When Cars and Culture Collide

UNIVERSITY OF MALTA

ANT3083: Material Culture

Dr Billiard Elise

WHEN CARS AND CULTURE COLLIDE

Mario Giovann Tabone [6688G]

2010/2011

Today’s culture managed to integrate the automobiles with its specifications as part of culture and society at large. Automobiles, as Richard Buckminister Fuller puts it, became “like part-time dwellings on wheels”, so the social animal had to interpret and reinvent his thinking about it. Notwithstanding its invention, the car chocked our cities with traffic; our meager natural resources are being increasingly threatened by new roads and the violation of health and safety issues.

Automobiles, that rapidly developed from an expensive toy of the rich to the standard passenger transport, were originally meant to be objects of utility to take individuals from position A to B. Today’s car serves more than just an object of utility. Today vehicles are being increasingly recognized as a status symbol. This sociological term that corresponds to perceived visible, ‘external denotation of the social position of the individuals’ is closely related to how individuals and groups interact and interpret the various cultural symbols. Clay McShane put it rightly when he said, “More than any other consumer good the motor car provided fantasies of status, freedom, and escape from the constrains of a highly disciplined urban, industrial order”.

James Agee (1909 –1955), an American author, journalist and poet was highly affected by this “mufflerized deity”, even if influenced negatively when at a small age of six his father was involved in an automobile accident. Agee, in a, ‘A Death in the Family’, a classic American story, portrays the family grief being assuaged with the idea that Jay Follet (the father of Rufus in the novel) did not suffer, but interestingly he was killed “graciously” by his defective automobile. The car gets a meaning through the several redactions of the car wreck narrative.

The car, being a symbol of...