LEP 10.2.

[yvannairie]

There was a poll about temperatures that caused a lot of hubbub recently and it's made me think about a different post I saw going around on Tumblr about how media never depicts warm places as "home", prescribing a northern hemisphere climate as normal and both southern hemisphere and equatorial climate as "foreign" and "exotic", and while I agree with the spirit of that post, the actual wording of it kind of irritated me as a northener, because media also rarely depicts actual northern climate as anything but exotic and mercilessly harsh.

Often this is done by representing anything north of 60 degrees north as a world of perpetual snow and ice, as tundra and wasteland, where there's no grass and no sunlight except in brief moments, and the winters and cold are exaggerated to resemble the summers of Antarctica, a literally uninhabitable continent. It's especially noticeable in the way people who live in the north are depicted -- when you get noble savage representations of Arctic indigenous peoples, they're always emphasising hardiness and a stubborn survivalist attitude, painting a picture of cultures that are too busy surviving to exhibit any joy or beauty, and when northern peoples are sufficiently naturalised as white, often we're depicted as completely culturally indistinguishable from a generic "western" culture, and our cultural practices that are distinctly northern are treated as quaint curiosities, or claimed to be stolen from sufficiently exoticised indigenous culture by progressive racists.

This is because the western imagination is firmly temperate more than it is really northern, and the generic western world is always imagining itself as being in the goldielocks zone with everyone around itself being some or other kind of savage because they lack one or other kind of abundance (either in arable land and resources, or in the fortitude it actually takes to cultivate the land and develop as a nation). Even people who are nominally considered being part of that imagination as it is used in (lbr, mostly USAmerican) media is still caricateurised when it falls outside of the very specific niche that is considered "normal". The joke about how Yankees are able to whitewash even other white people is largely about treating culture as a floating signifier or an aesthetic that can be stripped away to leave a purely "normal" person is the result of this.

This isn't to say that the exoticisation and appropriation of cultures that are distinctly non-western to a western imagination isn't a real problem. It's just that the representation of northern peoples also gets real bad real fast. Ultimately that post really spoke to something in me with the complaint that it's weird to see your home be reduced to a slice of tourist-familiar signifiers and then people acting like it's so wild and weird that aaaaanyone could live anywhere except continental US and central Europe.

Comments

[palominocorn]

I got in an argument with someone online that went like this:

Them: Iowa has the same climare as Russia.
Me: What part of Russia?
Them: You know, Russia.
Me: Russia has a lot of climates.
Them: It's the "Russian" climate!
Me: See this Koppen climate map? Russia has everything from Arctic to subtropical climates. What part of Russia is Iowa like?

Anyway as an Eastern European I feel you. We're stereotyped as cold and tough and unfriendly, partly because of the stereotypical climate, and I can't help but feel that Americans (who pride themselves on being so much friendlier than us) are polite without being the least bit kind. It's a big sore spot.

Even within the US the situation is... interesting. Try explaining a Los Angeles or Tampa climate to a New Yorker and their brain breaks.