Global Culture/Individual Identity

Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket

Gordon Mathews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415206167
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134625413
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Most people still think of themselves as belonging to a particular culture. Yet today, many of us who live in affluent societies choose aspects of our lives from a global cultural supermarket, whether in terms of food, the arts or spiritual beliefs. So if roots are becoming simply one more consumer choice, can we still claim to possess a fundamental cultural identity?
Global Culture/Individual Identity focuses on three groups for whom the tension between a particular national culture and the global cultural supermarket is especially acute: Japanese artists, American religious seekers and Hong Kong intellectuals after the handover to China. These ethnographic case studies form the basis for a theory of culture which we can all see reflected in our own lives.
Gordon Mathews opens up the complex and debated topics of globalization, culture and identity in a clear and lively style.

1 On the meanings of culture

Culture has become a problem in today’s world. Anthropologists have traditionally defined culture as “the way of life of a people”; by this usage, we can speak of “Navaho culture,” “American culture,” “Chinese culture.” But do such labels, in today’s world of global flows and interactions, really make any sense? Is there really any such thing as an American, or Japanese, or Chinese culture that defines all Americans, Japanese, Chinese in common, as opposed to non-Americans, non-Japanese, non-Chinese? If not, then should we discard the term “culture”?

In this chapter, I argue that culture does continue to be meaningful, if we can combine the earlier idea of culture as “the way of life of a people” with a more contemporary concept of culture as “the information and identities available from the global cultural supermarket” – culture, roughly speaking, as shaped by the state as opposed to culture as shaped by the market. I try to do this through a theory of the cultural shaping of self, and from there explore questions of cultural identity: How do we formulate – and have formulated for us – who, culturally, we are? This discussion sets the stage for our later chapters’ examinations of Japanese artists, American religious seekers, and Hong Kong intellectuals in their different yet parallel efforts to define themselves against both their particular cultural background and the global cultural supermarket.

The rise and fall of “culture”

Before its anthropological incarnation, “culture” meant refinement. Culture, in the nineteenth-century humanist Matthew Arnold’s words, was “a study of perfection … an inward condition of the mind and spirit.… Culture indefadgably tries … to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is … beautiful, graceful, and becoming.”¹ Culture was “the best that has been thought and said”, ² an ideal that most of us, living our ordinary, unrefined lives, could never hope to attain. This idea of culture remains in use today: I am thought to be “cultured” if I can sit through an opera without falling asleep and can comment knowingly – or at least pretend to comment knowingly – on the subtleties of literature and art.

Cultural anthropologists have reworked the concept of culture to apply not just to a learned and sophisticated few, but to all human beings. In Clifford Geertz’s words, “Culture … is not just an ornament of human existence but … an essential condition for it.… There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture.”³ As human beings, we are all cultured.

The history of this reworking of culture is well known to anthropologists. Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan are often credited with founding the science of anthropology in the late nineteenth century; to simplify a complex process, they took Arnold’s concept of culture as refinement and applied it to cultural evolution, which involved the progression of the human race, from, in Morgan’s famous terms, “Savagery to Barbarism to Civilization.” All human beings, in their view, however “primitive,” had the potential to become “cultured,” which seemed to mean like the Europeans and Americans of their day. Franz Boas, in the decades after Morgan and Tylor, is widely credited as being the first anthropologist to conceive not of “culture” but of “cultures” – to show that there is not just one universal culture that human beings are in various stages of attaining, but rather that each different society has its own culture, unique and coherent, cultures which cannot be judged against one another.⁴ This view has prevailed for most of the past century.

The history of cultural anthropology since Boas have been full of arguments about the particular meanings of culture. To what extent does culture determine individual behavior, and to what extent are individuals free to use culture for their own ends? What is the relation of culture to social and economic structures? To language? To the natural environment? How can we understand the relation between cultural ideals and reality, between what people say they do and what they actually do? Is culture best understood as public or private – as within people’s minds, or within the symbols that convey meaning between minds?⁵ Underlying these disputes, however, one basic definition of culture has been adhered to. “Culture,” this definition has it, is “the way of life of a people.”⁶ For all the differences in formulations of culture between different anthropologists, the assumption that all held in common was that culture consisted of bounded units, enabling Clifford Geertz to write of the contrasting Javanese, Balinese, and Moroccan concepts of self, just as Ruth Benedict, almost half a century earlier, had so distinctly portrayed the cultural values of the Zuni, the Dobu, and the Kwakiutl.⁷ The assumption common to these writers is that there are discrete patterns of cognition, values, and behavior that members of each of these groups share in common, in contrast to members of other groups. This is what cultural anthropologists have studied, and have believed in; this has been the basis of the discipline of anthropology – at least in its American if not its British variant.⁸

Ruth Benedict, through her best-selling 1934 book Patterns of Culture, was most responsible for making “culture” in its anthropological sense into a household word. As Margaret Mead later wrote:

When Ruth Benedict began her work in anthropology … the term “culture” … was part of the vocabulary of a small and technical group of professional anthropologists. That today the modern world is on such easy terms with the concept of culture, that the words “in our culture” slip from the lips of educated men and women almost as effortlessly as do the phrases that refer to period and to place, is in very great part due to this book.⁹

As Mead’s words indicate, “culture” – and an array of accompanying concepts, such as “culture shock” – have entered the mainstream today: we can speak of “Japanese culture,” or “French culture,” or “Chinese culture,” or “Mexican culture,” or “African-American culture” with the taken-for-granted assumption that what this label refers to will be more or less understood.

It is ironic, however, that anthropologists, the bringers of the concept of culture to the larger public, are now themselves abandoning this concept. As one anthropologist has recently noted, in today’s anthropological writing,

While the adjective “cultural” continues as an acceptable predicate … such phrases as “culture” or “Kwakiutl culture” or “the culture of the Nuer” are of increasingly infrequent occurrence.… When the word “culture” does occur, it frequently bears … quotation marks … [showing] the writer’s ambivalence, self-consciousness, or censure.¹⁰

Various anthropologists of late have sought to get rid of the term “culture” for a number of interlocking reasons, but one of the most pivotal is that, in today’s world of massive global flows of people, capital, and ideas, a “culture” can’t easily be thought of as something that people in a certain place on the globe have or are in common, as opposed to other peoples elsewhere. As Ulf Hannerz has written, “Humankind has … bid farewell to that world which could … be seen as a cultural mosaic, of separate pieces with hard, well-defined edges. Cultural connections increasingly reach across the world.”¹¹ According to some contemporary commentators (more often from the new, amorphous field of cultural studies than from anthropology), we have come to live in a world of culture as fashion, in which each of us can pick and choose cultural identities like we pick and choose clothes. As Jean-François Lyotard has written:

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.¹²

Embodying such claims, a Hong Kong newspaper article describes members of a motorcycle gang in China as obsessed by Harley Davidsons and the American dream of freedom. When the reporter asks why, he is told, “Cultures … are like the dishes on a table. You just pick up what you like.”¹³ “Culture,” in line with these formulations, may be defined as “the information and identities available from the global cultural supermarket.”¹⁴

Both these concepts of culture have considerable truth to them, but neither is adequate to describe the culturally complex world in which we live. Let me first discuss culture as “the way of life of a people.” Clearly there remain elements of a “shared way of life” in different societies in the world. Language undoubtedly molds the thinking of members of these societies in different ways; there remain distinct patterns of childrearing that shape distinct ways of thinking; governments shape the thinking of their citizens through public schooling; mass media in different societies serve to create their “imagined communities”¹⁵ as opposed to those of other societies. The nationally shaped cultures of societies such as Japan, China, and the United States do indeed exist. Anyone who stands on a Tokyo street corner for more than a few seconds, watching how people behave toward one another, can’t help but realize that this is Japan, bearing a distinct culture, unlike anywhere else; and the same exercise can be repeated on street corners the world over.

Indeed, it may be that this book underemphasizes culture as “the way of life of a people.” I focus in this book on cultural identity – how people comprehend who, culturally, they are – more than on culture as studied by outsiders: anthropologists examining patterns of language, knowledge, and social organization that may shape the way of life of people in a society beyond their own awareness. By focusing on people’s awareness of culture, we may see culture as more contested than taken for granted, as more chosen than given, even though the latter too may be of fundamental importance in understanding culture.

But despite this, it seems undeniable that culture as “the way of life of a people” is today problematic: there is so much diversity and interrelation within each different society that we can no longer easily speak of “Japanese culture,” or “American culture,” or “Chinese culture” as unified, distinctive wholes, as opposed to other unified, distinctive wholes. What values do the Japanese college professor, laborer, housewife, feminist, and punk rocker all share, as opposed to all their American counterparts? What behaviors do the American fundamentalist Christian, lesbian separatist, inner-city drug dealer, yuppie stockbroker, Vietnamese immigrant, and Hasidic Jew all share, as opposed to all Japanese or Chinese? Might it not be that the Tokyo rock musician has more, culturally, in common with his counterpart in Seattle than with his own grandparents? That two New York and Shanghai executives linked through their Internet connections share more of a common culture than does either with the janitors that clean her office? Maybe not; but the very fact that these questions can seriously be posed reveals the erosion of culture as the way of life of a particular people in a particular place, as opposed to other people in other places. That concept of culture is not enough.

Our other concept of culture – culture as “the information and identities available from the global cultural supermarket” – seems even more problematic. Clearly culture has become in part a matter of personal taste; to a degree, we seem to pick and choose culturally who we are, in the music we listen to, the food we eat, and perhaps even the religion we practice. However, our choices are not free, but conditioned by our age, class, gender, and level of affluence, and by the national culture to which we belong, among other factors. The way of life and social world within which we have been formed as human beings, as well as the ongoing social world in which we live – the different groups of people around us, whose opinions we can’t help but pay great attention to – show that free choice is largely a myth. Despite such objections, however, there is a degree of validity to this concept of culture. There is a sense in which we who live among the affluent 10 or 15 percent of the world’s population do wander through a “cultural supermarket,” choosing, albeit in a highly conditioned way, the identities we perform within our social worlds.

These two concepts of culture –culture as “the way of life of a people” and culture as “the information and identities available from the global cultural supermarket” – both serve to describe aspects of today’s world, but neither is sufficient to enable a real understanding of what culture means.¹⁶ One reason why they are each insufficient is that they represent two opposing forces shaping culture today: the forces of state and of market.

Culture, state, and market

Anthropologists traditionally conceived of culture on the basis of fieldwork in tribal societies; they could, to a degree anyway, speak on this basis of culture as “the way of life of a people.” Today, however, there are very few tribes left, at least as anthropologists traditionally thought of them: as groups with their own separate cultures, largely isolated from the world. Members of tribes once studied by anthropologists may now work as construction workers and stockbrokers, and watch Titanic and Baywatch. Anthropologists sometimes now investigate how tribes enact their cultures before tourists for their livelihoods; one recent account discusses how the Maasai in Kenya perform their culture for busloads of first-world visitors. During their performance, the Maasai are not permitted “to wear their digital watches, T-shirts, or football socks, and all radios, Walkmen, metal containers, plastics, aluminum cans, and mass-produced kitchen equipment must be locked away and hidden from the tourist view.”¹⁷ Tribes such as this one now belong to the same world that the rest of us belong to.

However, culture as “the way of life of a people” does clearly continue to exist in today’s world in large part because of states and their molding of their citizens. Almost all the land in the world today is controlled by states – as Clifford Geertz has remarked, virtually every “spot on the globe is … included in a bounded continuous stretch of space called the Republic of this, the People’s Republic of that, the Union, Kingdom, Emirate, Confederation, State, or Principality of something or other”¹⁸ – and so too almost all the people. Culture as “the way of life of a people” is in today’s world almost everywhere shaped by national states.

Anthropologists, in their predilection toward tribal societies, did not study national societies until relatively late in the discipline’s history. It was World War II that led many anthropologists to turn their attention to national societies. If Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture compared three tribal societies, her second great book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, dealt with Japan – an effort to understand “the mind of the enemy” that was influential in shaping American policy in its occupation of Japan after World War II.¹⁹ “National character” studies of societies such as the United States and Russia were published at roughly the same time, analyzing the “way of life” of these societies partly in terms of their common patterns of childrearing. However, it has only been in recent decades that anthropologists and other social scientists have begun to look critically at the particular ways in which states shape “the way of life of a people” for their own ends. Books such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s edited collection, The Invention of Tradition, show how “cultural tradition” is very much the product of the contemporary state;²⁰ “culture,” books such as these show, is not intrinsic and primordial, but manipulated and perhaps invented by the state for the sake of its own legitimation.

Loyalty to nation seems new in human history. The matter is unclear, but it appears that the empires and kingdoms of past history did not, for the most part, breed mass loyalty: one’s loyalty, for most people, was to one’s village, possibly to one’s religion or one’s ethnic group, but not to any nation. Nationalism emerged as an ideology only in the late eighteenth century, in the period prior to the French Revolution; the German philosopher Herder was the first to assert that “each national group has its own Volksgeist or Nationalgeist … its own … customs, mores, beliefs, psyche, and worldview.”²¹ States over the last two centuries have used such idealized concepts of the nation to justify their molding of disparate groups of people into a common citizenry, accepting that molding as the natural order of things. States seek to justify and legitimate their pursuits of power, shaping the thinking of their citizens through public education and through mass media. How many times this century have we heard states justify their aggression by making such statements as “we must defend our way of life”?

This shaping is remarkably effective. To speak personally, despite having striven as an anthropologist to see through and become detached from my national moldings, I still find myself unwittingly moved by the “The Star Spangled Banner”; the mantra of “one nation under God,” repeated every school day of my childhood in the Pledge of Allegiance, sticks to me yet. “My nation is special, divinely ordained”: might I not still believe such a thing in some unexamined corner of my mind? This is the case not just for me: 77 percent of Americans in one survey say they would be willing to fight in a war for their country,²² defending “the way of life of the American people” – this reflects the extraordinary power of the state’s molding.

Patriotism is not always a delusion; there may be values in one’s country that are worth defending, even dying for. Looking, however, at the wars fought in recent history, from the patriot fighting for Nazi Germany, to the American in Vietnam fighting “Godless communism,” to the Serb righteously engaged in “ethnic cleansing,” it is hard not to shudder at how wrong one’s country so often is, and how deluded citizens so often have been in what they are willing to die for. The nineteenth-century American military leader Stephen Decatur once famously proclaimed, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!” – in other words, “Even if our country is wrong, we should fight for her because she is our country.” But why? Why should one stand up for one’s country when one’s country is wrong? That well over a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Global Culture/Individual Identity
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. On the meanings of culture
• 2. What in the world is Japanese?: On the cultural identities of Kotoists, calligraphers, bebop pianists, and punk rockers
• 3. What in the world is American?: On the cultural identities of evangelical Christians, spiritual searchers, and Tibetan Buddhists
• 4. What in the world is Chinese?: On the cultural identities of Hong Kong intellectuals in the shadow and wake of 1 July 1997
• 5. Searching for home in the cultural supermarket
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index