Re: CHAT: Visible planets (was: Corpses)

Quoting Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>:

> At 10:57 AM 11/11/03 +0100, you wrote:
> >Quoting Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>:
> > > A side effect of this [going to a Antiochian Church) is that I don't
> think
> >of Arabs as all being
> > > Muslims, because the overwhelming majority of the Arabs that I
> personally
> > > know are Christians.
> >
> >You're just too rational for me. Most Arabs I know personally are
> Christian,
> >which certainly does not stop me from tending to think of Arabs as all
> Muslim.
>
> I'm curious how it happens that most of the Arabs you know are
> Christian.  I would think that this would be an unusual situation, given
> that most Arabs actually are Muslim.
All Arabs I know are people who've emmigrated to Sweden, and since certain
Arab countries are less than oppressively nice to their Christian minorities,
Christian Arabs are more likely to emmigrate than their Muslim counterparts.
Furthermore, with me being a member of the Swedish Covenant Church, and active
in its youth work (tho not this year, on account of me making year as an
exchange student in Aachen, Germany), not to mention that my father's a
pastor, people I know are disproportionately likely to be practicing
Christians. Add the standard element of chance, and it's not really that odd
at all.

> >I guess the key is that ethnicity, or indeed social group membership in
> >general, is something that happens to strangers; my friends are
> individuals.
>
> I perceive ethnicity and social group membership even in friends.
I was, of course, overstating for effect. I'm perfectly aware there are
cultural and social differences between my friends - particularly now that
most of the people I associate with are fellow exchange student from all over
Europe. What is true is that the better I know someone the less likely I am to
think of what ethnicity/class/subculture/etc he or she belongs.

A side effect is that when someone speaks of a group like, say, blacks or
senior citizens, what I usually think of isn't the people from these groups I
know personally, but some sort of media-derived generalizations of them.

An extreme case is the label "Black" - it always makes me think of American
Blacks, never of any of the few really dark-skinned people I've known
personally, or even of the not inconsiderable number of African immigrants now
living in Sweden.

Tangentially, I and the elder of my younger sisters have running "game"
consisting of placing people we know in categories
like "goth", "rocker", "computer geek" etc. This is of course a highly non-
serious activity, but what's interesting is that we always find it's harder to
so label people we know better than more remote acquaintances.

> (Although my husband doesn't look particularly
> Hispanic.  My half-Guatemalan friend was commenting a couple of months ago
> that both her children and mine were one-quarter Hispanic, and pointed out
> how different they looked - you really can't tell that my children are
> partly Hispanic, but three of her four children look strongly Hispanic.)
I've got to half-Spanish cousins; the elder looks perfectly Swedish, the
younger perfectly Spanish. It's the sort of thing that could inspire one that
start study genetics ...


                                                              Andreas

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