Page 70 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THINKING ABOUT CULTURE IN A GLOBAL ECUMENE

along the nature/culture divide. Yet in the context of arguing about globaliza-
tion, in my view, it is this first emphasis, on culture as meanings and meaningful
forms which we acquire in social life, that we should take as fundamental. This
would define the range of cultural analysis. With regard to the other two
emphases, our strategy now may be to reformulate them as core problematics in
our thinking comparatively about culture, its variations, and its historical shifts.
It is one implication of the interconnectedness of the world that culture may be
thought of in the singular, as one combined inventory of the ecumene. As
a cultured animal, each one of us now, somehow, has access to more of it – or
conversely, more of it has access to us, making claims on our senses and
minds. How, and to what degree, do people under such conditions arrange
culture into coherent patterns as they go about their lives? How, as they involve
themselves with the world, does culture sometimes, in some ways, become
organized and subdivided into something resembling the more or less tidy,
bounded, collectively held packages we have called ‘cultures’, and under other
circumstances take on other kinds of distribution?

Cultural confluences
One thing that my field studies in Washington and in Kafanchan had in com-
mon was that the conception of cultures as clearly delineated place-bound
entities did not work. It seemed to be a matter both of the outside ‘reaching in’
and the inside ‘reaching out’. In Washington and other American cities, black
people with limited resources, living in the segregated neighborhoods which
by the 1960s were routinely referred to as ghettos, could conceivably have
shaped their own culture more completely within the prevailing material
and political constraints; but in fact their habitat was not segregated enough for
that. As far as culture was concerned, something more or less approximating
mainstream America, with its beliefs, standards, and ideals, was forever present,
represented by schools, social workers, network television, and in a great many
other ways, as much part of the accessible cultural inventory as any streetcorner
form of meaning and expression. In Kafanchan, the ‘reaching out’ aspect some-
times seemed more conspicuous, as townspeople played with ideas about what
life was like elsewhere; how to get a young kinsman an overseas ticket, perhaps,
or what intriguing foreign goods to import. Yet in fact, both ‘reaching in’ and
‘reaching out’ are, and have been, present in both cases. Kafanchan, again, had
arisen around a railway junction which strangers placed there, and the curiosity
and the images of the outside world had in no small part been stimulated
originally by Christian missionaries and the churches and schools which they
established. Clearly, too, the people of my black Washington neighborhood
would often voice interests, hopes, and ideals which were little di fferent from
those of most other Americans.
In the book I wrote on the basis of my Washington field experience, I placed
on the frontispiece page some eloquent lines by W. E. B. DuBois, the pioneer

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