Page 80 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THINKING ABOUT CULTURE IN A GLOBAL ECUMENE

not only by internal political and economic integration but also by large-scale
migration from the outside, what has been described as ‘cultural fundamental-
ism’ now sometimes serves as a convenient substitute for racism (cf. Stolcke
1995).
Some of the critics of the culture concept would therefore avoid using at
least the plural form. Others would argue against using the noun form
altogether, and use only the adjective, ‘cultural’, which does not reify culture as
a substance but merely draws attention to a quality, a certain aspect of things.
Others again, probably not finding such subtlety sufficient, would evidently
now prefer to have nothing more to do with the concept at all.
I am afraid this is an ostrich response. Again, anthropologists may feel some
special responsibility for the concept of culture, but it is now an idea which is
everywhere, and the problem which is certainly not confined to academic
usage will not go away just because some rather small group of scholars decides
to banish the term from their own vocabulary. In so far as academic scholarship
on culture carries any intellectual authority outside our own institutions, we
would do better to keep a critical eye on the varieties of culturespeak both
among ourselves and in society at large – and try to blow our whistles when a
usage seems questionable or even pernicious.
It could seem, moreover, that the personal experiences which many
people now have of globalization might well allow them to participate in our
rethinking culture. Many of us may find a number of things we enjoy in global
interconnectedness, but we must recognize that such pleasures are hardly all
there is to it. As meanings and meaningful forms make their ways through time
and space, reconfiguring rather than obliterating diversity, conflicts may not
just fade away. As people who do not ‘share a culture’ more or less inevitably
come in each other’s way, contacts may well appear inconvenient, a bit
unpredictable, not quite transparent. Not least importantly, we may need to
learn to think of this as a fairly ordinary state of affairs, and simply to cultivate a
readiness to cope with much of it as it is – in the same way as one expects
mature people to cope with differences and tensions between generations, or
between the sexes, or between the parties in a number of other relationships
which they also handle on a regular basis. Life may be tough sometimes, but we
do not expect to solve problems in such relationships by telling the others to go
back to where they came from. Rather, we muddle through; and I suspect that,
in daily life in the global ecumene, it will be required of us that we all do a
certain amount of cultural muddling through.
But perhaps a kind of cultural analysis as everyday practice could at least
make such problems seem less threatening. ‘Culture’, then, must not be a mysti-
fying concept, but must point towards tools to think with. As a re flective stance,
everyday cultural analysis would involve a sense of how we know what we
know about other people: a sense of our sources of ignorance and misunder-
standings as well as of knowledge. It may suggest that differences between
people are neither absolute nor eternal. Culture can be viewed in no small

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