Page 69 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

ULF HANNERZ

life made me think about the culture concept again, to see what we can do
with it – if actually we can do anything with it.

In the global ecumene
To elaborate a little on that somewhat time-worn concept of culture in anthro-
pology, beyond the brief textbook definition, and to begin to scrutinize it, we
can discern several distinct emphases. One has been that culture is learned,
acquired in social life; in computer parlance, the software needed for program-
ming the biologically given hardware. We are cultured animals. The second has
been that culture is somehow a ‘whole’; that is, integrated, neatly fitting
together. The third has been that culture is something which comes in varying
packages, each with an integrity of its own, and distinctive to different human
collectivities, mostly belonging in particular territories. It is with the last of
these emphases that culture shifts most clearly into the plural form, as ‘cultures’.
It is this particular emphasis, entailing a conception of the organization of
cultural diversity as a global mosaic of bounded units, which is most dubious
in a world that is to a great extent characterized by mobility and mixture.
We need a counter-image to that of the cultural mosaic, one that does not take
for granted the boundedness of cultures and their simple relationship to
populations and territories, but allows as a point of departure a more open,
interconnected world.
Rather hyperbolically, in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan (e.g. 1964) used the
term ‘global village’. That has stuck in the public mind more than some of
his other far-reaching claims about the ways new media were transforming the
world and human consciousness. The ‘global village’, however, is in some
ways a quite misleading notion. To many of us, at least, it suggests not only
interconnectedness but togetherness, immediacy, and reciprocity in relation-
ships – a large-scale idyll. The world is not really like this. Most directly from
one of the classic figures of anthropology, Alfred Kroeber (1945), I want to
retrieve instead a concept which Kroeber himself had borrowed from the
ancient Greeks – the ‘ecumene’. In a lecture given soon after the end of the
Second World War, Kroeber noted that the kind of ‘culture’ anthropologists
would usually deal with was ‘necessarily in some degree an artificial unit
segregated off for expediency’. The ultimate natural unit, on the other hand,
must be ‘the culture of all humanity’. For the old Greeks, the ecumene, the
entire inhabited world as they knew it, stretched from Gibraltar towards India
and, just barely, to China. For us now, as an image contrasting to that of a
global mosaic, the ‘global ecumene’ may serve as a way of alluding to the
persistent cultural interconnectedness of the world through interactions and
exchanges.
With this image in mind, we can return to the three di fferent emphases
within an anthropological conception of culture I referred to before. Indeed all
three turn out to be contestable – the first of them, with regard to particulars,

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