Page 75 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

ULF HANNERZ

selectively, to refer to membership in particular bounded, durable collectivities,
frequently with major social and political implications. In such cases, we should
be aware that the drawing of cultural boundaries is, not least in the present-day
world, often highly selective. People on different sides of the boundary can
actually share a great deal, even if what is shared is in large part disregarded for
purposes of group formation. The distinctions between ethnic groups in
Kafanchan, and between black and white Americans, certainly exemplify this.
And so the mosaic metaphor actually turns out to be misleading, except as used
in a very selective way.
We may share some of our culture with just about everybody in the world,
then, and some of it, more or less self-consciously, with other members of
particular groups. But it is also possible that our particular biographies, involv-
ing the places and countries we have visited or lived in, the books we have
read by authors from anywhere, the television programs we zap between,
the websites we visit, the people we have known, may come together as very
much our own private, individuated combinations, to be pulled together in
coherent perspectives as best we can. Each of us may stand at a particular
intersection in that total network of the global ecumene. If there is an ‘inte-
grated whole’, it may be a quite individual thing. Perhaps we may find our way
to some small group, or even a single relationship, where much can be shared
in what amounts to a microculture. Yet sometimes, such circumstances may
also mean that we are more than ever opaque to one another – and alone in
the world.
Such individuation may in some ways be enjoyable, and may even appear
liberating. In other ways it can seem quite disturbing, and we may become
involved with it only partly by choice, and sometimes through circumstances
forced on us. Either way, it does not at all fit with the scenario of global
homogenization.
I have already used the metaphor of ‘cultural flows’. At this point I should
discuss flow a little more fully, because it is also important to the view of
culture I have arrived at. In anthropology, its history goes back at least to the
same Alfred Kroeber (1952) who reinvented the idea of the ecumene. Flow is
basically a processual metaphor, with both temporal and spatial implications.
And by now, in some number of disciplines, the general concept of flow has
become a favored way of referring to things not staying in their places, to
mobility and expansion of many kinds. As far as culture is concerned, there is
perhaps some risk that this metaphor makes cultural process seem too easy, too
smooth. Certainly we must not just understand a flow of culture as a matter of
simple transportation of tangible forms loaded with intrinsic meanings. It is
rather to be seen as entailing an infinite series of shifts, in time and sometimes
in changing space as well, between external forms available to the senses, inter-
pretations occurring in human minds, and then external forms again – a series
continuously fraught with uncertainty, allowing misunderstandings and losses
as well as innovation. Even when we deal with durable meanings and meaningful

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