Revisiting Colonial and Postcolonial: Anthropological Studies of .... mutual mediations between local culture and foreign cultural elements in cultural interface.
Revisiting Colonial and
Postcolonial
ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF
THE CULTURAL INTERFACE
EDITED BY
HEUNG WAH WONG AND
KEIJI MAEGAWA
o
Bridge21 Publications Los Angeles
Table of Contents
Contributors .................................................................................... 9
Preface .............................................................................................. 15 Heung-wah Wong & Keiji Maegawa Chapter 1 Dynamics of Culture in Interface-Theoretical Consideration ................................................................................. 21
Keiji Maegawa Chapter 2
Revisiting Colonial and Postcolonial: Anthropological Studies of the Cultural Interface Edited by Heung Wah Wong and Keiji Maegawa Copyright © 2014 Distributed by Transaction Publishers 10 Corporate Place South, Suite 102 Piscataway, NJ 08854 All rights reserved. Exclusive English language rights are licensed to Bridge21 Publications, LLC. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission from pUblisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information contact Bridge21 Publications, LLC, 11111 Santa Monica Blvd, Suite 220, Los Angeles, CA 90025. Published in the United States Cover Design by Chi-Wai Li ISBN 978-1-62643-012-9 Paperback
There is no Simple Japanization, Creolization or Localization: Some Reflections on the Cross-cultural Migration of Japanese Popular Culture to Hong Kong ..................................................... 43
Heung-wah Wong Hoi-yan Yau Chapter 3 Constructing Self and Other in the New Guinea Highlands: Whiteness and Inter-Clan Competition in the Postcolonial Period ............................................................................................... 73 Hiraki Fukagawa Chapter 4
The Dilemma of Ordinary Muslims in Religious Revival:
A Case Study of Hui Society in Kunming, Yunnan Province,
China ................................................................................................ 97
Masashi Nara Chapter 5 Creating a New Meaning for Buddhist Rituals: Two Forms of Religion and Conversion among Contemporary Indian Buddhists in Nagpur City .............................................................. 131 Tatsushi Nemoto
Preface Heung-wah Wong & Keiji Maegawa
This volume is based on the papers presented at an international conference titled Anthropology of Cultural Interface convened by Keiji Maegawa and Heung-wah Wong at The University of Hong Kong in February 2011. The conference is funded by School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong to which we are very grateful. This book, as you will see by yourself from the papers, is about 'cultural interface' as an anthropological concept and its theoretical strength in analyzing cultures. We are not going to offer a summary of all the papers in this short Preface but spell out the underlying theoretical assumptions and the methodological implications to the study of culture. The first theoretical assumption is that culture cannot be studied in isolation, an assumption that is based on the ethnographic experiences generating from our intensive study of cultures in which we learn that culture develops in relation to its encompassing contexts including other cultures that it comes into contact with. This of course is not novel or our own invention. We, for example, learn from Marshall Sahlins that '[n]o culture is sui generis, no people the sale or even the principal author of their own existence' (Sahlins 1999: 411) but '[m]ost peoples find critical means of their own reproduction in beings and powers existing beyond their normal borders and their customary controls' (Sahlins 1999: 411). This, however, is not a simple, direct cultural borrowing but a social process in which foreign cultural elements are appropriated according to local cultural schemes. In this event, foreign cultural elements are indigenized. As Sahlins famously argued, 'cultures are largely foreign in origin and distinctively local in pattern' (Sahlins 1999: 412). That is to say, the social process is ordered culture and takes place in what we call cultural interface. It follows that the study of culture should follow a general analytical framework that involves three terms: foreign cultural element, local
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Revisiting Colonial and Postcolonial
culture, and the cultural interface where the former two meet. We would like to point the reader to an important fact that the existence of the cultural interface implies that foreign cultural element cannot be directly reduced to local culture and vice versa. For cultural interface is a conceptual space where local culture mediates with foreign cultural element to produce social effects that cannot be specified by either the local culture or the foreign cultural element but by the mediation between them. The resulting social effects in turn will have further social consequences to both involved here. The configuration of any cultural encounter is therefore very complex and the social effect produced can be very various. There is indeed no simple homogenization or creolization. The complexity involved in cultural encounter can also be testified by the fact that local culture tends to establish in cultural interface a range of relations with foreign cultural elements that cannot be reduced to one single mode of relatedness. Neither can the social effect of such a cultural encounter be subsumed in such general terms as 'homogenization', 'creolization', and 'hybridity' because these terms are too general or abstract to cover the possible, concrete social effects of cultural encounter. Neither can we ignore the characteristics of foreign cultural elements. We can see from the chapter of Wong and Yau that different Japanese popular cultural items can have different relations with, and various social effect on Hong Kong society. There, as Wong and Yau conclude, is no simple Japanization because foreign cultural elements cannot be considered as homogenous. The crucial analytical space is the cultural interface where foreign cultural elements and local culture play outtheircomplicated relationships. Some embrace the foreign cultural elements wholeheartedly as what the homogenization paradigm would argue; other receive the same foreign cultural elements with a new meaning as creolization paradigm could points out; and in relation to this, some other mix the foreign cultural elements with something local as hybridization paradigm would describe. But none of these can exhaust the possible outcomes of cultural encounter, which are far more complex than what these terms can cover. The complicated outcomes of cultural encounter are the result of the mutual mediations between local culture and foreign cultural elements in cultural interface. In short, this collection of essays points to a crucial feature of cultural encounter and its social effects: complexity. In order to fully grasp such a complexity, we should pay attention at the same time to local culture,
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foreign cultural element, and their mutual mediations in the cultural interface. We have to emphasize that this general analytical framework should not be confined to the study of cultural encounter. It instead should be applied to the study of culture in general because culture, as mentioned above, develops in relation to its encompassing contexts including its own social, political, and economic spheres. For cultural developments, internally generated within a given culture, are also constructed in the same general way. More importantly, the fact that cultural interface is the condition of culture, it can be applicable to the study of culture in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial situations (Sahlins 1999: 411). This general analytical framework also points to a very important methodological issue: the unit of analysis. It appears obvious here that the unit of analysis is neither the local culture nor the foreign cultural element at issue, but the cultural interface of which the boundary shifts with the dynamic mediation between local culture and foreign cultural element. That is, today the unit of analysis cannot be determined a priori but specified by the ever-changing boundary of the cultural interface. In short, the unit of analysis in the study of culture is historically contingent. Now let us see the chapters of this volume demonstrate how this general analytical framework is applied to various ethnographic contexts!
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Revisiting Colonial and Postcolonial
Reference Sahlins, Marshall, 1999. "Two or Three Things that I Know About Culture," Journal a/the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 5: 399-421.
