Flexibility in culture - potential couplings?
What is flexibility and it’s nuances? Is it an adaption, a pulsation? Is it a permanent, irreversible change?
Extracts from Ethnic Groups and Boundaries by Fredrik Barth, social antropologist
I was searching for a ‘cultural contour’ or ‘border space’ where the traditional cultural image is challenged. My hypothesis is that this space keeps the culture with both vibrant and protective mechanisms. I think the elements within this space are easily changable and adaptable to reactions of outer or inner changes. One might say that this zone ‘fill up’ the in between space, between the inside and the outside. It is indeed also a creative sphere; a zone of reinterpretations and inventions. It newly - formulate tradtional cultural values as more accesible and visible to actors that don’t necessarily share connections to the Sami. This space also carries a potent field of feelings and tensions. The flexibility and the protecting maintenance of the contour are controlled, skewed and modified within the register of subjective feelings and opinions of the Sami people and of contexts of different scales. In this border zone one also get aware of what distinguishes me from you. You can place yourself inside of what you recognize something else from outside you. In this way it is a zone of differences, exclusion and inclusion.
“First, it is clear that boundaries persist despite a flow of personnel across them. In other words, categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories. Secondly, one finds that stable, persisting, and often vitally important social relations are maintained across such boundaries, and are frequently based precisely on the dichotomized ethnic statuses. In other words, ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of social interaction and acceptance, but are quite to the contrary often the very foundations on which embracing social systems are built. Interaction in such a social system does not lead to its liquidation through change and acculturation; cultural differences can persist despite inter-ethnic contact and interdependence.”
I have in this diagram distinguished that 1) individual reinterpretations or experimentations are pushing this fluid contour 2) provocations from ‘outside’ and contextual matters impact the ‘body of the culture’. In this depiction, the circles, the rectangles, the pentagons and the squares are forms to differensiate actors; ‘core values - actors, ‘edge - actors’ and actors of influences and contexts, to this Sami representation. This visualization is questionable. To look upon the cultural definition as a whole (of many wholes), one could acknowledge it as a more ‘coherent cultural definition’ that individs can acknowledge themselves a part of/ inside of, and that has sort of a consensus. At the same time, within this more fixed coherent image the individual interpretations of the shareholders of the culture constantly challenges the cultural representation. The figure emphasize the cultural construction as a multitude of actors that in accumulations suggest a cultural representations. Each actor is connectable to any other actor, as in the figure depicted as red lines. These are couplings that could easily untie. The more couplings the connection seem to be more ‘positioned’. Actors don’t have a fixed position and can potentially move to form new couplings with other actors. Such operations lead to new adaptions and maintain the unfixed. The culture exists due to the interplay between actors. The stapled red lines are only suggestions; the spaces in between actors are coded to be uncategorized and non favorable, to hold potentially new couplings and movement of actors, seeking couplings and interplay.
“The critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses. The boundaries to which we must give our attention are of course social boundaries, though they may have territorial counterparts. If a group maintains its identity when members interact with others, this entails criteria for determining membership and ways of signalling membership and exclusion.”
“We can best analyse the interconnection by looking at the agents of change: what strategies are open and attractive to them, and what are the organizational implications of different choices on their part?” “(i) they may attempt to pass and become incorporated in the pre-established industrial society and cultural group; (ü) they may accept a `minority’ status, accommodate to and seek to reduce their minority disabilities by encapsulating all cultural differentiae in sectors of non-articulation,.... (iii) they may choose to emphasize ethnic identity, using it to develop new positions and patterns to organize activities in those sectors formerly not found in their society, or inadequately developed for the new purposes.”