Carbon Trace

I’ve used the term many times on Carbon Trace: culture, i.e. cycling culture or bicycle culture. Cordelia, of The Phenomenal Field, asked in the comments to my last post:

So given my analytic bent, and risking a war of semantics when I am curious about the substance of your post, what do you mean by local cycling “cultures”?

Semantics is something worth fighting over in the sense that we create much of the world by how we talk about it, so meaning is no small thing. You may recall the discussion of the verbs “ride” versus “drive” regarding what it is we do on a bicycle. That wasn’t just a silly snit over words because words are damned important.

So what do I mean by local cycling culture? Here’s how I answered Cordelia in the comments: “By ‘culture’ I am referring to the general customs, ethos, and zeitgeist of a particular place.”

That answer hardly gets the job done. But it does point in a general direction. I’m using “culture” generally the way some academics in the humanities use it — as a catchall term to refer to a myriad of human-produced influences on the socio-political scene.

By using the term “local culture” I actually mean to identify a subculture, i.e. a group within a society that has a shared set of customs, values, and language. A subculture operates within larger cultures. In the case of utility cyclists, we are a subculture of the general transportation culture of an area.

In order to define a local cycling culture we have to identify and catalog its customs, values, and language.

When I claim that sport cycling rules American cycling culture, I mean that the customs, values, and language of sport cycling appear to me to have achieved hegemony among American cyclists. Our understanding of what riding a bicycle is, what it is for, and how we should think and feel about it comes largely from a specific set of customs, values, and language.

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