Re: culture, reform & change

Angel M.Y. Lin (mylin who-is-at oise.on.ca)
Mon, 30 Oct 1995 20:05:32 -0500 (EST)

Yes, Rolfe, I fear that we (East or West, indigenous or dominant...) are
all being swallowed up into popular culture and we'll have lost our
(indigenous) identities... our life styles and modes of existence and
aspirations and hopes and dreams and ways of leisure and work... all
merging into one big global socioeconomic system where one has little
choice (e.g., you can't choose to live in a small farm house and live on
your own produce... like Thoreau? --this used to be the ideal way of
existence in ancient Chinese myths...!)

Angel

On Mon, 30 Oct 1995, Rolfe Windward wrote:

> Angel and Ana's posts bring up an item that may (or may not) need to be
> placed in Angel's "list" and that is what appears to be the increased rate
> of "interculturation" (Lemke?) or cultural hybridization. I haven't
> researched this explicitly so I can't say how robust the notion is or,
> assuming it to be real, whether it is a sign of hope or despair, but it
> seems to me that global changes and increasingly peripatetic populations
> have also dramatically expanded the interface(s) between cultural groups; to
> the point where many are no longer distinct (assuming there was ever a time
> that they really were).
>
> In my own research, most of my subjects could only be "assigned" to a
> cultural category under the grossest of definitions and many express values
> that seem more consistent with mass or "pop" culture than any other "type."
> Despite the horrible consequences of exacerbated social identity (e.g., the
> former Yugoslavia) there seems to be something else, vital and adaptive,
> going on; for good or ill, I agree our theories probably need to catch up.
>
>
> Rolfe Windward
> UCLA GSE&IS
> ibalwin who-is-at mvs.oac.ucla.edu
>
>