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“Every aspect of almost every culture, from musing to music, from dining to dance and everything else you can think of, has been shaped by trade in goods, ideas, technologies, and - more than anything else - by the simple fact of people moving around the planet and interacting.
A healthy culture is like a healthy person: it is constantly changing, growing, and evolving, yet something persists through these changes, a ballast that keeps it upright and recognizable no matter how much it is buffeted by the transformative winds of trade.
We can even expand the analogy a bit, and think of a culture as something akin to a society’s immune system — it works best when it is exposed to as many foreign bodies as possible. Like kids raised in too-clean environments, cultures that are isolated from the world are beautiful but extremely fragile.
That is why, when it comes to protecting the particular cultures of the world, “authenticity” of the sort that natives engage in for tourists is probably the last thing we should be concerned with. (…) As a Pacific Island dancer replied when asked about his culture: “Culture? That’s what we do for tourists.””
A healthy culture is like a healthy person: it is constantly changing, growing, and evolving, yet something persists through these changes, a ballast that keeps it upright and recognizable no matter how much it is buffeted by the transformative winds of trade.
We can even expand the analogy a bit, and think of a culture as something akin to a society’s immune system — it works best when it is exposed to as many foreign bodies as possible. Like kids raised in too-clean environments, cultures that are isolated from the world are beautiful but extremely fragile.
That is why, when it comes to protecting the particular cultures of the world, “authenticity” of the sort that natives engage in for tourists is probably the last thing we should be concerned with. (…) As a Pacific Island dancer replied when asked about his culture: “Culture? That’s what we do for tourists.””
— Andrew Potter, Canadian philosopher, author, and magazine columnist, Cultural immersion or imitation?, The New Zealand Herald, May 4, 2010
