Page 74 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THINKING ABOUT CULTURE IN A GLOBAL ECUMENE

segmentation of markets, towards finding niches where commodities especially
adapted to the needs and desires of particular categories of consumers have a
competitive advantage. And such niches may be quite localized. Indeed, what
impressed me in Kafanchan was not least the way the cultural entrepreneurs of
West African urban life found their place in the market by creating, and offer-
ing for sale, their own creolized cultural commodities, attractive to their own
compatriots. 3
What even the simple framework of markets, states, movements, and forms
of life shows is that culture is divided into a great many di fferent clusters of
meanings and meaningful forms, handled in different ways by different actors
in different relationships. Yet while each of the organizational frames may have
its own tendencies in the handling of culture, they are also continuously
entangled with one another, to the extent that they engage the same people. It
is in these entanglements between the frameworks that we find much of what
is dynamic in culture today. Through them, that is to say, the flow of culture
may shift speed and direction, and meanings and the forms which carry them
may be repackaged into new units and combinations. When the ‘folk music’
of the form of life frame turns into the ‘popular music’ of the market, for
example, the cross-over involves changes in social organization as well as
cultural form.
This is the organizational basis, then, for the kind of situation I referred to
early in this chapter, where one might think of culture in the singular, as more
of a combined inventory of meanings and meaningful forms available to
human beings. Yet surely each of us as individuals will not appropriate all that
is in this inventory. So what patterns will then emerge? I believe the answer
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has to be multifaceted. Perhaps as we engage with the cultural flows within
and between those main organizational frames – state, market, movement, and
form of life – there is nothing in our personal cultural repertoires we do not
in some way share with some group of people. There may even be some
meanings and practices we share with just about everybody else in the world;
and here the global spread of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Barbie may
actually be less important than for example that of soap, matches, or those
blueprints for organized education which mean that a very large part of the
world’s children go to primary schools with, in principle, a very similar
curriculum.
Then there may be other complexes within our cultural repertoires which
we share with particular people around us, and by way of which we identify
more closely with these people. In such instances we may discern an approxi-
mation of that ‘cultural mosaic’ organization of the world, and it is often here
that in the contemporary world the notion of culture is combined with that of
identity, to the extent that the shift between ‘culture’ and ‘cultural identity’
may occur almost unnoticeably. One might indeed argue that all identities are
cultural in so far as they are constructed from meaningful materials acquired
through social life. Yet we tend to apply the idea of ‘cultural identity’ quite

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