Kwame Antony Appiah, in a piece for the NYT Mag designed to be the “it” article of January 2006, says that trade does change culture but it doesn’t erase it; exposure to technology and universal media content improves the good parts of life while discouraging the worst aspects of tradition.
While reading this essay, I kept thinking of Raico’s distinction between social tradition (that sustained by the voluntary actions of individuals)--and vital and necessary part of the functioning of society--and state tradition (that which is imposed on people through coercion or lives on because a state-sustained poverty limits individual choice). Appiah argues, in effect, that social tradition is surprisingly robust when faced with the “contamination” wrought by globalization, while state tradition is challenged and even crushed at every turn, which he regards as a good thing. He also notes that the most passionate opponents of “cultural contamination” are Western intellectuals.
He offers some interesting insights, among which:
It’s one thing to help people sustain arts they want to sustain. I am all for festivals of Welsh bards in Llandudno financed by the Welsh arts council. Long live the Ghana National Cultural Center in Kumasi, where you can go and learn traditional Akan dancing and drumming, especially since its classes are spirited and overflowing. Restore the deteriorating film stock of early Hollywood movies; continue the preservation of Old Norse and early Chinese and Ethiopian manuscripts; record, transcribe and analyze the oral narratives of Malay and Masai and Maori. All these are undeniably valuable.
But preserving culture — in the sense of such cultural artifacts — is different from preserving cultures. And the cultural preservationists often pursue the latter, trying to ensure that the Huli of Papua New Guinea (or even Sikhs in Toronto) maintain their “authentic” ways. What makes a cultural expression authentic, though? Are we to stop the importation of baseball caps into Vietnam so that the Zao will continue to wear their colorful red headdresses? Why not ask the Zao? Shouldn’t the choice be theirs? ... Talk of authenticity now just amounts to telling other people what they ought to value in their own traditions.
