Cultural Purity and the Refute of the Inevitable Momentum :: essays papers

Cultural Purity and the Refute of the Inevitable MomentumIn the introduction to The Pure Products Go Crazy, James Clifford offers a poem by William Carlos Williams about a housekeeper of his named Elsie. This girl is of mixed blood, with a divided parking area ancestry, and no real collective roots to trace. Williams begins to make the observation that this is the heraldic bearing that the world is moving in, as Clifford puts itan inevitable momentum. Clifford believes in that, in an complect world, one is always to varying degrees, inauthentic. In making this statement, Clifford is perhaps tho partially accurate. In the western hemisphere, where Williams was located, perhaps it bay window be utter directly that the influence of modern font cabaret has attributed to the lack of general ancestry, as one culture after another has bl eradicateed with the next. Perhaps it can be tell as well that, as Clifford puts it, there depend no distant places left on the planet where the presence of modern products, media, and power cannot be felt (Clifford, 14). The intention of this paper is to contend source that there is essentially such a thing as thin culture, and contrary to Cliffords belief, that there are pure unblended cultures that watch (while not altogether untouched by foreign influence), natural deep down themselves. It will be argued as well that the influence of modern society does not necessarily lead to a loss of cultural wisdom itself, but rather that a presence of certain cultural practices in spite of appearance the respective cultures has attributed to the lasting purity of certain cultures. In this case, we will be discussing the cultures that exist in Haiti and Bali. To address the first part of my argument, we fist essential take in hand what exactly is this pure culture that has been mentioned therefrom far. Clifford believes that cultures, for the sake of the argument being made can be said to be impure cultures, have had to reckon with the forces of progress and national unification, and that essentially this has led to many traditions, languages, cosmologies, and values being lost, some literally murdered (Clifford, 16). He argues that inevitably, all cultures either will, or have experienced this, and in the end have transformed into an alternate version of themselves. I propose that a pure culture is one that has either not had to deal with such circumstances, or has dealt with outside influences, without altering what is wholly exclusive about itself.