Cultural Hybridity E-Book

Peter Burke

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 156

Beschreibung

The period in which we live is marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters of all kinds. However we react to it, the global trend towards mixing or hybridization is impossible to miss, from curry and chips - recently voted the favourite dish in Britain - to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu, 'Bollywood' films or salsa or reggae music. Some people celebrate these phenomena, whilst others fear or condemn them. No wonder, then, that theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Ien Ang, have engaged with hybridity in their work and sought to untangle these complex events and reactions; or that a variety of disciplines now devote increasing attention to the works of these theorists and to the processes of cultural encounter, contact, interaction, exchange and hybridization. In this concise book, leading historian Peter Burke considers these fascinating and contested phenomena, ranging over theories, practices, processes and events in a manner that is as wide-ranging and vibrant as the topic at hand.

Leseprobe

Cultural Hybridity

PETER BURKE

polity

Copyright © Peter Burke 2009

The right of Peter Burke to be identified as Author of this Work has beenasserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose ofcriticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the priorpermission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4696-1ISBN-13: 978–0-7456–4697-8 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For Marco and LaraMulti-cultural children

‘All cultures are the result of a mishmash’(Claude Lévi-Strauss)

‘The history of all cultures is the history ofcultural borrowing’(Edward Said)

‘Today, all cultures are frontier cultures’(Nestor Canclini)

CONTENTS

Preface to the English edition page

Introduction

Varieties of object

Varieties of terminology

Varieties of situation

Varieties of response

Varieties of outcome

Notes

Index

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

This brief essay on an extensive subject has a complicated international history. In 1999 the Einstein Forum invited me to give a lecture in Berlin on a topic of contemporary relevance and I chose ‘cultural exchange’: the following year Suhrkampf Verlag of Frankfurt published a German translation of the lecture under the title Kultureller Austausch. A couple of years later a Brazilian publisher, Editora Unisinos of São Leopoldo, invited me to write a short book for a series of theirs, so I revised the Berlin lecture and expanded it from about thirty pages to about a hundred, adding a number of Brazilian examples. This Brazilian version, Hibridismo cultural, appeared in 2003.

More recently, Ediciones Akal suggested a Spanish translation, and I took advantage of this opportunity to expand the essay a little more, as well as to update the references. An Italian publisher, QuiEdit of Verona, then expressed interest, and I thought that this might also be the time for an English version to appear, once again expanded. It now weighs in at over 130 pages.

I have learned a good deal in the course of these attempts to revise and expand what was originally a lecture, as well as to communicate with German, Brazilian, Spanish, Italian and Anglophone readers and to find examples relevant to their different experiences. One might say that cultural globalization, a theme that is naturally discussed in the essay itself, has made its impact (if not had its revenge) on the author.

INTRODUCTION

A recent discussion of post-modernity, by the British historian Perry Anderson, describes the tendency of the period we live in to celebrate the ‘cross-over, the hybrid, the pot-pourri’.1 More exactly, some people – like the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, especially in his Satanic Verses (1988) – celebrate these phenomena, while others fear or condemn them. The condemnations are issued, it should be added, from very different political positions, since the critics of hybridity include Muslim fundamentalists, white segregationists and black separatists. The conceptual problems raised by the employment of the term ‘hybridity’, which has been described as ‘maddeningly elastic’, will be discussed in chapter 2 below.2

One sign of the intellectual climate of our age is the growing use of the term ‘essentialism’ as a way of criticizing one’s opponent in many kinds of argument. Nations, social classes, tribes and castes have all been ‘deconstructed’ in the sense of being described as false entities. An unusually sophisticated example of the trend is a book by a French anthropologist, Jean-Loup Amselle, called Logiques métisses (1990). Amselle, a specialist on West Africa, argues that there is no such thing as a tribe such as the Fulani or the Bambara. There is no sharp or firm cultural frontier between groups, but rather a cultural continuum. Linguists have long been making a similar point about neighbouring languages such as Dutch and German. On the frontier, it is impossible to say exactly when or where Dutch stops and German begins.