Culture
Oklahoma is placed in the South by the United States Census Bureau, but lies fully or partially in the Southwest, and southern cultural regions by varying definitions, and partially in the Upland South and Great Plains by definitions of abstract geographical-cultural regions. Oklahomans have a high rate of English, Scotch-Irish, German, and Native American ancestry, with 25 different native languages spoken.
Because many Native Americans were forced to move to Oklahoma when White settlement in North America increased, Oklahoma has a lot of linguistic diversity. Mary Linn, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and the associate curator of Native American languages at the Sam Noble Museum, said that Oklahoma also has high levels of language endangerment.
Six governments have claimed the area now known as Oklahoma at different times, and 67 Native American tribes are represented in Oklahoma, including 39 federally recognized tribes, who are headquartered and have tribal jurisdictional areas in the state. Western ranchers, Native American tribes, southern settlers, and eastern oil barons have shaped the state's cultural predisposition, and its largest cities have been named among the most underrated cultural destinations in the United States.
While residents of Oklahoma are associated with stereotypical traits of southern hospitality – the Catalogue for Philanthropy ranks Oklahomans 4th in the nation for overall generosity – the state has also been associated with a negative cultural stereotype first popularized by John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath", which described the plight of uneducated, poverty-stricken Dust Bowl-era farmers deemed "Okies". However, the term is often used in a positive manner by Oklahomans.
Read more about this topic: Sports In Oklahoma
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says, I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)