Expanded Thoughts

I'm returning to expand my thoughts from before.

• Is the blending of Western and Indian traditions causing a tradition to die or is it the natural course of history, tradition and people?

I have often thought about this concept. It appears that throughout all of history that culture and tradition has gone through the process of change, things get added in, others taken out or changed and we adapt to the situations that happen upon us. Does this mean it is negative or should be avoided? Sometimes that may be a moral, value, ethic question but I don't know that it has to be.  I have wondered about the idea of identity preservation and what specifically is so important about it.

The first time I thought of this was in a Humanities of Latin America course where the killing off of indigenous peoples, languages and culture was a prime topic.  We read, "The Storyteller," by Mario Vargas Llosa which followed the story of a man who developed a passion for the culture and preservation of a nomadic, indigenous tribe. The story plot is asking the readers to engage with the idea of indigenous cultures as stagnant or capable of being dynamic. I didn't see what was wrong with change, change is also a natural process. I think that the real problem is the concept of loss. 

Dealing with languages brings us to the idea of how a language holds inside it an entire way of being, in some ways, a culture and a history are woven into a language and those cultural memories would not continue to be passed on.  In Llosa's novel the storyteller travels from tribe to tribe and tells the stories of their people and through an oral presentation he keeps their history and culture alive along with relaying news of family and others within a nomadic group of people, language is their tie. Changes to that language also begin to change their perception of history, of what they do and who they are.

Why is this bad, however?  That is what I keep coming back to and I think a large part of me sees natural change as just that, natural. Not everything can be controlled or held in its current state, nothing works that way and sometimes I see preservation as more of a means of inhibiting the natural course of how life plays out and interaction affects us. I am glad to have been affected by other cultures and peoples and do not mind that they may have also been affected by me and my culture and way. It takes a strong moral stance and understanding and the ability to learn to choose and make wise and analytical decisions to live in this kind of world.  This is what I believe we should focus our education towards, and I believe it is one of the main goals of higher education, at least.

As certain technologies have brought the world closer together and more accessible it only seems the natural process for interaction to begin and each of our own cultures and ways to start to meld into a new culture, maybe one day (a very far distant day), we will all end up sharing a global culture together. The only wrong I immediately see in any of this is force, denying of human rights, not allowing others to choose and not exercising wisely our own power to make choices. There have been and will continue to be many who work through force and close their minds to understanding anything outside of what has been immediately before them.

It is that mindset that needs to be taught out of people, and opportunities like field studies are one way I can see that being accomplished, but I even believe that it could begin to lessen as more and more people are exposed to a larger variety of choices and lifestyles through media and technology and small pieces of those will mix with their own culture.  once again, it may be a very slow process, one not perceivable through even a lifetime, but piece by piece the things that have made the world global will create a kind of global culture where ideas, languages, art, music, politics are all affected by another through process different from the history of how things were always done for their people and in that area. I do see this as the natural process of life rather than as a death of a culture.  

I'll finish these incompleted thoughts with a quote that I feel sums up some of what I'm trying to express here and I'll move on to a few of the other questions from my Inquiry Conference notes on another day.

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
Blaise Pascal