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Wednesday, December 07, 2005

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Michael C.

Displacement in time, place, and culture is an ongoing and accelerating process.

The second generation children of immigrants are clashing not with the original culture that shaped their parents, but with the fortified calcification of traditions created to protect identities in peril. Cultures live and breath in their native environments, and this necessarily means that they are continuously changing in subtle ways.

I would guess that your Korean American student might have an easier time dealing with the parents of her peers in Korea. Immigrating to America has removed her own parents from the stream of gradual changes introducing modernity to Korea. The tensions between modern and traditional, American and Korean, parent and child; get conflated here in ways that they don't in Korea.

Jack Whelan

Korean culture in Korea might still be alive, but I don't think it will be any better at surviving than traditional cultures in Europe. It's just a little further behind the the curve than other cultures.

When I meet, for instance, educated Germans or French, there is certainly a residue of their traditional culture in them, but it remains like a stain that has not been completely washed out. Their souls are more postmodern than they are German or French.

In Korea they are still in the middle of the wash cycle. But in a few generations educated Koreans will be like you and me, and like educated postmoderns everywhere. I don't see why Asia should be exempt.

Michael C.

I am not trying to promote some kind of Asian exceptionalism that will allow their culture to survive unmarred the globalizing solvent of modernity. Rather, I see that immigrant communities cling to a cultural identity frozen at the point that they left their native soil. Regardless of the origin of the immigrants—Irish, Korean or Italian—the children of the immigrants exist within a set of cultural strictures that no longer match those that continue to evolve in the mother country. If anything, I would expect this effect to be accentuated for immigrants from countries that have undergone more recent modernization.

Jack Whelan

Michael--

Yes this freezing phenomenon is pretty interesting. And it's something I'd like to talk about in a future post. Although it's really a different thing than what you're talkling about because of its physical isolation, you're making this point reminded me of Iceland.

In the seventies, the cheapest way to get to Europe was a New York-Rekjaviic-Luxembourg route that I took a couple of times. On the way back on one of these trips an American guy gets on in Rekjavic and sits next to me. He was a graduate student working for the summer shoveling volcanic ash and trying to learn Icelandic. Turns out he was also a student of medieval Norse literature, and he said that Icelandic was pretty much a frozen version of Norse from the 13th century or so.

Think about that the next time you listen to something by Bjork. She's someone who developed in a culture that is linguistically stuck in the 1200s. Maybe that's what gives her music that eerie where did that come from quality.

jw

Jack Whelan

I pasting this in for mathe:


Jack,

Last night I saw the movie "Avatar" and was very pleasantly surprised. It was a shaft of warming hope in this frozen season. I am a sci-fi fan and from reviews and talks with those who had already seen it (mostly men interestingly), I expected a compelling if not ground breaking visual spectacle of 3-D movie technology but a rather lame and unskillful plot.
In my eyes, director James Cameron presents the clash between our corporate (in both senses of the word) imperial culture and the wholistic, adaptive culture of indigenous people, in a popular and entertaining format. Moreover he does this not in a polemical way-- as some critics suggest, but in a way that introduces psychological and theological subleties that do not often appear in film. Some of these issues are addressed by you here in this posting and by others.
As you probably know, the plot is wrapped in the standard Cowboys and Indians story and the hero (as in the movie "Dances with Wolves") eventually identifies with the culture of the Pandoran people. However he and others were deliberately inserted into these alien's lives by the corporate invaders as part of a "soft power" strategy to remove the Pandorans from a particularly valuable part of the planet. The movie explores the co-optation of scientists and anthropologists. The corporate invaders allow the scholars to satisfy their scientific curiosity and they out of tragic and catastrophic naivety (and in real life greed for fame), provide information that will allow them to psychologically manipulate the natives, thereby minimizing the amount of violence and of course negative publicity that it would engender. The visuals beautifully illustrate the blurring lines between the military (the amply armed security force are former soldiers and Marines) , corporate interests and scientists. Actor James Worthington who plays the hero Jake Scully skillfully portrays this ethical dilemma. Scully and more significantly Grace (played by Sigourney Weaver), the director of the scientific/diplomatic effort discover the power and beauty of the native culture and of the "entity" they worship. Grace asserts that this power is scientifically verifiable and that its value to Earth far exceeds the value of the underground mineral they seek.
We are familiar with the idea that we can learn and benefit from native cultures more than they can from us, but I have not seen this idea presented in quite so entertaining a way. Indeed, the last part of the film (including the surprise ending)
can is a demonstration of the interconnectedness of life on Pandora. If you read
C.S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strength" you'll get the idea.
As a pleasant bonus, we also see an avatar-- in the original sense of the word.


Posted by: mathe |
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When I meet, for instance, educated Germans or French, there is certainly a residue of their traditional culture in them, but it remains like a stain that has not been completely washed out. Their souls are more postmodern than they are German or French. http://www.fullmediafire.com

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I am not trying to promote some form of Asian exceptional-ism, which will allow their culture to survive the solvent unmarred globalization of modernity. I like your work.

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