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CULTURAL LOGICS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES 159

century and their foreign sources, as well as to prophetic and classical
Islam/'^^
If modernizing is both a leveling and a fragmenting, what ought a
culture have in order to achieve national identity and integrity? One
could presume a perduring hnguistic community, expressed in literatures
deemed to be our own, as a saving grace of cultures and nationaUties. If
this is to be successful, it must be shown how the literatures could absorb
and reshape the impact of modern globalization. Perhaps the Hellenic
culture may provide a clue. The Greeks could easily absorb various myths
from surrounding cultures, although they subjected them to Greek
interpretation which operated not on a basis of archaization or their
clashing ideologies, but on a shared number of institutions that included
dialogical flux and mythological pluralism.^' The institutional context,
allowing for protagonal and antagonal interpretations and pubhc dispute
even what the sacred, did not propose any one mythological content, but
could incorporate, in a unique way, any content. Yet in current modern
globalization, the cultures absorbing modernization cannot merely treat it
as an ideological content to be either contested or compared; it comes
in forms such that in order to understand its language one has to
conflate it with the modern bearer of the language: mass media
technology.
Despite its various drawbacks, the work of Dumont may be partially
suited to explicate modernizing globalization and the maintenance of
cultural and national identities. In his view, each culture undergoing
modernization develops its specific modernistic ideology, stressing
individualism and historicism, by unifying it with archaic myths and magic
rituals. What is restrictive in this conception are the examples, borrowed
almost exclusively from the modern West, such as England and France,
and some of the border-line Europeans, such as Germans and Russians.
Even if it were possible to extend his claims to other cultural designs,
they contain various options that might not square with modernity. If
there were to occur a pseudo-unity of modern individualism and archaic
tradition, totaUtarianism might well be its result, abolishing modernization,
although using its technical means to obtain archaic ends. The synthesis

^* Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1988), 116.
^' Julien Ries, "Gedanken zur Hellenisierung der orientalischen Kulte," in Hartmut
Zinzer, Hrsg., Der Untergang von Religionen (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986), 51ff.