The belief in a cultural mainstream gave way to the ideal of pluralism.

In the western world in the 1990s, even sophisticated performance art became part of the cultural mainstream: performance art as a complete artform gained admittance into art museums and became a museal topic.

Many hearing-impaired adults - and their number is growing - have isolated themselves from the cultural mainstream because of hearing loss.

Craftsmen and pattern-books did come over from the Protestant Low Countries, but by and large our relative isolation from the European cultural mainstream led to a national style which was a bizarre though attractive mixture of Gothic and classical styles.

The influence of both Haridas and Bina Chaudhuri (and their early protégés in San Francisco) upon the emergence of Asian philosophies and ways of knowing within the American cultural mainstream would be difficult to overestimate.

Now we live in a multicultural society, where we're a series of subcultures overlapping a bit, but there is no cultural mainstream any more.

It was annexed by Thailand in 1902, but there have been only periodic efforts to integrate it into the cultural and economic mainstream of the country.

Could it be that the tough-but-tender ethos of Robert Bly's "Iron John" has trickled down into the cultural mainstream despite the buckets of glib derision heaped on the men's movement?

In recent decades, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" has gained a higher profile in the cultural mainstream due to an increasing proliferation of cover versions by other musical artists, most having been recorded during the last ten years.

The Christianisation of Scotland brought the country into the cultural mainstream of Europe.