Page 159 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

Civilizational discord
Cross-cultural interaction is commonplace in the globalized world. The con-
tact can encourage co-operation, but it can also lead to conflict in even the
most ordinary cultural contexts and social practises. For instance, both civiliza-
tional harmony and discord can be found in agricultural and social patterns of
multicultural community garden plots in the Nordic countries. Barbro Klein
(1990) observes that in Sweden, for instance, individual garden plots made by
Swedes, Finns, Middle Easterners, and Chinese in these shared public spaces
differ by botanical content and organization, and that ‘ethnic neighborhood
clusters’ and ‘outright segregation’ exist on the multiethnic grounds. Any out-
ward signs of sharing or joint purpose as ‘gardeners’ can be found ‘only inside
the ethnic groups . . . or ethnic coalitions such as the North European one’
(Klein 1990: 20). The ethnic groups not only grow di fferent things in different
ways, they demarcate their space in the garden by putting up boundary fences,
the likes of which do not exist between adjacent gardeners of the same
civilization.
Analyzing cultural orientations and behavior strictly according to civiliza-
tional differences, however, obscures the fact that tremendous discord exists
inside the various civilizations, and inside all the individual nations that make
up any civilization. In the Swedish culture of Western civilization, for example,
‘collectivist values such as equality, solidarity, and cooperation are officially
sanctioned, whereas individualistic concepts such as freedom, independence,
and personal success have a more oppositional flavor’, according to ethnologist
Billy Ehn (1990: 49). The ever-increasing influx of this ‘oppositional’ culture,
especially that exported by the United States, brings with it a ‘dog-eat-dog
mentality, cheating, and ruthlessness . . . any sense of responsibility for public
values and community are more or less non-existent’ (Ehn 1990: 54). Such
cultural differences can easily provoke discomfort in exchanges of all types
between countries of the same civilization.
Koichi Iwabuchi’s research on Asian regional cultural flows and cross-
cultural consumption further underscores how this intercivilizational cultural
resonance operates in complex, contradictory ways (Iwabuchi 1999). Iwabuchi
shows how Japanese cultural materials travel and arrive in other Far East Asian
nations, where the attractive civilizational commonalities are relativized by
profound historical ruptures between and among the countries involved. In
particular, Japan’s odious imperialist history combines with enduring civiliza-
tional resonances to produce an historically constituted uneven relation with
other Asian nations (Iwabuchi 1999).
And what about countries composed of a heterogeneous mixture of people
who come from many different civilizations, a rapidly growing global trend?
The United States, a nation of immigrants and multiple cultures from the
beginning, may be the prototypical case. The racial, ethnic, and cultural differ-
ences of men and women who compose the United States’ populace have been

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