Page 112 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

HYBRIDITY

a matter of philosophy but of the wider cultural processes of subject and identity
formation. Indeed, it is central to the current Western account of the self to see
persons as unified and capable of organizing themselves. For example, morality talk,
which in Western culture seeks to make intelligible and manageable the moral and 89
ethical dilemmas that face us, is centrally concerned with questions of individual
responsibility for actions. Indeed, individual responsibility is embodied in laws that
hold persons accountable for their actions.
A humanistic understanding is also manifested in the organization of academic
knowledge into discrete subjects. Thus psychology is held to be about the workings
of the individual mind, Western medicine treats individual ailments, and economic
theory, though concerned with social processes, has the rational, self-interested,
choice-making individual at its heart. Further, it is often argued that realism as a set
of representational conventions upholds a humanist viewpoint through its focus on
the individual person.
It is commonly suggested that, within cultural studies, humanism is represented
by that strand of work known as culturalism and by ethnographic and other
qualitative forms of research. This is so because the level of analysis in this approach
is taken to be the whole person and their intentions, meanings and experience on
a phenomenological plane. That is, culturalism has stressed the active, creative
capacity of people to create cultural meanings and lived experience. By contrast,
work associated with structuralism and poststructuralism has been seen as ‘post-
humanist’ as it displaces the unified agent from the centre of analysis. Here
meaning resides in discourses that are exterior to individual human beings and
which constitute subjectivity as an effect.
Links Culturalism, post-humanism, poststructuralism, realism, structuralism, subjectivity

Hybridity The concept of the hybrid made considerable strides into the vocabulary of
cultural studies during the 1990s in the context of discussions about globalization,
diaspora cultures and postcolonialism. At its core, hybrdity involves the mixing
together of previously discrete cultural elements to create new meanings and
identities. Indeed, the notion of hybridity has played a significant part in
destabilizing the very idea of an unchanging culture that has secure locations since
hybrids destabilize and blur established cultural boundaries in a process of fusion
or creolization. One can make a distinction between structural hybridization that
refers to a variety of social and institutional sites of hybridity, for example border
zones or cities like Miami or Singapore, and cultural hybridization that describes a
range of cultural responses from separation and assimilation to hybrids that
destabilize and blur cultural boundaries.
In the context of the accelerated globalization of late modernity writers have
begun to talk about hybrid cultural identities rather than a homogeneous national
or ethnic cultural identity. Indeed the instability of meaning leads us to think of
culture, identities and identifications as always a place of borders and hybridity
rather than as fixed stable entities. Globalization provides the context for an
increased range of sources and resources available for identity construction. Patterns