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Are you cultural or post-cultural? Feb 09, 2012
By George F. Simons
"at diversophy.com"
Anne Witte has presented us with quite a readable guide to learning about and using culture in times of great cultural upheaval and transition. Her book deals in a matter-of-fact but information rich way with this dilemma.
To quote the preface, introducing the first part of her book, "... culture is presented as less a question of states and nationalities and more of a series of instances and processes that distinguish some groups from others." This addresses the raging debate as to whether culture is a real and stable entity or near chaotic intersection of individuals, contexts, and objectives, which leads toward skepticism of culture as a concept worthy of attention. In other words she provides an understandable and credible "both/and" position of being and becoming in the place of the paralyzing "either/or" standoff. It is organic rather than dialectical. Seminal issues such as culture itself, and such cultural components as language, authority, and values are explored in this first part.
In the second part of the book Witte looks at the behavior of nations in a globalizing world, the contagion and hybridization of cultural strategies in the face of raging technology and threatened ecosystems. Deliberately opting out of a single disciplinary point of view, she is able to enrich our perspectives from a variety of disciplines, and provides a goodly-sized bibliography to substantiate this. Part 2 deals with transitions, from the cultural to the national, to the post-national, to the post-cultural and the globalized. Again. it puts perspective on how we understand culture as, for example, expressed in this headline in the opening of chapter 6, "Culture is a creative and adaptive force-incompatible with static concepts like ethnicity and territory." The final chapter summarizes the ten critical learnings of the book and raises questions about how we go forward with what we understand as culture and how we will educate for it.
What I like most about Past and Future Culture is the tangibility of the discussion. Closely tied to history, language, and human behavior, and expressed in artifacts, rituals and values, it becomes hard to deny either the power of culture or the complexity of change underway within and between cultures. For example, the chapter on values makes full recognition of the power of religious and philosophical beliefs in the building and exchange of cultural values, topics often skirted in more antiseptic and supposedly scientific discussions. There are endowments of cultural capital that can be appreciated, exchanged, and developed, no matter the relativity or reality assigned to them by critics upset with fears of essentialism. Identifying cultural discourse as "illusions" or "grand narratives" does not excuse us from an examination of how they function in society, politics and personal life as they wax and wane over the centuries. In this context the past and future of language, intimately connected with how we conceive of, generate and transmit culture, as well as how we understand and misunderstand each other, is concretely dealt with. And the author really admits that the cursory discussion of issues may lead to some points being disputed or contradicted. Be that as it may, the book broadens the context of the often somewhat jejune discussion that goes on around cultural matters.
Contributing both to the reach and readability of this volume is the fact that each of the major chapters is followed by a "culture focus" that provides in a few pages a multidisciplinary overview of "spheres" of civilization, their development, critical points in their history, and an overview of their engagement with the rest of the world. I find this particularly important in the face of the fact that there seems to be an abiding if not cultivated ignorance of such dynamics in the intercultural field. I say "ignorance" not only in the sense of unknowing, but in the sense of choosing not to pay attention to the real-life profiles of civilizations, their geography, and their interaction both historical and growing with other parts of the world.
For this reviewer, Witte's concept of "post-cultural" is the most challenging semantically. Agreed, as the author asserts, "individuals of postmodern societies can transcend, enhance or compromise their membership in cultural communities, belonging to more than one culture, or create new identity groups based on the knowledge of scripts." For me what is described as post-cultural is in fact a part of the flow of culture itself and how we construct and reconstruct our identities. Perhaps there is a shortage of words to express the consistency of where we're coming from and where we are going in order to achieve a seamless view of culture and history. Perhaps this is akin to news casting where ever-fresh headlines are needed if listeners and viewers are to continue to pay attention to an ongoing phenomenon.
When dealing with the macro aspects of cultural phenomenon, it is all too easy for us to forget what Daniel Sibony (De l'identité à l'existence) points out as the individual's life struggle to move from identity to existence, to discover and create the "points d'amour" that allow us to live and die most fully and most humanly. Culture is in flux ultimately because of this inmate human need to exist beyond identity. The urge to "exist" drives not only ideas and inventiveness, and all sorts of striving, but also empathy, human connectedness, magnanimity and sacrifice. This is true whether our culture is one that prescribes individual achievement or collective harmony. It is true whether we are rooted natives, expats, immigrants, or asylum-seekers. Witte's book comes closer than most in making us aware of culture as each of us holds it, expresses it, and adapts it and applies it or attempts to reject it in our search to exist.
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