What is subculture?

I want to address the concept of a subculture in this post mostly because I feel like that is the best way to explain this past week.  Especially Saturday.  "Subcultures" are so hard to define, because the term is generally used to describe any collection of people/traditions/interests between the size of the individual (n=1, ~0.00% of the population) to the size of 'mainstream' (lets say ~80% of the population.)  Subcultures are created by aggregates of individuals, just as a culture will be created by an aggregate of individual subcultures thus composing a larger aggregate of individuals.  As the aggregates grow, the individual fluctuations and variations at the individual level are smoothed out and are replaced by larger, sweeping, simpler trends.  So basically, culture works exactly like statistical mechanics transforming the uncertainties and probabilities of quantum mechanics into the elegant smooth universal laws of physics so neatly summarized in Newton's laws.  Cool.  This is a fairly meaningless musing on my part over the weekend, but I just wanted to state it briefly in order to frame the rest of this blog post.

Saturday I went to Moscow with A-----, a girl in one of my classes whom I met belly dancing a few weeks ago to "MegaVeganDay."  It was not what I expected it to be.  Though to be fair, I'm still not exactly sure what I expected it to be.  So disregarding my expectations, what it was in fact, was a vegan festival tucked away in a convention space in an artist colony in northern Moscow.  And like everything else in Russia, it was incredibly hard to find even though we knew we were within 100 meters of it.  None of the people around the metro station knew where "Flacon," the complex was, so after doing the old fashioned call-someone-who-is-near-a-computer-because-you-don't-have-a-smart-phone thing we were able to find the community.  The graffiti on the fence reminded me a lot of Melbourne's street masterpieces so I took a picture of it for you all.

Not really known for its street art, it was nice to see some in Moscow.  If you like street art, I highly recommend you to visit Melbourne, or if you would like to know more about Russian street art, visit a fellow ETA's blog.

When we found Flacon, we moved to the next stage of 'find that event.'  "Do you know where the vegetarian festival is?"  "We eat meat."  Not exactly a complete response.  I also eat meat, in fact I have been eating an awful lot of it since I got here.  But finally we found the festival in the most obvious place for a "mega" event - behind the dumpsters, around the corner through the construction. Clearly.  It turned out to be a collection of venders of vegan products and other things that would appeal to the demographic, a local vegan restaurant setting up camp, some very active activists trying to get people to adopt homeless dogs, and some very happy go lucky, everything is beautiful, wonderful, and wayyyy over simplified love the earth cartoons.  I am hoping to go into the environmental sciences, so obviously I care a great deal about the trees (see a good half of my former blog posts) but the clips about the crying little pig being brought to market and dreaming of his mommy and the one about the sad house in the middle of a landfill vs. the happy smiling house surrounded by solar panels didn't really do much against my ever present wall of cynicism.  But I maintain that MegaVeganDay was interesting, and that the sandwich I ate was actually very good and filling, though the vegan cheese scares me.  Vegetarian is natural, I respect vegetarians, I have several times been vegetarian for a few months at a time, and ideally if I had the willpower and the iron levels, I would prefer to be a vegetarian in order to be more consistant with the views I tend to express on environmentalism.  Vegan though?  Do you know how much processing goes into vegan food?  Anyone want to take a crack at the carbon footprint of creating vegan food?  I shall move on to a new topic now before I go too far on this.  But that is one subculture down.  

After maybe half an hour, 45 minutes checking out the vegan festival, we decided to head towards central Moscow to one of A------'s favorite museums, The State Museum of Oriental Art (Государственный музей исскуства народов востока) which turned out to be fantastic.  As in, really quite amazing.  There were three floors to the museum and we only made it through one, the art of Afghanistan, Iran, India, the Buryat (tribe around lake Baikal, see another ETA's blog) and Mongolia.  My first impression (okay, second.  First impression came from the angry babushka yelling at me for not checking my umbrella) was very good, walking into an entire room full of Afghani art.  Americans, especially now, have a pretty skewed view of the country, and it was really amazing to see so much beautiful and very impressive artwork that came from the country, independent of modern military struggles, independent of the current challenges the country faces.  It somehow made it more of a place that I could understand rather than the ethereal 'other' or 'enemy' or 'the place where American soldiers are dying that we barely hear about anymore.'  It is a place with a past and a future and people living there right now who are part of both.  

Musings aside, the rest of the art did not disappoint.  The Iranian miniatures were for me the most impressive.  The level of tiny detail would drive me crazy, but I can tell that they loved what they did.  It is the type of stuff my dad is really good at that unfortunately didn't make it down through the genetic stream.  I highly recommend the museum to all who venture to Moscow at any point in the future.  Our visit there concluded with a classical Indian dance concert conducted by a local teacher whose Russian was about on par with mine except with a very very thick Indian accent.  It was nice to finally be able to completely understand someone because he only used words I knew.  I don't know why this is, but classical Indian dance is one of the things that draws the most nostalgic feelings for Yale for me.  Maybe because of the strong prevalence of Indian culture on campus, maybe because of Roshni, maybe because I spent so much time trying to collaborate our dance group with the classical Indian group on campus, I'm not really sure why it is.  But it did remind me of how much I missed dancing.

Which was okay because two days later I made it to my second dance class.  Instead of belly dancing, this time it was ballroom.  I have a very limited experience with ballroom, but did pretty fine considering I didn't understand a lot of what the teacher was saying (I keep finding myself in very vocab specific situations) and was going almost completely off of mimicry.  I'd like to keep going to these, and I'm still holding out hope that soon I can start some of my proposed projects for the Fulbright, one of which was having an American Modern Dance class.  Or just a modern dance class than reflects more my style.  Or both.  We shall see how this all pans out.  

So with two subcultures down, the third and last one I want to address now, is the American subculture in the Russian mainstream.  There have been two events these past two weeks that specifically reminded me that I am an American amongst Russians.  The first was Halloween.  Though in truth I am not such a huge Halloween fan, I wanted to share some of the cultural experiences with my students.  So, we had a little party instead of class where we made jack-o-lanterns, watched Charlie Brown: The Great Pumpkin, learned Thriller (or an adaptation of it) and each group presented a short poem,  skit, or in the case of the advanced group, read a short selection from Macbeth.  I reworked Pippy Longstockings to fit the weather and my available wardrobe, and was joined by a devil, cat, flea market, very elaborate ghost, and a few others.  Some of the students were too shy to dress in costume, but it's the spirit that counts so lets just say that they came dressed as Russians.  

The more amenable-to-pictures half of the students who came.  

Making the jack-o-lanterns

Oranges made great mini jack-o-lanterns as pumpkins are expensive and hard to find.  

The other event that reminded me of my American-ness was the presidential election.  I had the privilege of voting two weeks early by absentee and as such of being unconcerned with the final death rites of both campaigns.  And though Russians may not be able to vote in the US election, they nonetheless seem to have strong opinions about it.  "I congratulate you on the election for Obama!"  "We are so glad Obama won."  "Better what we know than what is unknown."  "We like Obama.  He came to Russia and experienced the vodka, bears, chics" [originally chickens before I corrected him.  I am also still a bit in doubt of the veracity of this last statement, I somehow doubt any of Obama's state visits involved much experiencing of Russian 'chics', unless the speaker was referring to Obama's secret service in which case it is absolutely a true statement.  Here though, I am just faithfully reporting what I heard.]  "You voted for Obama?  Good."  And there are still areas of US politics that I have not yet covered in class.  "You are a Democrat?  So you are conservative?"  And without delving into my political views, I can safely say that my overwhelming thought on hearing that Obama was reelected, was "Oh thank goodness there doesn't need to be a recount, I'm not sure I could handle one more day of campaigning.  It's finally over!"  I hope President Obama can find time in his busy second term to look into some campaign finance/procedural reform.  

Election day was a day that I felt very proud to be a woman, and very proud of the strong women (and men) who fought for my right to vote.  (Lady Gaga feels so too.)  So as a closing thought, I want to say thank you to all of the brave suffragettes who risked so much, but who gained so much more.  And here's to a continuing of their noble work towards eventual equality in pay, opportunity, and citizen rights for all Americans.