Perhaps there’s some of that going on in America too. If you asked me, I would say, America doesn’t have taboos. In America, you can stick your chopsticks in a bowl of rice and nobody would even notice! But that’s a little like the joke about how a Soviet citizen could stand in front of the Kremlin and yell, “Mr. Reagan is doing a terrible job!” Of course the actual violation would be different. And of course the taboo in your own culture is not something you’d readily think about or do, because that’s kind of the point.
What could an American do in a restaurant that would spark actual disgust, but would not do so universally in any culture? Is there a funeral rite an American could reenact, to the shock of his guests, at the table?
One person on a Reddit thread suggested that perhaps drinking from an urn would be an equivalent faux pas; but then, nobody would do that, while one might absently stow the chopsticks in the rice so they stay put. (Then again, one might only do that if one is from a culture in which it isn’t taboo, which, again, is kind of the point.)
But I still wonder whether Americans aren’t just more crass than other people: If some gleefully blasphemous Yankee pig opened a bar called “Drink Till You Die” and served the drinks in urns—well, some other Yankee pigs would pay to get drunk drinking out of urns. And maybe more to the point, there might not be enough of a widely shared culture to scold such a place out of business.
I could imagine that it might be taboo to name family-friendly businesses with sexual double entendres. And yet we have the pet salon called Doggie Style, the poke bowl shop called Lei’d Poke (“Lei’d Poke is a concept of Happy Endings Hospitality”), the seafood restaurant called Crabby Dick’s. Or one might imagine religion-related taboos for something like the tasteless pizza shop called Cheesus Crust, which, mercifully, went out of business. But for every person who would find this distasteful, there’s someone who finds it funny, and neither view quite wins out or speaks for “America.”
Another candidate for a shared American taboo might be burning the flag—but again, that ship sailed some time ago. Even spitting on soldiers doesn’t conjure a sense of absolute disgust across all of American society.
The closest thing to an American taboo I’ve come across is the idea that it’s bad manners to ask people how much money they make—or, perhaps, how much weight they’ve lost (or gained). Perhaps more than anything else, Americans broadly resent prying questions. Or to put it differently, American sensibilities particularly prize a wide sphere of privacy, perhaps tied to our individualism, and therefore questions which can be conversation starters or idle remarks in other cultures can come off as overly nosy in an American context.
Even this, however, does not feel quite as universal, or quite as severe a social violation, as the taboos that hold sway in many other countries and cultures.
Thick and Thin
So is our culture too diverse, unique and multifaceted to have shared rituals and taboos? Or are we just shameless?
The more I think about this, the more I think the answer is that “American” culture is quite diverse and somewhat “thin.” It is a collection of compromises and lowest common denominators. But “America” is a compendium of distinct cultures and peoples, too. Our various subcultures are probably more analogous to what we think of as “Chinese” or “Japanese” culture (or “French,” for that matter).
For example, sailors. In searching for American taboos, I discovered that many sailors hold to an old idea about bananas causing storms and shipwrecks (or, in the safer modern world, bad fishing days). This is not some winking joke, apparently; some captains even ban Banana Boat sunscreen on board. Some, of course, carry this on as a bit of self-aware nautical superstition that isn’t really believed but comes with the territory. But if you do some online reading, it appears that some sailors take it very seriously. There are charter boats where you can get in trouble for packing a banana as a snack. The attitude is not “Come on, man, just get in on the joke with us,” but more like “You brought a banana on board, you idiot!?”
Another group of subcultures is devout members of a religion. Perhaps at a dinner table where all the guests are Catholic, you’d not want to raise the glass of red wine for a toast and then go, “In a similar way, when the supper was ended He took the chalice ... .”
In the abstract, there’s something comforting about conformity, about knowing that a great deal of mental work has been done for you by society. In the abstract, a society without taboos and red lines is one of moral relativism and “you do you”: 320 million lonely, atomized, self-contained societies of one. In the abstract, a “thick” culture that demands your allegiance excites—or perhaps soothes—the conservative.
But such a culture also makes demands, not any less strong for being informal, that most Americans are not used to. We are used to following the “rules” of our own communities or subcultures—which, even then, to some extent we choose—while existing in the looser, broader American culture that for the most part leaves us alone. Most Americans, I suspect, would struggle to live in a culture that prescribes and proscribes much more than ours does.
Perhaps we could do without the sexual puns when we’re just going about our business. And you’d have to force that alcohol-filled urn into my cold, dead hands. Maybe I’m just an American, but I suppose I value that being my own decision.
 | A guest post by
|