Intercultural Themes

InterculturalThemes RichardSchechner 1989 INTERCULTURAL THEMES ARE PRESENT in my directing, my writings, and my hopes for the future of the world. Like many other postmoderns, I've traveled a lot. Not because I've been a refugee, a starving person in search of food, a prisoner of this or that Gulag, or someone oppressed or victimized who must, as the police say, "Move on!" My journies as scholar, tourist, and artist have been privileged goings made by my own choice. In Asia, Micronesia, Australia, native America, Latin America, and Europe, I have exchanged information, ideas, techniques, feelings with people I've met. Some of these exchanges have been carried out in a more or less formal manner-lecturing, directing plays, participating in and leading workshops, talking to the press, arranging for the translation of my writings. Although I have not consciously on the individual level been a colonizer or exploiter, I have been enriched (yes, I know the metaphor) by my trips. No culture is "pure" -that is, no culture is "itself." Overlays, borrowings , and mutual influencings have always made every culture a conglomerate , a hybrid, a palimpsest. So much so that we probably should not speak of "culture" but of "cultures." Racism is basically a myth of desired cultural purity played out against "others" who are perceived as being not only different but inferior. The notion of "culture" though questionable is useful. Every apparently whole culture examined historically can be cut up into smaller and larger 151 pieces, each with its own sustainable claims to "integrity." Some "stable" cultures-for example, the British (or are they English? Scots? Welsh? Irish? Anglos? Saxons? Celts?)-are not homogenous, even today: for the influx of former "colonials" from India, Pakistan, the West Indies, southern Africa, and elsewhere is changing the cultures of the British islands as drastically as the invasion of the Normans did nearly 1000 years ago. Is this influx reducible to the collision of cultures, or does it mark the creation of new cultures: Anglo-Indian, Indo-Yoruban, and so on? Just how many hyphens does it take to specify what culture one is talking about? Can not the existence of distinct cultures be located down to the neighborhood, the family grouping, and possibly the individual? But for all its problems, the notion of culture' is useful. The slipperiness of "culture'' as a definite term is due to the extreme dynamism, lability, and volatility of any given culture. Every culture is always changing, even Japan during its period of so-called isolation that ended with the Meiji restoration of 1868. What is meant by "culture'' is actually a snapshot, a stop-frame of an ongoing historical action. This ongoing action is a function of both endogenous and exogenous influences often so tightly intertwined as to make distinctions between en- and ex- impossible. Attempting to fix cultures or stop them from changing is like trying to end or annihilate history. Efficient communications and information networks, affecting not only the well-off but everyone, will make cultures increasingly less a matter of birth and more a matter of choice. Performing arts-because they express behaviors and emotion through symbolic action, narrative of both the made-up and collective mythic kinds-are wide avenues of intercultural exchange. Rituals and sports as well as arts, beliefs and agreed-upon modes of competition as well as styles, are being exchanged. Not all of the exchanging is welcome. Certain cultures, under great pressure, are threatened with extinction. But cultures are not "natural species," and care must be taken before applying ecological models to cultures using the same methods employed to save gorillas or rain forests. These attitudes barely conceal a kind of primitivism whereby threatened cultures (the Tagalogs of the Phillipines, for example) are perceived as "living museums" of the way humans "used to be." Also, interventions based on "saving" or "protecting" cultures, although high-sounding, often are late twentieth-century versions of the racist patronization or imperialist ambitions that glossed, and glosses, the work of missionaries whose avowed purpose was, and is, to "save" and "civilize" people who were, and are, thought to be savages/heathens (ripe for exploitation). The alternative of 152 SCHECHNER'S...