Page 72 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THINKING ABOUT CULTURE IN A GLOBAL ECUMENE

especially to celebrations of cultural ‘integrity’ and ‘purity’, the various terms
for cultural mixture have undeniably often had more appreciative, favorable
connotations. The formulation by the writer Salman Rushdie (1991: 394),
describing his most famous novel, has been widely quoted:

The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the
transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations
of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices
in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the pure. Mélange,
hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.

Even so, I would suggest that my own understanding of creolization is not
really so unqualifiedly enthusiastic. For much as I have enjoyed the vitality of
West African urban culture, in Kafanchan and elsewhere, I am aware that creole
cultures of the kind I have tried to describe and analyze are extended through
structures of transnational as well as national structures of center–periphery
relationships, and are far from free of the in fluences of power inequality also
characteristic of such structures.

Actors and relationships
Yet I have lingered here on understandings of contemporary culture which
are more particularly tied to my attempts to understand black America, and
Nigerian town life. In more general terms, how would I now approach the
organization of culture in the global ecumene, in its relative openness?
My point of view comes out of the social anthropological tradition; I return
again to the fact that culture is by de finition a social phenomenon. Meanings
and meaningful forms belong primarily to human relationships, and only
derivatively and rather uncertainly to territories. This is an old assumption, but
it becomes even more significant when social life for more and more people
involves a mix of local and long-distance relationships, drawing on varied
patterns of physical mobility as well as media technologies. It is true that when
I began my fieldwork in Washington, the emphasis in anthropology was still so
exclusively on face-to-face relationships that I was mildly worried by the fact
that I was spending so much time just idly watching television in the company
of my new acquaintances. Then I gradually realized that the comments they
made on what they saw on the screen were themselves a source of insight into
their culture. During the years since then, of course, the more or less ethno-
graphic study of media reception has turned into a major genre of media
research. By now, we are more inclined to accept that the relational view does
not isolate the electronic from the face-to-face, and in principle o ffers an equal
hearing to the migrants and to those who stay put.
The global ecumene then becomes a very large social network – or a ‘net-
work of networks’, if we also want to allude to its internal diversity, and the

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