Cultural Interactions

Conflict and Cooperation

Frans-Willem Korsten

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Edward Clydesdale Thomson

Cover design: Gijs Mathijs Ontwerpers, Amsterdam

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

ISBN 978 94 6372 038 0

e-ISBN 978 90 4855 617 5

DOI 10.5117/9789463720380

NUR 757

© F.-W. Korsten / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

For the Chilean people

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preamble: On a Musical Note

Part 1 Cultural Realms

1. Culture in Terms of Representation and as Form-of-life

1.1. In what senses is culture a matter of life and death? 19

1.2. What is the definition of culture?

2. Culture and Politics: The Paradox of Self-Determination and the Nation-state

2.1. Self-determination: Self-evident or a paradox? 33

2.2. Why is the nation-state culturally determined?

3. Culture and the Political: A Multiplicity of Worlds

3.1. What is the connection between culture and world? 43

3.2. How does culture connote a multiplicity of worlds?

4. Culture and Economies: Society

4.1. Society: How is value determined economically and culturally? 53

4.2. How are economies determined by culture and can culture be used economically?

5. Culture and Affective Economies: Civilization

5.1. Civilization: How are cultural hierarchies always affectively charged?

5.2. How are the interests of people defined by affects and emotions?

6. Culture and Religion: Community

6.1. What is the relation between culture, religion, and communities? 75

6.2. How can separate domains of life infiltrate one another?

Part 2 Cultural Selves

7. Culture and Self: Individuality

7.1. Why do people want to lose their selves, or sacrifice themselves? 87

7.2. How can people become alienated from their culture?

8. Culture and ‘Other’: Affiliation

8.1. Why do cultures construct an ‘other’ and what are the consequences?

8.2. How are selves defined in intensified urban situations of cultural interactions?

9. Self and Other: In-comparability

9.1. Translation: What is needed to understand other cultures? 113

9.2. Does cross-cultural understanding have its limits?

10. Culture and Dis-abled Selves: Normality

10.1. How is disability historically and culturally determined?

10.2. What are the cultural affordances in disabilities?

11. Culture and Animal Selves: Relationality

11.1. How do tropes anthropomorphize animals, and animalize humans?

11.2. Do people have sufficient understanding of animal culture?

12. Culture and Machinic Selves: Artificiality

12.1. Mixtures of being: Have humans always been artificial?

12.2. What are the multiple relations between culture and technology?

Postscript: On a Note of Justice

Bibliography

Index of terms

Index of names

Acknowledgments

This book was conceived in the years 2016-2021 and written in the course of the years 2020-2021. It is a COVID-19 book in the sense that it is based on the podcasts that I started to make when all teaching had to go online for a second year BA course in the Leiden University Department of International Studies in The Hague. Podcasts cannot be too long, so there were two of them for each session. The very genre of podcasting provoked me to think of music, and the music in turn provoked me to think about why I would choose to relate a specific session, and its content, with this or that piece. The COVID-19 years certainly had their effects on content, but equally strongly provoked a host of questions on form(s). It is hard to say ‘thank you’ to the circumstances that formally changed the format of this book, but at least it needs to be acknowledged.

I was helped in writing this book by comments by or conversations with especially young colleagues working on similar issues, all with their own expertise. I am grateful to Gerlov van Engelenhoven (especially), Aida Gholami, Zeynep Gültekin, Andries Hiskes, Yasco Horsman, Bram Ieven, Looi van Kessel, Adam Marcus Patterson, Sara Polak, Miriam Retter, Renee Turner, and Tessa de Zeeuw. The Department of International Studies in The Hague was helpful and generous in giving me the chance and the time to develop this course, as well as by providing me with input into the process. Here, I want to thank Joost Augusteijn, Paula Esteves dos Santos Jordão, Jaap Kamphuis, and Tim de Zeeuw.

Then there is the more general intellectual climate where issues dealt with in this book would pass or be considered within a variety of meetings, where we were thinking and talking or, perhaps more importantly, I was listening. In this context I would like to thank the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and its director, Sybille Lammes. Other colleagues who were of importance in making this book, in the present or the past, are Nuno Atalaia, Maria Boletsi, Thomas Bragdon, Cui Chen, Kai-wen Chiu, Maghiel van Crevel, Esther Edelmann, Kornee van der Haven, Gert Jan Hofstede, Isabel Hoving, Yasco Horsman, Nancy Jouwe, Çağlar Köseoğlu, Inger Leemans, Liesbeth Minnaard, Greta Olson, Sara Polak, Shailoh Philips, Aafje de Roest, Dorine Schellens, Mineke Schipper, Nanne Timmer, Berrie Vugts, Astrid van Weyenberg, and Kitty Zijlmans. I thank Oscar Man, Lucy McGourty, Margo de Koning and the AUP editor for their editing. Mistakes remain mine.

Unlike my previously published monographs, this book was prepared in only a very small part by lectures delivered at conferences or seminars, or articles published in journals. It was developed fully in the context of teaching. The number of students to acknowledge is too big, but I thank all those who approached me with questions of clarification, issues of interest, suggestions, straightforward provocations (during the break of a lecture: ‘Why is culture important?’), requests for expansion, and all other forms of either negative or positive criticism. Luckily, the latter substantially outweighed the former. I can say this differently: I thank the majority of students for their commitments.

Preamble: On a Musical Note

Australian magpie1

Let us start this introduction with listening – to a bird: the Australian magpie. Considering its sounds as ‘singing’ or ‘music’ is an anthropomorphism, with ‘anthropomorphism’ indicating that people give names to things so as to place them in their own lifeworld, or to ‘morph’ them according to a human logic. Scholarly speaking – so not spiritually, an issue to which we will come back – the bird, in making its organized sounds, is not communicating with humans. It is sending out something, and listening to what comes back, from its own kind. Biologically speaking, this is clear. Culturally speaking, it is more complicated, for the study of culture implies the study of expression. With regard to this, and in terms of interaction, the question is twofold: do magpies have culture as a result of which they express things that can be understood and learned, also through generations, by members of their own species? And can this exchange of expressions then also be meaningful to others, like other magpie species, or a host of other ones, including the human species?

In what follows, when focusing on cultural interactions, we will start with humans and their cultural interactions. Yet at the end of the explorations, we will also come to consider animal cultures, and technological ones. We do so to counter a too self-evident domination of anthropomorphism. If people define a bird’s sounds as ‘singing’ or as ‘music’, this is an anthropomorphism. When people describe such ‘singing’ as a matter of ‘competition’ or as the marking of a territory, this is an anthropomorphism as well, since the very definition of ‘territory’ is a human one. Or, to give a third example: the mirror test is yet one other anthropomorphic way of defining whether other beings have a sense of self. Only a small number of species appear to be capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror: chimpanzees, orang-utans, bonobos, Asian elephants, dolphins – and magpies. Yet why would the human mirror be the universal marker of self-recognition or of a sense of self? Suppose that octopuses were the self-proclaimed rulers of the planet. Consequently, they might turn the world into an ‘octopomorphic’ one. Studying human beings, octopus scholars would ask whether human arms, hands, legs, or feet have their own independent forms of intelligence and agency, for this would be analogous to the intelligence of an octopus. In the perception of octopuses, humans would be limited, if not handicapped, animals: they appear to have a centre of intelligence only in their heads! Recent octopus research even suggests that human beings need a mirror to recognize themselves as a self. Human beings also cannot change the colours and structures of their skin, by the way. They appear to make up for this incapacity by constructing artificial, colourful things with which they cover their skin.

If we come to consider cultural interactions in relation to humans first, and then to animal cultures and the technological ones, this can only be done systematically on the basis of a definition of culture that makes the transition between the three possible. And as the scholarly history of the study of culture proves, it is notoriously difficult to formulate an adequate definition of such a common thing as culture. For instance, a popular study on cultural differences, especially in the world of business – Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business (2014) – marks cross-cultural interaction on the basis of eight dominant aspects of cultural habits. These concern, for instance, how people communicate (explicitly vs. implicitly) or evaluate (direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback), how they lead (egalitarian vs. hierarchical), or how they disagree (confrontational vs. avoiding confrontation). Yet Meyer’s study does not define what is meant by culture.

Another example: in Understanding Culture: A Handbook for Students in the Humanities, Babette Hellemans defines culture as ‘the sum of the collective representations associated with a particular society’.2 This is a definition, for sure, but one problem here is that culture appears to be something that ‘is associated with’. This implies that it can only be assessed from some sort of outside, namely by actors who do the associating. Secondly, culture appears to mark a society. Of course, we should ask what is meant by ‘society’, then, but the equation of culture with society is in any case a controversial one. In what follows, we will not consider culture to be equivalent to a society. On the contrary, a society may host many cultures (cf. Chapter 4). Finally, we will argue that culture is more than the total sum of collective representations. We will surely deal with the force in representations, but also move beyond them in an attempt to come up with a concise definition of culture as something that people do not only have or use, or associate themselves with, but that they embody and live (cf. Chapter 1).

One of the reasons for the difficulty to define culture may be that culture is generally dealt with on the basis of two different manifestations. On the one hand, culture indicates the entire set of practices, expressions, and artefacts by which people organize their lifeworlds. This mode of culture is involved, for example, when people speak of ‘Japanese culture’, or ‘Tapirapé culture’ – the culture of one of the indigenous peoples living in Brazil. As the two examples illustrate, scale is not decisive for culture, for we just compared a culture of approximately 126.5 million people with one that currently consists of about two hundred. On the other hand, culture is often used to indicate the entire set of artistic expressions produced by people in fields such as architecture, sculpture, music, literature, cinema, games, and so forth. The two are often distinguished by means of the use of the word ‘culture’ with a small ‘c’ and a capital ‘C’.

The distinction between culture and Culture connotes a hierarchy that has come to be questioned more and more over the past six decades. One of the issues with this distinction was why, for instance, classical European music would be assigned a capital ‘C’ and pop music would not; why art house movies would, but by no means television series. Also, why would the Ghanaian artist and ethnomusicologist Mustafa Tettey Addy be considered as a performer, whereas the French composer and bird watcher Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) would be blessed with the aura of the capital C, precisely due to his being regarded as a composer. Likewise, why would medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen’s (1098-1179) construction of a secret language for her company of women be a matter of linguistics only, whereas her songs were art? We will return to the issue of cultural hierarchies in Chapters 5 and 8. For now the important point is that the relation between the two, culture and Culture, is pivotal in the field of the humanities for the forms that they may use, what these forms express, what such expressive forms can, or may mean; and how such expressions embody a mode of living.

With the heading of this study being ‘conflict and cooperation’, these two terms need to be defined as well. First of all, in many instances, c/Culture is considered to be a positive matter that brings people together. This is, for instance, what UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, tells us about culture:

In today’s interconnected world, culture’s power to transform societies is clear. Its diverse manifestations – from our cherished historic monuments and museums to traditional practices and contemporary art forms – enrich our everyday lives in countless ways. Heritage constitutes a source of identity and cohesion for communities disrupted by bewildering change and economic instability. Creativity contributes to building open, inclusive and pluralistic societies. Both heritage and creativity lay the foundations for vibrant, innovative and prosperous knowledge societies.3

The quote not only entails a contradiction – culture is, on the one hand, a defence against ‘bewildering change and economic instability’, whereas, on the other hand, it lays the ‘foundations for vibrant, innovative and prosperous knowledge societies’ – but it also sketches a pretty rosy picture of what culture produces, especially when it is equated with creativity. If the creativity in culture is at the basis of ‘open, inclusive, and pluralistic societies’, there are as many examples where people have rather creatively produced societies that are, culturally speaking, closed, exclusive, and uniform. Many of the devastating conflicts that people were engaged in, or wilfully have engaged in, were propelled by culture.

We preserve the notion of conflict, in accordance with its etymological origin, for violent confrontations between people. Conflict goes back to Latin confligere: ‘to fight/strike with’. Conflict is different from friction here. Even open, inclusive, and pluralistic societies will brim with frictions. Such frictions can be productive, positive even. They can also be annoying. They may lead to conflict, but not necessarily so.

As for cooperation, historically speaking, there has been much more intercultural cooperation than conflict. The reason is simple: people may wage war at times, but they always trade and exchange things, even in times of war. War is temporary, that is; trade and exchange are continuous. Sometimes trade even takes place between warring parties. Cooperation etymologically means ‘to work together’. This can be, but need not be work as in modern labour. There are so many ways, also economically, in which people may work together. For instance, the cultural forms of knowledge and practices that women developed with regard to giving birth – also indicated by ‘labour’ – were developed within cultures but also developed through the help of cultural interactions.4 One example: currently in Peru healthcare workers who were used to Western ways of giving birth managed to work together with indigenous pregnant women who wanted to give birth according to their customs: sitting upright, with a trusted or loved relative behind them and with a rope in front of them with knots to support themselves.5 As may be clear, people have tendencies throughout history to mark other cultures as ‘other’ or ‘less’. Nonetheless they have time and again also shown great interest in, or attention for others and other cultures. The human animal may be a pretty brutal one at times, but it is also an attentive and curious creature – or at least it can be.

The book was developed for a second year BA course in international studies. However, it can be useful for other courses, due to its systemic build-up. The book is divided into two blocks. In the first block, culture is studied respectively in terms of larger-scale forms of organization, or realms, such as culture itself, nation-state, world, society, civilization, and community (Chapters 1-6). In this block, culture is defined as such, and cultural interactions are studied for how they relate to politics, to the political, to economies, to affective economies, and to religion. In the second block, forms of self and selfhood are central. There, cultural interactions will be studied respectively in relation to notions of individuality, affiliation, comparability, disability, animality, and technology (Chapters 7-12).

Developing the course and writing this book was a learning process in itself. Originally, I was trained in the domain of arts and culture – comparative literature and theory, specifically. My position at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and at the Department of Film and Literary Studies was the result of this training. At the start of my teaching in The Hague, I tried to translate the knowledge developed in my fields of expertise to a body of students that by and large missed training in the arts and culture and were interested much more in the relevance of cultural dynamics and tensions in the force fields of international, sociopolitical, economic, or religious developments. As will become clear, works of art, literature, films, and music proved to be excellent guides in exploring these international dynamics. Still, I had to recalibrate, reorient, and explore new fields of research, also in response to rapidly developing, planetary developments that involved both human interactions and transhuman ones.

Nothing in what follows is decisive, or conclusive. Almost everything is a matter of scholarly debate, agreement, conversation, or rejection. This does not mean that anything goes. In fact, scholarly speaking, nothing goes. In a scholarly sense, matters only ‘go’ depending on substantive sensing, analyzing, reasoning, motivating, underpinning, choosing, agreeing, or disagreeing. With regard to the material offered in this text, many of the readers may agree with this or that, others with yet other points; few will agree with nothing. In the field of culture, it is impossible to have a neutral or objective position. Even if this text is an introduction, it is also political in the sense that time and again the question is not just what individuals choose for but also what collectives choose for. In a sense, this introduction is a provocation. It asks readers: what do you choose for? Choosing against something is also possible. In my assessment and politically speaking, choosing against something is, in the end, less forceful.

Every chapter consists of two parts that each start with a piece of music as a musical epigraph. The pieces can be either songs with text, or pieces without text. Readers are asked to listen to these before reading the chapter. The reason I wanted to involve music is that it may be the best way to avoid thinking about culture only in terms of ‘meaning’. Cultures are as much a matter of rhythms, of choreographies, of movement, of sounds, of all the senses, of which there are more than five.6 Studying culture is not only something of the scholarly mind, that is. It is as much about sensuous and sensitive perceptiveness since culture is always embodied. Consequently, cultural scholarship that wants to make sense cannot be a matter of the mind only. Cultural knowledge is embodied and positioned knowledge by definition.

1 Wild Ambience, ‘Australian Magpie: Song & Calls’.

2 Hellemans, Understanding Culture, 18. Emphasis in original.

3 UNESCO, ‘Protecting Our Heritage and Fostering Creativity’.

4 See, for instance, Davis-Floyd and Sargent, Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge. As for conflict, next to cooperation, one editor of this volume also worked on a volume in which the effects of economic or military violence on giving birth are central: Scheper-Hughes and Sargent, Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood.

5 Gomez, ‘Giving Birth Upright, with Maté’.

6 The Dutch psychiatrist Iris Sommer could easily get to eleven. To test her awareness, she decided to live for a year in Mumbai and the book on this experiment was called De zeven zintuigen: Over waarnemen en onwaarnemen, or The Seven Senses: About Perception and Non Perception.

Part 1

Cultural Realms

1. Culture in Terms of Representation and as Form-of-life

1.1. In what senses is culture a matter of life and death?

Señoras y señores

Buenas tardes, buenas noches

Buenas tardes, buenas noches

Señoritas y señores

To be here with you tonight brings me joy, que alegría

For this music is my language, and the world es mi familia

For this music is my language, and the world es mi familia

For this music is my language

And the world es mi familia

For this music is my language…

‘The World Es Mi Familia’, from COCO (2017)7

In terms of why culture matters and why cultural interactions matter, perhaps the most pronounced and basic question is: in what senses is culture a matter of life and death? Giving an answer to this question forces us to come up with an answer to a second question: what is the definition of culture? To answer both, this chapter explores two pivotal concepts: ‘representation’ and ‘form-of-life’. The two will be dealt with by taking seriously that culture is a matter of life and death, and a matter of representation, or perhaps more than this: a form-of-life.

Human beings are not the only animals to have culture (cf. Chapters 11 and 12). Yet for centuries the fact that human beings had or used culture was the dominant marker of difference between them and animals. For instance, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) stated that only people have a sense of their own mortality because they can think about their inevitable death and express their feelings, anxieties, and desires about it. For sure, animals also die, but according to Heidegger they have no sense beforehand, or no sense of anticipation, that their life is restricted, for this is a culturally determined issue. Leaving aside the issue whether or not animals sense that their life is limited, it is certain that all cultures make people aware that life is confined within the limits of birth and death.

In general, or fundamentally, human life depends on culture, since it contains the entire set of practices, attitudes, technologies, and artefacts by means of which human beings are able to organize themselves in conflict and cooperation with the living environment. For instance, how to find, prepare, eat, taste, and share food is a matter of culture. The French philosopher Roland Barthes noted that food is a ‘system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior’.8 With respect to the production, consumption, tasting, and sharing of food, culture is a fundamental issue for the transfer of knowledge between people, collectively and across generations.9 Here we already have three pivotal elements of a definition of culture. Human beings are a cultivating species; a speaking, communicating, and teaching species; and a sensing and knowing species, be it with several divergences.

For instance, the wisdoms people teach one another with regard to birth, life, and death vary considerably across cultures. The conceptualization of death, the rituals surrounding birth and death, and the practices of dealing with death and the dead differ substantially between, say, Mexican and Maori cultures. More so, even within a particular culture, there will be great differences between individual communities. For instance, in Dutch culture the differences between Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and secular communities are substantial in how they deal with life and death. Moreover, death has come to be dealt with differently with the arrival of consumer culture; or it is being dealt with differently in the current phase of global capitalism.

In the context of global capitalism, with its roots in the period of colonialism and the flows it has produced, some speak of a ‘necropolitics’, as Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe did.10 Mbembe used the term to indicate that the organization of life and death is not only a cultural concern, but a governmental and legal issue as well, in a situation that Mbembe describes as perpetual war. We will return to the relation between culture and politics in the next two chapters. For now, the point is that Mbembe highlighted how in many current circumstances political and legal actors decide who is to die and who is to live. The cases of immigrants trying to cross the Mexican borders or the Mediterranean seas are just two chilling examples.

In most cases and most cultures, life will be valued more than death. Still, many cultures define situations in which death is valued more than life, whether for spiritual reasons or out of shame. In terms of politics and legality, however, the question is who is allowed to live, or for whom authorities will take responsibility. As we will see, politics is distinguishable from culture, here, but also closely connected to it.

The value that people attach to their culture is not fixed. They may assimilate into another culture, or combine elements from different cultures to design a new mixture that feels like their own. The Dutch, for instance, are famous for their tulips nowadays. Yet the cultivation of tulips came from Turkey – tulipa originally means ‘flower resembling a turban’. The story is that in the seventeenth century, some tulip bulbs that the sultan had presented as a precious gift to a Flemish diplomat, ended up being passed on to a Leiden professor named Carolus Clusius, from whose house they were later stolen. Consequently, an entire new industry started that redefined the Dutch self-image. The same scientist, under whose supervision the hortus botanicus (botanical garden) was created in Leiden, also introduced potatoes, tobacco, tomatoes, beans, and maize into the Low Countries. For centuries, potatoes were another Dutch icon, captured in an equally iconic painting by Vincent van Gogh: The Potato Eaters (1885).

Another example: Russians can be proud to be Russian, yet that very name is adopted from the Vikings, who were called Rus, and who in the eighth century had settled in the region stretching from the Baltic sea to the Black Sea. The Vikings, in turn, were originally much opposed to Christianity but assimilated into Christian culture nevertheless over the course of four centuries, which is why all Nordic countries in Europe are now by and large Protestant. All of this is ample evidence, then, that people can be irreverent, flexible, and innovative in their dealing with culture.

There is also ample evidence of how culture may be so quintessential to human beings that they cling to it as if it were life itself. People have been willing to give their lives for a culture, or a religion, either because they refused to give in to a suppressive power or because they were willing to give their life for the greater good – something coined as ‘altruistic suicide’. All martyrs can be considered as an example, here. The explanation may be that life without culture is not possible. One of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade was not just that human beings were enslaved, but that they were robbed of their culture and meaningful lifeworld. Yet despite this deprivation, they started to reshape their lives culturally in the new enforced circumstances. The reason was that life without culture is, indeed, not possible, or not bearable. At the same time, for enslaved people the culture of origin held a palpable attraction for decades, and even centuries.

In this context, the African-American philosopher bell hooks – whose refusal to spell her name with capitals is intentional – was interested in pedagogy and didactics in Teaching to Transgress (1994) or Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2004). She feels herself to be a part of a long tradition of people who had to teach themselves how to organize their own culture against oppressive forces in such a way that they felt alive, valuable, and meaningful. Here, hooks noticed the enormous powers residing in representation. These powers reside in two manifestations. If people belong to a certain culture, everything they do, whether they want to or not, expresses this culture. The ways in which people walk, talk, belch, and decorate their environments, the ways in which they have sex, dress, eat, or hold their head; they all express a certain culture. In whatever they do, people represent a culture, then, or they embody different cultures – whether they want it or not. The realm of representation also contains all the explicit ways by means of which a culture is expressed, or by means of which people are given the task to represent something. If people are appointed to be ambassador for Mozambique in China, for instance, they represent their country, but also its culture(s).

As the prefix re-suggests, representation is a manifestation of something else. Philosopher and literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak made a distinction in this context between representation as Vertretung or as Darstellung.11 The first means that representations or representatives are representing something or someone else. The second, Darstellung, concerns all those case in which something is being expressed, or posited by means of representation. In both cases we encounter the loop of culture. Most CEOs, for instance, will not accept an old, second-hand, and creaky kitchen table as their desk. They will want an impressive, massive, solid, big, and shiny table, with one chair at the head. This table and the organization of space that it implies, represents a specific distribution of power, and suggests that the CEO has real power that is represented through the table. Yet it also works the other way around, for what would the CEO be without it, or without a salary, without the dress or the suit, without the contract? More generally, the paradox here is that any culture uses multiple sets of representations, but at the same time the entire set of representations also embodies that culture. It is not the case that there is some entity of ‘culture’ that comes first, and is then represented. Culture is present only, or posited, through representations. This is why the struggle about what is being represented is so immensely charged.

In this context, hooks noticed the nigh unstoppable force residing in movies, as powerful instruments of cultural representation that influence the ways in which people think, feel, and sense. This was partly a matter of who was or was not being represented on the screen, but, more importantly, of how people were being represented. In the context of the United States of America, it concerned a movie industry with its own aesthetic and political agendas and its own people in charge. Still, any kind of political power has always been invested in this force of representation, and for good reason. The first Jesuits who came to South America had well-developed programmes to teach indigenous peoples to sing Christian songs. Currently, the Chinese government is very capable of suppressing any form of cultural expression in the north-western part of China where the Uighurs live. Aside from political oppression, or lethal violence, the Chinese government developed massive and intensive teaching programmes to make the Uighur people give up their own culture and to make them culturally Chinese.

Situations like these may drive people to a point where they would rather die than give up on what organizes their lives meaningfully, affectively, and sensibly: their own culture. This does not mean they desire to die, although this can also happen, but that they are willing to risk their life in a struggle or battle for their own culture. Mahatma Gandhi took this risk, for instance. Yet his murderer also did so. The latter was a Hindu nationalist who considered Gandhi’s agreement to the separation of India and Pakistan to be too favourable to Muslims. He was willing to sacrifice his own life in the fight for a dominant Hindu culture. He knew he would be captured, having killed Ghandi in a crowd at broad daylight, tried, and sentenced to death. And so it happened.

To many, culture will not be experienced as a matter of life and death on an everyday basis. People simply live their culture. The latter phrase may seem odd. Do people not have a culture? In the next part of this chapter, when answering the question of how to define culture, we will make a scholarly decision to reject this idea of people ‘having’ a culture. A culture is not a car. It is a form-of-life; people live it, and this is why they are so attached to it.

We started this chapter with the song ‘The World Es Mi Familia’, from the animation movie COCO (2016). Its lyrics were written by Adrian Molina and the music by composer Germaine Franco, a Latino and American of Mexican descent. The movie deals with the most famous days of festivity in Mexico, Día de muertos, on 1-2 November. For those not familiar with this festival, the movie is just a fiction that is entertaining. To Mexicans, it may mean much more. They do not simply know the festival; they live it. The song goes like this:

Señoras y señores

Buenas tardes, buenas noches

Buenas tardes, buenas noches

Señoritas y señores

To be here with you tonight brings me joy, que alegría

For this music is my language, and the world es mi familia

For this music is my language, and the world es mi familia

For this music is my language

And the world es mi familia

For this music is my language…12

Textually, the song embodies a cultural interaction between an English language/USA culture and a Spanish language/Mexican culture. This interaction becomes evident given that two languages are mixed in one sentence, as in ‘the world es mi familia’. The latter phrase makes it sound as if the boy considers the whole world to be his family, which gives it a harmonious touch. Yet the cultural meanings and connotations of ‘family’ differ substantially across cultures, ranging from a nuclear family with father, mother and two kids, to large and flexible groups of relatives, which need not even be related by blood. As for the harmony within families, all readers can decide whether families are only about harmony and cooperation or whether there may be considerable conflicts involved. As for the concept world, we will be discussing it in Chapter 3 and then conclude that assuming the world to be one may be the wrong way of looking at it.

For now, the most important thing is that the song clearly indicates that culture is always related to collectives, from relatively small to bigger ones. This will be the focus of the first six chapters. Let us therefore consider in the next part of this chapter, how culture can be defined as a collective endeavour; and let us choose how to define culture.

1.2. What is the definition of culture?

All the people in the world are dreaming (get up stand up)

Some of us cry for the rights of survival (get up stand up)

Saying c’mon c’mon! Stand up for your rights (get up stand up)

While others don’t give a damn

They’re all waiting for a perfect day

You better get up and fight for your rights

Don’t be afraid of the move you make

You better listen to your tribal voice!

‘Tribal Voice’ by Yothu Yindi (1991)13

In the field of cultural studies, so-called objective ways of studying or, say, measuring culture, are possible, but the question is how meaningful these methods are. Consider, for instance, the visas that the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection hands out, requesting applicants to confirm they understand that:

Australian society values respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, freedom of religion, commitment to the rule of law, Parliamentary democracy, equality of men and women and a spirit of egalitarianism that embraces mutual respect, tolerance, fair play and compassion for those in need and pursuit of the public good. Australian society values equality of opportunity for individuals, regardless of their race, religion or ethnic background.14

Scholars from the University of Western Australia then wondered: would these values indeed be subscribed to by Australians? They organized an inquiry to which 7000 people replied; the results revealed that power, achievements, and traditions are not at the top of the list of Australians’ values. Instead, they value benevolence, security, and societal universalism highly.15 These values are specified as:

People who value benevolence would strive to be loyal, dependable, honest, helpful, kind, and forgiving. […] Individuals who value security deem social order, national security, and their family’s (and own personal) security to be very important. […] People who value universalism in a society, attach great importance to equality, social justice, tolerance, wisdom and peace in the world.16

Given this, one would surely love to meet Australians. Yet the passages quoted and paraphrased, above all, show the limitations of so-called empirical data in the cultural domain. For how representative are the 7000 who participated? How many Aboriginals replied, for instance; and would they agree that ‘equality, social justice, tolerance, wisdom and peace in the world’ are the backbone of Australian culture? Would they feel they were being dealt with benevolently? And then, though Australia does not collect statistics on the ethnic origins of its residents, it asks people to specify their ancestries during each census. In 2016, 16.5% of Australians identified themselves as East Asian, Southeast Asian, or Central and Southern Asian. Did they respond to the survey? If so, would they have preferred Australian culture over their culture of origin? And just one more question: if Australians prioritize security, the question is whose security this is, or in how far the longing for security by some is compatible with universal benevolence.