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Globalisation, Culture
and Museums
by Linda Young, Senior Lecturer, Cultural Heritage
Management, University of Canberra, Australia
Globalisation is often conceived as a tidal wave, a catastrophe
that obliterates all in its path: nations, economies, communities,
cultures. It is huge and immensely powerful- as uncontrollable
as a force of nature. Everywhere it affects ordinary individuals
as well as large political and economic structures. It is inescapable.
However, the tidal wave metaphor does not give the whole picture;
it describes the shock of globalisation, but not the dynamic.
Firstly, cultural globalisation is not new. Cultural contact,
clash and change have always accompanied the economic contacts
of trade and the political contacts of conquest. And although
culture is always place-bound, it is never static. Cultural diffusion
occurs throughout history, creating new cultural forms, often
resisted as impure and dangerous. But aspects of hybrid change
inevitably become adopted into mainstream culture. There never
was and never can be a single pure stream of local, national
or ethnic culture, other than a variant which receives the imprimatur
of political correctness - for a time ... Yet change was once
so slow that culture could seem eternal, before sea travel and
European trade and imperialism induced unprecedented cultural
(and other) changes in Africa, America, Asia and Oceania. Today,
however, technological developments enable cultural contact at
such an individual level that it pervades daily life as never
before.
Elements of Western culture are taken up, yet they receive a
local twist. Rock music acquires ethnic expressions; Hollywood
spawns Bollywood; TV audiences watch local soaps in between the
syndicated comedies. Traditionalists see such incursions as the
corruption of authentic cultural expression. But with different
eyes, we can see that hybrid forms contain their own logic and
integrity. Museums will continue to have a role as the repositories
of traditional, even extinct, cultures. Specimens should always
be preserved as a record of and a tribute to the past. At the
same time, museums must avoid both antiquarianism and nostalgia.
This means we must engage with original owners or their descendants
to understand the context of cultures now embedded in museum
collections. It might mean repatriating some material. But experience
already shows that the relationships formed between museums and
the subjects of their collections can produce new kinds of knowledge.
Museums should now also document and collect the hybrid forms
emerging in their domains, drawing on specialist museological
expertise, unconstrained by conventional canons. Such collections
of past and present will become, in cultural theorist Arjun Appadurali's
description, a "warehouse of cultural scenarios". Museum
collections constitute a resource for human creativity, and we
should facilitate their use by our communities.
And of course museums must interpret both old and new cultures,
informed by the perspective of tolerance. Pride in the achievements
of one's own culture, together with a curiosity and respect for
other cultures, defines museums' way ahead. |
