Politics & Power Quote by Alan Dundes

Dundes is doing what folklorists often do at their best and worst: turning a culture into a diagnostic tool. The line has the brisk confidence of a comparative claim, but its real engine is provocation. By setting “ancestor worship” against America’s supposed preference for children, he’s not just describing different family customs; he’s sketching two competing moral hierarchies. In one, the past sits at the head of the table. In the other, the future does.

The subtext is sharper than the surface: “does not really resonate” quietly reframes filial piety as a message that fails in an American market. That’s classic Dundes-era cultural analysis, when academics were increasingly attentive to symbolism but still willing to generalize in broad strokes. The sentence reads like a footnote with teeth, the kind that pushes students to recognize their own cultural defaults by making them sound strange. “Favor children” is doing heavy lifting here, hinting at American youth obsession, the cult of novelty, and a family narrative that runs forward (self-making, new beginnings) rather than backward (lineage, obligation).

Context matters because the claim is also a mirror held up to American discomfort with aging: retirement homes, euphemisms for old age, and a social economy that prizes productivity and reinvention. Still, the formulation risks collapsing “Asian cultures” into a single script and “Americans” into a single temperament, smoothing over immigrant households, multigenerational living, and the ways respect can be expressed without ritual. The intent isn’t nuance; it’s contrast, meant to make cultural priorities visible by overstating them.