Culture
While the dominant culture in the Pacific Northwest today is Anglo-American and Anglo-Canadian, there is significant Mexican and Chinese influence. 23% of Vancouver, B.C. is Chinese, and 50% do not speak English as their first language. Parts of Oregon and Washington are bilingual in both English and Spanish, and Native American culture is strong throughout the Pacific Northwest. The hippie movement also began in California and the Pacific Northwest. There have been proposals for certain parts of the Pacific Northwest becoming its own country because of the shared ecoregion and culture. The most well known proposals are Ecotopia from the Nine Nations of North America and Cascadia. However, the region is strongly divided by the international border, and this division has grown more rather than less powerful over the 20th century. In addition, although the metropolitan centers of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland are bound into a kind of urbanized region, they originated and continue to thrive as east-west gateways, competing with each other, rather than north-south connectors.
Pacific Northwest has among the most introverted people in the United States.
Cannabis use is relatively popular, especially around Vancouver BC, Bellingham, Seattle, Olympia, Spokane, Portland and Eugene. Several of these jurisdictions have made arrests for cannabis a low enforcement priority. Medical marijuana is legal in British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, as well as in Alaska, though that state prohibits its sale and has no licensed dispensaries, and in the Yukon, although less than 50 of the territory's residents are licensed to use medical marijuana and no legal dispensaries operate within its borders. As of December 6, 2012 possession of less than an ounce of marijuana for recreational use is slated to become legal in Washington state as a result of the state ballot measure, Initiative 502, which was approved by the state's voters on November 6, 2012 by a ten-point margin.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“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)