Tied in knots over pizza

To those of you seeking a travel post, I apologize - you'll have an update on my scurrying to and fro in no time. For the moment though, I want to stop and reflect for a little while on some broad issues that I've been thinking about recently, albeit ones that are definitely being illuminated by the travel experience.

I got thinking about the subject of this post - globalized culture, cultural appropriation, authenticity, indigeneity, etc. - while wandering Tangier at noontime looking for cheap eats. As I passed a shop with cheap and tasty looking slices of pizza in the window, my own internal debate began something like this:

Voice #1 "Mmm...pizza"
Voice #2 "But that's white people food!"

I even got as far as debating with myself whether the fact that the slices were thin and square - ie, Italian-style rather than American - granted them enough exoticism to make their way onto my daily menu. Such are the trifles that sometimes consume the thrifty traveller. Still, this debate actually happens fairly often. As a shoestringer, my food choices are already pretty constrained, as I can't afford to eat local delicacies all that often. At the very bottom end of the scale, the cheapest food is also often very local, but that can make it damned hard to find if you're not in the mood to walk an hour into the oldest part of town to track down your boiled sheep's head (which, by the way, is lovely). As it stands, in many parts of many towns in many countries I've been presented by a menu that is pretty internationally consistent: burgers, pizza, and shawarma. All of which I like. None of which I would, on the face of it, consider "authentic".

To most travellers, myself included, authenticity matters. In our own minds, we aren't bumping over dusty roads for umpteen hours just to end up in some ersatz western fast food joint with shitty ketchup, or (in my case at least) in some anonymous business-class hotel that could be anywhere from Toronto to Kinshasa. I'd like to think that the most important part of travel is immersion in cultures - however one defines the term "culture" - that have different sets of norms about what to eat, how to act, what art to create, or how buildings look. We do this in the face of a world in which "Western" culture seemingly predominates, which lends itself to judging local experiences on some sort of sliding scale, with one end made up of the sort of middle-of-nowhere village life that ends up being idealized, and the other end festooned with McDonalds arches.

I actually spend surprisingly little time thinking about culture, especially considering that I subscribe in political theory, at least broadly speaking, to a school of thought called contextualism in which the most basic concepts - morality, meaning, knowing - are legitimately sensitive to the context in which they were concieved. Although this isn't limited to cultural context, it certainly includes it. The idea is to find some middle ground before dropping off the theoretical cliff and becoming a total cultural relativist, arguing that one can only judge one's own culture (whatever the hell that might mean). In any case, both contextualism and travel (I think) are dependant on the idea that cultural norms have some intersection with physical place. That's where this gets interesting.

As with most of the things that we hold as solid around us, when you put the idea of "local culture" under the microscope, it gets very fuzzy, very fast. Take, as an example, the city of Tangier. The site, or at least roughly this spot, has been occupied in succession by paleolithic and neolithic hunter-gatherers, some of the earliest agriculturalists, a civilization that we would now identify as Sub-Saharan, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Berbers, then Arab tribes that arrived with Islam in the 7th century, then the Portuguese, the English, an international council, and finally a sovereign Morocco. How, exactly, do we sort out what "local" culture means in all that context? The local history museum pulls an interesting fast one, referring to the Roman, Portuguese, and European eras as "occupations" while cheerily describing Islamic "settlement". In reality, the Islamic move into North Africa was very much a conquest, one that replaced the indigenous (at the time) Berber culture with imported tribes from North Africa, often at swordpoint. The Romans actually get a better claim on the word "settlement", as they often did found new cities, rather than take over existing ones. Still, it's probably best to keep everyone in the conqueror column. At the end of all this tumult, of course, white people fly into Morocco viewing hijabs and robes as authentic expressions of an indigenous culture, and the rest as colonialism. Hmm.

It's difficult to know where to start on the issue of indigeneity. Oodles has been written on it, some of which I've read, but not nearly enough to make me an expert. There's a lot of obtuse journal articles out there in the cultural studies milleu. Some are useful, some are not. In any case, I think that the compressed time scale in Morocco - at least 13 distinct "cultures", many more if you properly subdivide the era of Muslim rule - helps point out the difficulties I have with ascribing inherent value to being indigenous to a place. In Morocco, the question emerges obviously: how long do you have to be here to qualify? Are Arab Moroccans really "locals"? If so, are the Europeans? One has been here 1200 years, the other 300. Where shall we place the cut-off? The Berbers, of course, were here before - but not forever.

Although this is a testier subject in Canada, the same thing of course applies. Unless we subscribe to the quasi-religious school of thought that has Native Americans emerging from a parallel evolutionary track in North America (for which there is no evidence whatsoever), we quickly realize that Native Peoples, like us, are immigrants. In broad terms, their ancestors came from Asia sometime around 25,000 years ago (or more). More relevantly, the current arrangement of tribes that was frozen into place by white people is one that has changed often enough within historical record. The methods were usually what we would consider colonial - conquest and war - although there were plenty of exceptions to this. I'm not for a moment trying to compare European colonialism and indigenous conquests on scale. Europeans managed to annihilate, through disease, murder, and policy, somewhere around 90-99 percent of the population. Native nations never destroyed so thoroughly - although there were certainly times when one nation overran and erased another. In any case, indigeneity even in the settler states of North America and Australia is a tricky thing to really grasp. For K-W residents, the Six Nations is perhaps the best example of this issue, as in their case they were granted the Haldimand Tract rather a while after Europeans arrived on the scene - it was certainly not Iroquois territory from time immemorial.

Where am I going with all of this? Back to the pizza place in Tangiers.

As a libertarian at heart who identifies, at least broadly, with the political left, culture and globalization ties me in knots. Leftist discourse here often spins the narrative of Western dominance. You know the one. With all the money and power lying in the West, our culture overruns the world, steamrolling local languages and cultural forms and leaving behind a homogenized, Westernized, secularized global culture. I think there's much more to it than that.

To be sure, this aggressive picture of Western imposition has some truth to it. During colonial days, our strategy to deal with local cultures, especially when the conflicted with Western Judeo-Christian norms, was to stamp them out and kill the people who practiced them. Who knows what the world cultural scene would look like had slavery, colonialism, and the rest never happened. But it did. To me, trying to erase the colonial legacy in favour of some chosen version of "indigenous" culture is often to chase shadows - thus the discussion above. What was lost was surely beautiful and to be mourned, but it isn't coming back.

In any case, murder is no longer the main method of Western cultural imperialism. The market is. Here, we have a problem. When I find Schwarzenegger posters in Mongolian gers, packed McDonalds' on New Delhi streets, or Moroccan Pizza joints, I'm not confronting something put there at gunpoint. These art forms, ideas, foods, are legitimately popular. Indeed, McDonalds is always a fascinating social scene outside of the West - and you rarely see white people there. People like Western action movies, rap music, and food. They are willing to pay for them, and they do, quite often at the expense of their local traditions, and very often at the expense of their local languages.

There is surely something being lost here. There is, though, clearly something being gained - or it would not be happening. When we refuse to acknowledge this, the Left - in our anti-globalization guise - becomes strangely conservative. We arrange our value judgments in such a way that we seek to hold onto what has gone before, to protect a version of local cultures that are no longer current. Some would argue, of course, that there's good old false consciousness at work here, that people have been brainwashed into accepting a hollowed out Western culture that is objectively less good than their own. There's no way to disprove that, but I call bullshit on it on grounds of being patronizing, assuming that we educated ones can somehow see beyond it and that it's our job to pull the ignorant locals back to "authentic" culture. Blech.

Perhaps it's the economist in me, but I can't help but see this as a cost-benefit situation. The costs are the loss of the traditional arts and languages. These costs, to be fair, are huge. On the benefits side, there are all kinds of new cultural forms that come from the hybridization of culture. Indeed, even a passing look at the cultural history of Morocco, or any place else, reminds us that all culture is just that, a hybrid. By looking to restrain this, by viewing the advance of globalized culture as a threat, we're making a value judgment that the past is so important, it's worth sacrificing the possibilities of the future for. I can't sign myself up to that.

I think, in the end, there is perhaps a simpler reason for why the Left gets upset about culture. It isn't just that we export it. It's that what we export is often such shit. Listen to all the wonderful, interesting music coming out of Canada. What do you get in the rest of the world? Celine Dion and Shania Twain. There's more than a little snobbery at work when we find ourselves embarassed at a KFC sign in Beijing. That, though, is a separate discussion. I'd be the first to agree that I'd rather my own life be free of fast food and commercialized monotony. I just don't think I have the right to dictate that to anyone else.

I do, of course, write all of this from my position at the top of the heap as a white, affluent, male Canadian. Perhaps I would speak differently were I personally marginalized - and indeed, I think we have every responsibility to support those around the world who identify as such. We just shouldn't be the ones doing the identification. The picture in the sphere of culture is also a whole lot fuzzier. In movies, it is not Hollywood that dominates, it's India. In sports, not white men but black, and in music women often find cross-cultural appeal. It's still all a bit of a muddle, but one that I continue to find utterly fascinating.

Anyways, my cards are now on the table, but I'd love a bit of discussion on this one. What say you all on cultural imperialism? My comment field awaits.

And, by the way, the pizza was delicious.
Peace
Josh