Crossing cultures…

This is a stream-of-consciousness ramble, I’m afraid, inspired by the fact that I’m killing time before going to the airport for my flight to Singapore.

Niti Bahn had posted a list of attributes that she felt are characteristic of ‘global citizens’, or ‘global nomads’ – and not, as I said, of a generation as a whole. Fair enough, and it’s not the first time I’ve told off for taking small piece of someone’s post and going off on a tangent with it. I suspect that we are both right, in that today’s culture-crossers, and ‘global nomads’ are developing a skill set that will be much more widely necessary for the generation that are in school now.

Anyway, this all got me wondering what sort of culture is going to be generated by the mixing and sharing of cultures that’s going to be happening in the near future.

In the colonial past, fairly large-scale physical transfers of population took place, voluntarily or otherwise, and some fairly fascinating things came up out of that. I wrote in a recent post about Vodou, which grew out of the transplanting of fractured African cultures to the Caribbean; and about the generation of new languages in the South African gold mines. Doing some reading about Kalarippayattu (which when transplanted to China led to the martial arts of Shaolin), and Silat led me to the discovery that when Malay slaves were taken to South Africa, Silat merged with Zulu stick fighting techniques to form a unique Afro-Malay martial art. Wow. It isn’t just the Zulus who fight with twin sticks, though: the BaSotho do as well. While I was working in Lesotho, we often saw small groups of youths wandering, in isolation as they went through initiation rituals. Wrapped in blankets or plastered in white or red clay, and armed with sticks, we were told on no account to go near them, for our own safety. The world they lived in wasn’t ours. The oddness was in seeing these small armed groups moving alongside the highways, with trucks and minibuses roaring past them, a reminder that the modern world has gaps in it, I guess – to adopt William Gibson’s maaxim that The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed, maybe even the present isn’t either.

So where am I going with this? I don’t know. It just seems worth bearing in mind that introducing ubiquitous access suddenly, connecting parts of the world that have the skill sets for that with parts that only comparatively recently didn’t have any communications at all, could lead us to some strange places, and I wonder whether we might be very surprised at some of the results. We like to think that our Westernised, liberal, capitalist model will dominate – even if we question whether it ought to – but perhaps something entirely different and unexpected will be created by the online meetings of minds.