Toubab. Pomoi. Obroni. Yovo. White Man. I have quite the collection of different names following me around these days. Every local language has a different word for "white person" (although in Sierra Leone and Liberia, people usually just say "White man" in English), and wandering around West Africa, you hear these words a lot.
You hear the cries of "white man" in a few ways. Often times, especially from children, people passing will look at you and chirp "White man, how are you?". Rarely are they interested in an answer, and indeed, when I ask it back, I often get the response "How are you too!". Nonetheless, this one's actually reasonably pleasant.
Equally common are people trying to get your attention. A Ghanaian fruit seller might yell "Obroni! You buy bananas!" as I trundle on by. A lot of local languages (especially those of the Fulani) regularly refer to people by their attributes. For example, a short person might commonly be addressed as something like "Shorty" in most social interactions, so it's not a huge surprise that I will forever be whitey. Apparently, it takes a surprising while for this to drop. A friend of mine lived with a Ewe family in Togo for several months, and they referred to her only as "Yovo" until the very last couple of weeks.
In small places where white people rarely venture, you also often hear "white man" as a straight-up exlamation of surprise, as people gape at this strange hairy fellow trundling down the road, and call to their friends to come see.
In many ways the most common one, though, is the simple statement of my whiteness. Lest I be in danger of forgetting what my skin colour is, I get reminded by kindly passers-by every couple minutes in many places, especially in Ghana. It's not at all clear what response is called for when someone looks at you and flatly states "obroni". Sometimes, if I'm feeling cheeky, I reply with the local word for "black person" (here, it's "obibini") which usually unleashes a giggle or two from the obroni-ist. Sometimes, I just say "true!". Most of the time, I don't really respond, if only because that would sometimes have me continually chattering as I walk down a crowded street.
It's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. I doubt that any of us could imagine pointing and yelling "black man!" at an African walking down a Canadian street. You wouldn't get the greatest reception, to say the least. Yet here, most of the time, it doesn't really bother me.
I say "most of the time", because you certainly do get a fair bit of sneering or vaguely hostile calls. It's always tricky territory to read too much into tone when listening to a foreign language, but it's usually reasonably clear when you're the butt of a joke or a snide comment. Still, given the long history of white people bearing highly dubious gifts in this part of the world, I'm perfectly willing to take the odd verbal jab.
The funny thing is, the amount of calling-out doesn't seem to have any real relationship to how many white people come by a given spot. In Ghana, which is full of white people, it's constant. In Liberia, which gets very few, it's rather rare. It changes from village to village and region to region - when I went out East in Ghana, the streets were creepily silent.
Finally, and perhaps most amusingly, there is the White Person Song. All children know the white man song. The tune is generally confined to one country or region, but within that region it's remarkably consistent.
In Ghana and (so I'm told) Togo, it runs like this (imagine a sing-song here)
Ob-ro-NI, how-are-YOU, I-am-FINE, whatisyourname?
or, the French version (with slightly lower information content)
Yo-VO, bon-JOUR, comment-ca-VA?, ca-VA-bien!
Friends of mine swear that they've heard parents teaching the White Person Song to their children, and correcting them when they get the tune wrong. That would certainly explain it's amazing consistency from village to village to village. Ah, yet another topic I would love to research....
In any case, the day is wandering on, and I just got a drive-by obroni-ing as I sit in the Cybercafe. I think it's time to descend into the market for my daily dose of catcalls, so, as always,
Peace
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Monday, October 26, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
Banana Pancakes
They're tasty things, banana pancakes. They're also symbols of a culture, one that's almost completely absent from West African travel: backpacking. In other parts of the world, youngish people with absurdly large packs and absurdly low budgets have created a very visible subculture that changes very little from country to country. Sometimes they take over a street, sometimes a whole neighbourhood.
Thamel in Kathmandu. Khao San Road in Bangkok. Paharganj in New Delhi. I've stayed in all of them and can testify that the mix of hostels, cheap hotels, cybercafes and restaurants serving up spaghetti (and banana pancakes of course!) is pretty consistent. I remember meeting a fellow in Bangkok once who was actually there to attend a conference on backpacker culture - held, of course, on Khao San Road. This culture also has a pretty strong foothold in South America and even in the Middle East and East Africa. Even where the density of backpackers doesn't support a traveller's ghetto, there is often just one hotel that they congregate at, and businesses to serve them spring up around it.
Let me be clear that I by no means dislike this. I can be a big snob about travelling, but backpacker-oriented places do provide a ton of useful things. They often have message boards and info centres catering to poor travellers like me. There are book exchanges and Western movies on DVD, and other travellers to swap stories (read: drink) with. I've always thought it's not a bad thing to have this around. Every traveller can choose whether or not to burst out of the bubble, and if they really want to drink smoothies with white people all day, well, it's not really my business. I was stuck in Kathmandu once for more than a week, and would be lying if I didn't say that a nightly dose of lasagna was a nice change after two lonely months in China.
In West Africa, I've rarely had that choice. Morocco gets plenty of tourists, but I stayed largely away from where they stayed, as the places in guidebooks were too pricey. Mauritania gets plenty of wealthy French people, but not in the summertime. I pretty much had the place to myself. Ditto with much of Senegal, except for in the south, where I did bump into a few backpackers (and book exchanges!). From then on, though - through Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote D'Ivoire - I saw not a single other backpacker. The cheap places to stay were brothels more than hostels, and I passed my evenings drinking beer with locals and reading in my room.
I didn't particularly mind this, and certainly got used to it. The result? Ghana is a shock. I'm in Cape Coast right now, the centre for tourism along the coastal beaches-and-castles circuit, and even though it's low season, there are plenty of backpackers (and richer tourists) about. There are definite signs of smoothies, vegetarian cafes, and probably a banana pancake somewhere, if I were so inclined. There is also, wierdly for me, company. I spent a night drinking wine with a dreadlocked Austrian fellow from one hotel, and am heading off to a national park tomorrow with a Polish girl from my current one. I toured a castle in a group that included at least 25 white folks, which was a mighty change from the fleeting glimpses of them passing by in NGO landcruisers. My throat actually hurts - I've gotten used to spending long hours silently, and a couple days of hanging out with other backpackers has given the ol' vocal cords quite a workout.
In many ways, Ghana, with its developed backpacker trail, will be an exception. I don't expect to see the same number of foreigners anywhere else other than (possibly) Mali, where they also have quite the scene. It is certainly convenient - but I think I'll stick to my rice, sauce, and streetside beers.
Peace
Josh
Thamel in Kathmandu. Khao San Road in Bangkok. Paharganj in New Delhi. I've stayed in all of them and can testify that the mix of hostels, cheap hotels, cybercafes and restaurants serving up spaghetti (and banana pancakes of course!) is pretty consistent. I remember meeting a fellow in Bangkok once who was actually there to attend a conference on backpacker culture - held, of course, on Khao San Road. This culture also has a pretty strong foothold in South America and even in the Middle East and East Africa. Even where the density of backpackers doesn't support a traveller's ghetto, there is often just one hotel that they congregate at, and businesses to serve them spring up around it.
Let me be clear that I by no means dislike this. I can be a big snob about travelling, but backpacker-oriented places do provide a ton of useful things. They often have message boards and info centres catering to poor travellers like me. There are book exchanges and Western movies on DVD, and other travellers to swap stories (read: drink) with. I've always thought it's not a bad thing to have this around. Every traveller can choose whether or not to burst out of the bubble, and if they really want to drink smoothies with white people all day, well, it's not really my business. I was stuck in Kathmandu once for more than a week, and would be lying if I didn't say that a nightly dose of lasagna was a nice change after two lonely months in China.
In West Africa, I've rarely had that choice. Morocco gets plenty of tourists, but I stayed largely away from where they stayed, as the places in guidebooks were too pricey. Mauritania gets plenty of wealthy French people, but not in the summertime. I pretty much had the place to myself. Ditto with much of Senegal, except for in the south, where I did bump into a few backpackers (and book exchanges!). From then on, though - through Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote D'Ivoire - I saw not a single other backpacker. The cheap places to stay were brothels more than hostels, and I passed my evenings drinking beer with locals and reading in my room.
I didn't particularly mind this, and certainly got used to it. The result? Ghana is a shock. I'm in Cape Coast right now, the centre for tourism along the coastal beaches-and-castles circuit, and even though it's low season, there are plenty of backpackers (and richer tourists) about. There are definite signs of smoothies, vegetarian cafes, and probably a banana pancake somewhere, if I were so inclined. There is also, wierdly for me, company. I spent a night drinking wine with a dreadlocked Austrian fellow from one hotel, and am heading off to a national park tomorrow with a Polish girl from my current one. I toured a castle in a group that included at least 25 white folks, which was a mighty change from the fleeting glimpses of them passing by in NGO landcruisers. My throat actually hurts - I've gotten used to spending long hours silently, and a couple days of hanging out with other backpackers has given the ol' vocal cords quite a workout.
In many ways, Ghana, with its developed backpacker trail, will be an exception. I don't expect to see the same number of foreigners anywhere else other than (possibly) Mali, where they also have quite the scene. It is certainly convenient - but I think I'll stick to my rice, sauce, and streetside beers.
Peace
Josh
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
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
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
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