Haven Cultures
Haven cultures are the products of marginalized groups experiencing cultural drift. Their isolation leads them to develop unique cultivars. These unique cultivars’ internal hierarchies often drive adherents to do more and more distinct and extreme things to signal cultural dedication, creating cultures that look very unique from the perspective of societies’ dominant pop cultures.
Haven cultures are unique in that members are pushed in rather than recruited. These cultures would not have formed were people not otherwise spurned by mainstream cultures due to some characteristic they hold.
Examples of Haven Cultures
- LGBT culture
- Some expat cultures
- Some forms of gang culture
- Early Irish-American culture
- Early Italian-American culture
Characteristics of Haven Cultures
The cohesion of haven cultures, especially in their early days, heavily depends on discrimination from predominant cultures.
Haven cultures are so dependent on mainstream discrimination that if the discrimination stops, they will either invent fictional discrimination, act in a way that intentionally generates discrimination to ensure their stability,[[84]](#_ftn84) or end up fading within a few generations. Consider Italian-American and Irish-American cultures, which were extremely cohesive in their early days only to collapse into shadows of their past prominence once anti-Italian and anti-Irish sentiments died down. Fortunately, not all haven cultures are subject to this conundrum when discrimination subsides; some evolve into stable cultures (which we will discuss next).
Haven cultures often have uniquely low bleed rates—especially when discrimination is high—because adherents have nowhere else to go.