Cultural Hybridity

PETER BURKE

polity

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First published in 2009 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4696-1
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For Marco and Lara
Multi-cultural children

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

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

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

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.³ 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.

A preoccupation with the topic is natural in a period like ours that is marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters of all kinds. The consequences of cultural globalization are debatable and debated. One possibility, to be discussed below, is cultural homogenization, while some scholars suggest the opposite, heterogenization. Whatever the merits of these arguments, especially where long-term consequences are concerned, it is difficult to deny that what we see, hear and experience in other ways in the short term is some kind of mix, a process of hybridization that assists economic globalization as well as being assisted by it.⁴

However we react to it, this global trend is impossible to miss, from curry and chips – recently voted the favourite dish in Britain – to Thai saunas, Zen Catholicism or Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu, or ‘Bollywood’ films, made in Bombay-Mumbai and mixing Indian traditions of song and dance with the conventions of Hollywood. This process is particularly obvious in the domain of music, in the case of such hybrid forms and genres as jazz, reggae, salsa or, more recently, flamenco rock and Afro- Celtic rock. New technology – including, appropriately enough, the ‘mixer’ – has obviously facilitated this kind of hybridization.⁵

No wonder, then, that a group of theorists of hybridity have made their appearance, themselves often of double or mixed cultural identity. Homi Bhabha (1949–) for instance, is an Indian who has taught in England and now lives in the USA. Stuart Hall (1932–) who was born in Jamaica of mixed parentage, has lived most of his life in England and describes himself as ‘a mongrel culturally, the absolute cultural hybrid’.⁶ Paul Gilroy (1956–), also of mixed parentage, was born in London and has worked in the USA. Ien Ang describes herself as ‘an ethnic Chinese, Indonesian-born and European-educated academic who now lives and works in Australia’.⁷ On the other hand, the late Edward Said (1935–2003), a Palestinian who grew up in Egypt and taught in the USA, described himself as ‘out of place’ wherever he was located (in similar fashion, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India after its independence, once declared that he had become ‘a queer mixture of the East and West, out of place everywhere’).⁸

Compared to these individuals, the sociologist Nestor García Canclini (1939–), who grew up in Argentina but works in Mexico, and the anthropologist Eduardo Archetti (1943–2005), an Argentinian who moved to Norway, may hardly seem to be mixtures at all. All the same, their personal experience of life in different cultures, or living between different cultures, surely underlies their concern with questions of hybridity.⁹

Indeed, Latin America has seemed to many people to be the hybrid region par excellence, since it has been the site of encounters, clashes, miscegenation and other interactions between the indigenous population, the European invaders, and the slaves whom the Europeans brought from Africa. Hybridity was celebrated by the Mexican José Vasconcelos (1881–1959), the Minister of Education and author of The Cosmic Race (1929), which presented the mestizo as the essence of the Mexican nation, and by the Brazilian sociologist-historian Gilberto Freyre (1900-87), whose Masters and the Slaves (1933) defined the identity of Brazilians in terms of mixing, especially between European and African cultures.¹⁰

Writers who employ the concept have also been faulted for identifying Latin American culture with hybridity and so blurring distinctions between different regions of Latin America. Uruguay, for instance, with a population that is mainly of Spanish and Italian descent, is very different from its neighbour Brazil, where Africans, Japanese, and immigrants from many parts of Europe, as well as the indigenous population, have contributed to the cultural mix.¹¹

The work of the theorists mentioned above has attracted growing interest in a number of disciplines, from anthropology to literature, from geography to art history, and from musicology to religious studies, although workers in one discipline are not always aware of what is happening in some of the others. Historians too are devoting increasing attention to the processes of cultural encounter, contact, interaction, exchange and hybridization, as the notes to this volume will show.

The text that you are now reading, however, is not, or not only, a study of cultural history but an essay that is as hybrid as its subject, concerned with the present as well as the past, with theories as well as practices, and with general processes as well as specific events. Although processes of hybridization may be found in the economic, social and political spheres, this essay will confine itself to cultural trends, defining the term ‘culture’ in a reasonably broad sense to include attitudes, mentalities and values and their expression, embodiment or symbolization in artefacts, practices and representations.

In an informal, personal essay of this kind it is best to state one’s own position right at the start. Let me therefore explain that, as a northern European who has always been attracted to Latin cultures (from Spain to Brazil), as well as a Westerner fascinated by what Europeans used to call the ‘Middle’ and ‘Far’ East, my own experience of cultural interaction (whether between individuals, disciplines or cultures) has been extremely positive. In any case, the argument that all innovation is a kind of adaptation and that cultural encounters encourage creativity is one that I find extremely plausible.

All the same, I did not write this essay in order to celebrate cultural exchanges or cultural hybridity but in order to analyse these phenomena. In the analysis that follows, I shall try to be as detached as possible. Detached, not objective, since it is impossible to escape from one’s own position in history and society. I firmly believe in the value of standing back, at least temporarily, from one’s own situation, and so taking a longer and wider view than is possible in other circumstances. This is the distinctively academic contribution – and one that is especially appropriate for a cultural historian – to a debate that concerns most of us today.

In this particular case, I have no wish to present cultural exchange as simple enrichment, forgetting that it sometimes takes place at someone’s expense – sometimes quite literally. For example, in the field of music, especially popular music, Westerners have borrowed from other cultures, among them the Pygmies of Central Africa, copyrighting the result without sharing their royalties with the original musicians. In other words, they have treated Third World music as a kind of raw material that is ‘processed’ in Europe or North America.¹² In similar fashion, over the last 500 years or so, Western scholars have often exploited indigenous knowledge of plants, healing and so on in different parts of the world and they have not always acknowledged their sources.¹³

The concept of hybridity has also been criticized for offering ‘a harmonious image of what is obviously disjointed and confrontational’ and for ignoring cultural and social discrimination.¹⁴ It is obvious enough that prolonged encounters between human groups have included a good deal of conflict. However, it may be useful to distinguish these social conflicts from their unintended consequences over the long term – the mixture, interpenetration or hybridization of cultures. African music, for example, travels the world with less difficulty than Africans.

The price of hybridization, especially the unusually rapid hybridization that is characteristic of our time, also includes the loss of regional traditions and of local roots. It is surely no accident that the present age of cultural globalization, sometimes viewed more superficially as ‘Americanization’, is also the age of reactive nationalisms or ethnicities – Serb and Croat, Tutsi and Hutu, Arab and Israeli, Basque and Catalan, and so on. Freyre famously celebrated both regionalism and what he called the ‘interpenetration’ of cultures, but there is usually a tension between them.

Freyre was one of the first scholars anywhere to devote as much attention to cultural hybridity as he did in 1933 in his study of the masters and the slaves in the sugar plantations of Northeastern Brazil, Casa Grande e Senzala.¹⁵ In similar fashion, still in the 1930s, the North American anthropologist Melville Herskovits (1895– 1963), who worked on Haiti, discussed what he called the syncretizing of African gods and Catholic saints in the New World.¹⁶ A little later, the sociologist Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) and the novelist-musicologist Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (1904–80) made similar points about Cuba.¹⁷

In the case of Europe, two studies of the 1930s and 1940s stand out in this respect. The Making of Europe (1932), by the English cultural historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970), focussed on the period 500–1000 and emphasized three contributions: those of the classical, Christian and ‘barbarian’ traditions. Although Dawson did not use terms such as ‘hybridity’, the book may be viewed retrospectively as a study in cultural contact, interaction and hybridization. Again, Américo Castro y Quesada (1885–1972) offered a controversial interpretation of Spanish history that privileged the encounters and interactions between three cultures: the Christian, the Jewish and the Muslim. Only recently has this idea become widely accepted in Spain.¹⁸

In the 1950s, the British historian Arnold Toynbee reflected on what he was already calling ‘encounters’ between cultures, on the importance of diasporas and on the nature of cultural ‘reception’.¹⁹ He devoted two volumes of his multi-volume Study of History (1934–61) to what he called ‘contacts between civilizations’ in space and time, ‘colliding cultures’, or the ‘diffraction’ of ‘culture-rays’.²⁰ Unlike most Englishmen of his generation, Toynbee was attracted to a kind of religious syncretism. He even recorded a religious experience in the National Gallery in London in 1951 in which he invoked Buddha, Muhammad and ‘Christ Tammuz, Christ Adonis, Christ Osiris’.²¹

Some people, whom we might describe as ‘purists’, were deeply shocked by the arguments of Freyre, Castro and Toynbee when they were first published. Today, by contrast, many of us are prepared to find hybridization almost everywhere in history. In an age of cultural globalization – even if the strength of this movement is sometimes exaggerated – historians are increasingly sensitized to similar phenomena in the past.

Historians of the ancient world, for example, such as Arnaldo Momigliano (1908–87), have become more and more interested in the process of ‘Hellenization’, which they are coming to view less as a simple imposition of Greek culture on the Roman Empire and more in terms of interaction between a centre and a periphery.²² The idea of ‘syncretism’, launched by the Belgian Franz Cumont (1868–1947), from which a later generation of scholars distanced themselves, is coming back into favour.²³ Again, historians of the Renaissance have become more concerned than they used to be with the Byzantine, Jewish and Muslim contributions to that movement, rather than treating it as a spontaneously generated Italian or Western European ‘miracle’.²⁴

In an age of an increasingly ecumenical Christianity, historians of the Reformation are more willing today than they once were to admit the importance of cultural exchanges between Catholics and Protestants. For example, the devotional writings of Counter-Reformation Catholics, such as the Spaniard Luis de Granada, the Italian Lorenzo Scupoli and the Frenchman Saint François de Sales were translated into English and were read with approval by Protestants, among them the poets George Herbert and Andrew Marvell, while John Wesley himself, the founder of Methodism, recommended works by Pascal and Fénelon.²⁵

Again, some historians of the European missions to Asia, Africa and America claim that the ‘converts’ did not so much abandon their traditional religions for Christianity as make some kind of synthesis between them.²⁶ Sometimes the mixture was obvious to the missionaries themselves, as in the case of the ‘heresy of the Indians’, the Santidade de Jaguaripe in Bahia in the Northeast of Brazil in 1580.²⁷ In other places, the synthesis seems to have been virtually invisible. For example, a study of Christianity in early modern Japan claims that the socalled ‘converts’ incorporated Christian symbols into the indigenous symbolic system, producing a hybrid religion sometimes described as ‘Kirishitan’, from the Japanese way of pronouncing the word ‘Christian’.²⁸

The subject is immense but this essay is a short one. It offers a bird’s-eye view of a terrain that is huge, varied and contested and makes an attempt to view the current debate on the globalization of culture in historical perspective.

Fernando Ortiz once described Cuban culture as a kind of stew, ajiaco.²⁹ A book about hybrid cultures can easily turn into a similar preparation, in which the ingredients, however various, are liquidized and homogenized. However, it is surely more illuminating to analyse mixture than to replicate it. In what follows I shall therefore try to draw distinctions rather than blurring them.

Hence the pages that follow will be divided into five main chapters, united by their stress on variety. In the first place, the variety of objects that are hybridized. In the second place, the variety of terms and theories invented to discuss cultural interaction. Third, the variety of situations in which encounters take place. Fourth, the variety of possible responses to unfamiliar items of culture, and fifth and last, the variety of possible outcomes or consequences of hybridization over the long term.