Transculturating TRANSCULTURATION

Transculturating TRANSCULTURATION DianaTaylor I A GIVEN; THEORIES TRAVEL. The question Edward Said poses in the "Traveling Theory" chapter of The World, the Text and the Critic is "whether by virtue of having moved from one place and time to another an idea or theory gains or loses in strength, and whether a theory in one historical period and national culture becomes altogether different for another period or situation." In a move that echoes the crossing and blurring of national boundaries, the social sciences and the humanities are crossing disciplinary boundaries to ascertain how cultural material passes from one society to another. Terms like "transculturation, acculturation ," "neo-culturation" have been used by anthropologists and literary theorists alike to describe the impact of one culture on another. My intention is to examine the changing usage of the term transculturation in relation to theatrical activity to illustrate not only how theories travel and how they change their meaning and function in different contexts, but also how the socio-economic and political power of one culture also impacts on, without altogether determining, another. However, it is essential to emphasize from the outset that transculturation is not a theatrical phenomenon but a social one. The existence of theatrical hybrids (such as Peter Brook's Mahabharata)does not necessarily represent the deeper and more global shifts of transculturation in a society. Transculturation affects the entire culture; it involves the shifting of socio-political, not just aesthetic, borders; it modifies collective and individual identity; it 90 changes discourse, both verbal and symbolic. Therefore, before discussing transculturation, it is necessary to clarify what we mean by "culture." Culture, for my purposes here, involves two facets. The "first face of culture," as David Laitin calls it in Hegemony and Culture, is the one studied by social system theorists like Max Weber and Clifford Geertz, who hold that culture is tenacious and that cultural identities are "given" and self-reinforcing. For Geertz (in Local Knowledge), culture is "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which [people] communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life." These theories emphasize the difficulty of ascertaining "meaning" across cultural borders. The "second face of culture" is comprised of the conscious politicization of culture, the strategic use of cultural symbols, and the recognition that "cultural identity becomes a political resource" in group action. The theory of transculturation involves both faces of culture. On one hand, it delineates the process by which symbols, discourse, and ideology are transformed as one culture changes through the imposition or adoption of another, and examines the historic and socio-political forces that produce local meanings. On the other, the theory of transculturation is a political one in that it suggests the consciousness of a society's own, historically specific, cultural manifestations -in contact with but differentiated from other societies. The various uses of the theory of transculturation examined here exemplifies the political positioning and repositioning of collectivities in their pursuit of empowerment. The issue in transculturation, then, is not only one of meaning (what do symbols mean in different contexts). It is also one of political positioning and selection: which forms, symbols or aspects of cultural identity become highlighted or confrontational, when and why. This said, it is possible to turn to the original Latin American theories of transculturation and chart how they undergo change as they are adopted by "First World" theatre theorists.' The term "transculturation" was coined in 1940 by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz to denominate the transformative process undergone by a society in the acquisition of foreign cultural material-the loss or displacement of a society's culture due to the acquisition or imposition of foreign material, and the fusion of the indigenous and the foreign to create a new, original cultural product. Ortiz defined the concept in opposition to the term acculturahonwhich had been coined by U. S. anthropologists in 1936. He writes that "the term transculturation better expresses the different phases in the transitive process from one culture to another, because this process does not only imply the acquisition of culture, as connoted by the Anglo-American term...