Page 81 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

ULF HANNERZ

part as a matter of cumulative experience, and exchanges about that experience.
It is a matter of doing as well as being, it is fluid rather than frozen. And such
everyday cultural analysis might also tell us that culture may cut across social
distinctions, so as to create at least some areas of sharing, and some possibility of
mutual intelligibility.

Notes
1 On the ‘culture of poverty’ debate, see e.g. Valentine (1968), Leacock (1971), and, for
my own interpretation, Hannerz (1969 and 1975).
2 During my study in Washington, I had been associated with linguists studying black
American dialects from a creolist perspective, and this later gave me some initial
sense of its relevance to my study in Kafanchan.
3 For a detailed discussion of some such products, see Barber and Waterman (1995).
4 See the discussion in Hannerz (1996: 30 ff.).
5 For some discussion of this project see Hannerz (1998a, 1998b).
6 Between my studies in Washington and Kafanchan, I had actually also done a smaller
project on politics in the Cayman Islands, in the Caribbean – and, during my
fieldwork there, a crisis also briefly drew a British gunboat to an offshore anchorage
point (Hannerz 1974).
7 For further comments on this, see Hannez (1996: 30 ff.).

References
Barber, K., and Waterman, C. (1995). ‘Traversing the global and the local: fújì music and
praise poetry in the production of contemporary Yorùbá popular culture’. In D.
Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart. London: Routledge.
DuBois, W. E. B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: McClurg.
Hannerz, U. (1969). Soulside. New York: Columbia University Press.
—— (1974). Caymanian Politics. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, 1.
Stockholm: Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.
—— (1975). ‘Research in the black ghetto: A review of the sixties’. In R. D. Abrahams
and J. F. Szwed (eds), Discovering Afro-America. Leiden: Brill.
—— (1987). ‘The world in creolisation’. Africa 57: 546–59.
—— (1992a). ‘The global ecumene as a network of networks’. In Adam Kuper (ed.),
Conceptualizing Society. London: Routledge.
—— (1992b). Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New
York: Columbia University Press.
—— (1996). Transnational Connections. London: Routledge.
—— (1998a). ‘Of correspondents and collages’. Anthropological Journal on European
Cultures, 7: 91–109.
—— (1998b). ‘Reporting from Jerusalem’. Cultural Anthropology, 13: 548–74.
Kroeber, A. L. (1945). ‘The ancient Oikoumenê as an historic culture aggregate’. Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute, 75: 9–20.
—— (1952). The Nature of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leacock, E. B. (ed.). (1971). The Culture of Poverty. New York: Simon and Schuster.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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