I think America's obsession with the English royals is about an Anglo culture seeking mythic roots, as it were. America doesn't really have the same weight or depth of history that pretty much every other culture does. Our sociomagical focii -- if that's the term I want to use, I'm no anthropologist -- are almost entirely post-1900. We have a handful of culture heroes from before then -- Pocahontas, Squanto, the Pilgrims and Founding Fathers, Abe Lincoln, Billy the Kid who a lot of people don't know more than the name of -- but for the most part we didn't get any mythic figures of our own until superhero comic books. The widespread interest in Anglo royals seems to me to be largely about the semi-divine aspect of monarchs: the pharaoh Ra incarnate, the Japanese emperor of the lineage of Ameterasu, the kings and emperors of Europe crowned by the Pope as his temporal counterpart, etc. etc. etc. American society doesn't have a spiritual, magical, mythical focus nor a connection to the land, and we probably won't for several more centuries.
As for the interest in celebrities... that's a monkey brain thing. We want a connection with the monkeys who have high social status, they make the rules and that will give us better status of our own. Except that society's divorced extremely visible high status from actual effects on our lives, and our monkey brains haven't caught up.
If nothing else, thinking about it in these terms helps me feel less like reaching into the tvs and biting the pundits.
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FamousIrrelevant.I think America's obsession with the English royals is about an Anglo culture seeking mythic roots, as it were. America doesn't really have the same weight or depth of history that pretty much every other culture does. Our sociomagical focii -- if that's the term I want to use, I'm no anthropologist -- are almost entirely post-1900. We have a handful of culture heroes from before then -- Pocahontas, Squanto, the Pilgrims and Founding Fathers, Abe Lincoln, Billy the Kid who a lot of people don't know more than the name of -- but for the most part we didn't get any mythic figures of our own until superhero comic books. The widespread interest in Anglo royals seems to me to be largely about the semi-divine aspect of monarchs: the pharaoh Ra incarnate, the Japanese emperor of the lineage of Ameterasu, the kings and emperors of Europe crowned by the Pope as his temporal counterpart, etc. etc. etc. American society doesn't have a spiritual, magical, mythical focus nor a connection to the land, and we probably won't for several more centuries.
As for the interest in celebrities... that's a monkey brain thing. We want a connection with the monkeys who have high social status, they make the rules and that will give us better status of our own. Except that society's divorced extremely visible high status from actual effects on our lives, and our monkey brains haven't caught up.
If nothing else, thinking about it in these terms helps me feel less like reaching into the tvs and biting the pundits.