What does your culture mean to you? There are 6000 extant languages spoken on earth today. It is estimated that 90% of them will be lost within a century. Not to genocide (though that is always a possibility) but to neglect and cultural homogenization. This confuses me. While on the one hand, I greatly appreciate the value of being multi-lingual (being one myself), on the other, the barriers thrown up by cultural differences I see are the root of many of the problems we face today. And language is central to this, so I will use it interchangeably with culture. We can roughly assume that individual cultures assume their own languages and spiritual beliefs, all of which evolved together, but influences each other to a large extent. Cultural homogenization has been going on for several millennium and I see it as a positive factor to the growth of individual cultures and civilizations as well as the growth of the human race as a whole. The spread of Islam brought Arabic to even the most far-flung parts of the world, colonialism brought romance languages and made them an international standard. And the burgeoning populations of India and China and their increasing imposition of a homogeneous language of communication, Hindi for India and Mandarin for China, has in itself led to a decreased usage of several of their sub-cultural languages and a massive increase in these new homogenized languages. Now the two languages are spoken by the vast majority of these two rapidly growing countries, and the ease of communication due to the common language factor within these countries can easily be attributed as a main factor.
Now on the other hand, there are cultures which will lose their languages and perhaps even the associated religious and historical significance that those languages give to their people. But their people are moving out, discovering that the world isn't so large, marrying into other cultures, religions and languages, raising their children in a hybrid of cultures, a clash of civilizations and even ways of thought. And their children no doubt may choose to accept and learn the various aspects of the dual nature of their heritage, but will almost definitely themselves marry into a different culture or into one or the other of their own heritage increasing the effects that has on their own progeny. This goes on and on in and endless loop until we are left in a few centuries with a few dozen major languages, fewer religions and fewer historical remnants of society. Does the preservation of these cultures and languages have to be within the historical populations? Are we confining the Australian aboriginals to speak their ancestral language and follow their ceremonies for some perceived benefit to mankind, like some kind of cultural zoo? I am uncomfortable with the menagerie of events that sustain and promote obscure dying languages and people, in the name of drawing 'tourism' and preserving heritage, like Balinese dancers become an archaic remnant of a society looking for western homogenization but caught in the profitable parade of what was once a sincere expression of history and mythology. And well into the next century, when the Balinese people have forgotten their religion and struggled to industrialize and commercialize and all those wonderful profitable, comfortable, 'ize' terms that western democracies spit out at them, then they will still have their dancers, their zoo of culture, until even that fades into loneliness, like the last lion at a circus when the world can afford a safari in Africa.
What are we losing and what are we gaining? Are we defined by the history that no longer has bearing on our lives? Do we make choices based on religions we no longer follow? Is true independence of thought and feeling come from this non-culture, without the boundaries of ideology that a culture dictates? Or does that make us merely slaves to another ideology of a new culture we evolve for ourselves?
It is no doubt imperative to document human history through its language and its culture in the hope that some lessons may never be forgotten, but do we dare impose this preservation upon people who choose to abandon it for their perceived security in integration? Will we eventually shed pretenses of our histories of black slavery, white oppression, brown pacifism, mongoloid industriousness, and be a human and not a history?
I'm asking you whether you would be comfortable with a day when you can step outside and someone will not try and relate to you by the little they know of your culture (among the millions in the world) but they will relate to you as human beings. On that day, will that happen because you no longer possess that identity, lost in a stream of conformism (to obviously some ideal mid point), or will it happen because somehow, we can preserve a collective consciousness of history, language and religion without judging the other for it? I highly doubt the latter.
So take your smiles and your tidbits about my heritage that you know and leave them at home and start from scratch. What language do you communicate to me in, how comfortable do you assume I am in that language and there we start again on the barrier that language gives us through our perceptions of it.
But then who could ever stand a monolingual world, with a mono culture of brownish-blackish-whitish-yellowish skin with blackish-brownish-blondish hair and blackish-brownish-bluish-greenish eyes?
Where does it all go?
Where is your cultural identity in your life?
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