Matt Stefanko Intercultural Communications November 12, 2013 Cultural Legacies Harlan, Kentucky is a small town located in the

stretch of the Appalachian Mountains known as the Cumberland Plateau. It was a strange and isolated place back in the nineteenth century, and it would have remained unknown if two of its founding families, the Howards and the Turners, were able to get along. It all started one night when the two grandsons of the Howard and Turner families played each other in poker and then both accused the other of cheating. This eventually led to Little Bob Turner being shot and this event led to more and more killings in the Howard and Turner families. Harlan, Kentucky was not a place where people lived in harmony. There were almost identical feuds all over the Cumberland Plateau during this time period. In one town there were over a thousand murder indictments over a 40-year period in a town whose population never was more than fifteen thousand. Many of these violent acts never even made it to the indictment stage. This region was victim to a powerful strain of what sociologists call a culture of honor. Settled primarily by Scotch-Irish, the region was remote and lawless and had been fought over for a hundred years. The culture of honor helps explain the crime patterns in the American south and why murder rates are higher there than in the rest of the country. To really understand why small towns in Kentucky acted how they did in the nineteenth century, you have to go back hundreds of years to a country across the ocean. It matters not only where youre from but where all your ancestors are from as well.

In the early 1990's two psychologists, Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett, began an experiment to test the culture of honor. For their experiment they gave young men a questionnaire to fill out and then they had to turn it in at the end of the hallway. For some, that was all that happened. For the rest, they were called an asshole as they tried to get by a man in the hallway. Most men from the northern parts of the United States laughed off the incident and did not show any changes. However, the southerners got angry and their testosterone jumped. To test this, the psychologists took saliva samples before and after the incident and shook their hand to see how firm it was. With this test they were able to effectively see the culture of honor in action. Even though these young men werent living like their British ancestors, they still acted like they were living in Harlan, Kentucky in the nineteenth century. This was all just because they grew up in the South. Cultural legacies can be very strong forces that can continue for generation after generation. According to Gladwell, Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them (p. 175). It is basically when you feel the need to follow in your ancestors footsteps because of how the world thinks about that group of people. It is to keep your family name respected and to be like them in some way. Cultural legacies constantly affect our lives whether we realize it or not. Gladwell showed with the insult experiment that the southerners still have some of their past heritage and attitude in them even though it may be hard to see on the outside. Even as time goes on, history remains a big part of who people are, how they act, and what they want to become. One example in

history that has formed a cultural legacy is how the France always surrenders in war. Since they surrendered in World War I and II people start to few them as weak people who do not fight back. This could continue in French peoples lives. Another example is from when the colonies broke free from British rule. Americans today feel very privileged and are constantly worried about losing their freedom rights because they still take great pride in what happened over 200 years ago. These legacies are so prevalent in society that it becomes hard not to feel the same way. The Howard-Turner feud where they would kill each other because they killed their family or friends can easily be related to modern day gang violence today. It is the same basic idea and it shows how long cultural legacies can stick around. Before I read this chapter, I had no idea what a cultural legacy was. After learning more about them I would say that I have definitely seen the effects of cultural legacies in my own life. I would say that my cultural legacy in my family would be to graduate college, get a good job, and support my family. This is what people in my family have always done so its as if Im just expected to fall into that mold. Being part of a fraternity I also seem to fall into a cultural legacy. People expect you to just party all the time or wear certain clothes. When I went to a leadership conference called UIFI over the summer it was weird to see that a lot of the other fraternity men all dressed the same as each other. There are also regional cultural legacies that I have noticed. If I talk to people from the South they seem like theyre not as smart just by how they talk and how they were raised. While that is obviously not true in a lot of people, I feel like that is a cultural legacy for a lot of people. Gladwell really made me realize things about cultural legacies I never noticed before.

Sometimes it can be good to continue a cultural legacy, but unfortunately a lot of the time they can give way to racial and gendered generalizations.