ON CULTURE, ITS TRANSFORMATION, THE RELEVANCE OF
LANGUAGE, AND THE MYSTERY OR MASTERY OF ITS MEANING

My Sociology professor in college defined culture in very generalized terms, as in every thing that makes us good. The idea that there is precision in generalization would have fit ma'am's terms to a t, for transcendence, were it not for the then agonizing headlines owing to the hazing death of a neophyte in the sadistic hands of fratmasters: LIVING (AND DYING) IN A CULTURE OF VIOLENCE.

My own definition is no less general, no more precise, but won't hopefully trigger a culture clash owing to contradiction: Culture is everything that makes a specific group of people that specific group of people. (Yikes. Is this what they call petitio principii? As in, We do not feel the movement of the earth because we move with the earth?) Actually, it can be stated differently, in as many versions as there are cultures: Culture is what makes Africans Africans or Filipinos Filipinos (or as one poem's title reads: The Irishness of Irish, which tempted me to write a piece entitled, The Joyceness of James Joyce).

But in the book Post Colonial Transformation by Bill Ashcroft (Rontledge, 2001), culture is presented in a very scholastic light, as the myriad ways in which a group of people makes sense of, represents and inhabits its world, and in a very interesting context, its transformation or response to imperial discourse.

In brief, the concern of the book is to present the colonized peoples' response to the cultural dominance of the colonizer (the latter being the West or Europe, the former being the Third World) and the transformation as context actually serves as a very transcending exception to the widespread belief that colonialism is unmitigated cultural disaster that destroys indigenous cultures. (I had long maintained this belief. In my readings of Irish literature, I came to understand the perpetual angst prevailing in Irish pop culture. As history had chronicled, Irish culture was practically obliterated by the British colonization, the King's English thrashing out their very own Gaelic language, now dying, being spoken only by a few. And as Roy Gwyn Smith said, Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?) But the strong antithesis is this: colonized cultures have become resilient that they changed the character of the colonizer, of the imperial culture itself, known as the transcultural effect.

The example given is a lift from the writings of Ralph Ellison, with music as the specific cultural feature. Accordingly, while the slaves in America (African natives who came in with the European settlers) were exposed to the classical music of their masters, there was no way for a transfer of this culture from colonizer to colonized (in italics because colonization is used not in political signification) due to the sophistication not only of the musical instruments used, but also of the music itself. But in the face of this exposure, the slaves learned to appreciate music and simply had to make do with what was available to them, namely, their hands, fingers and feet. And so they hummed, stomped their feet and snapped their fingers, the effect being a cacophony of sound that, while not having the symmetry and measurement of classical music, proved lilting and uppity. And so emerged this type of music now known to you and to me, now loved by the decsendants of descendants of the European colonizers and their kind, now a giant of a type in music, ladies and gentlemen, the music invented by the slaves, none other than jazz.

The concrete argument therefore is that culture is not static but move in a constant state of transformation.

(to be continued)