Page 76 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THINKING ABOUT CULTURE IN A GLOBAL ECUMENE

forms, and with culture which stays in place, we must be aware that they can be
durable only by being in a way constantly in motion. To keep culture going,
people have to invent it, reflect on it, experiment with it, remember it (or store
it in some other way), debate it, and pass it on.
Let us come back here to that old-style de finition of culture I mentioned
earlier, that emphasizing ‘transmission’, ‘from generation to generation’. Such a
definition privileges the past as the time when particular cultural forms some-
how came into being. Later generations are turned into robots, receptacles. The
point of emphasizing process, as I want to do, is not to shift to the opposite bias,
and discern only change, change, change. It is rather a matter of destabilizing
the privileged assumptions of continuity and timelessness, to make reproduc-
tion and change in principle equally problematic, and to direct attention to the
part of human agency in it all. When it is understood that human beings are
forever cultural, information-handling animals, dealing with their surroundings
by way of interpreting and making signs, then culture can be seen as to a degree
fluid and permeable, not entirely independent of a variety of practical and
material conditions. We may sense that all kinds of interests and pressures in
human life take the shape of culture, cultural identity, and cultural difference.
Such a view of culture as ongoing, adaptive, collective activity goes a great deal
better with my field experience in both Washington and Kafanchan than does
that old textbook definition.

Among the foreign correspondents
Recently, I have turned to yet another research project set in the context of the
global ecumene. But it is rather different from the two I have described before.
The first two could be identified with particular places – an urban neighbor-
hood in the United States, a town in Nigeria. Looking at the world and its
organization of culture primarily in relational rather than spatial terms, how-
ever, there is no reason why our units of study must always have this kind of
territorial anchoring. Indeed we will stand a better chance of eventually getting
some grasp of the global whole if we complement such place-bound inquiries
with studies of units which themselves somehow extend in space over national
boundaries, bridging social and cultural distances.
5
This is a study of news media foreign correspondents. Turning to a study of
an occupation makes sense partly because much of twentieth-century global-
ization was literally globalization at work. Business people, academics, diplo-
mats, consultants, journalists, artists, athletes; all of them now extend their
occupational communities and cultures across borders. And a more speci fic
reason for my curiosity about the foreign correspondents has been that they
would seem to be key players in today’s globalization of consciousness. People
piece together their images of the world from diverse sources: school books,
travel brochures, and certainly not least the news media. The reporting of for-
eign correspondents for newspapers and news magazines, news agencies, radio

65