Cultural BoundariesAuthor(s): Simon HarrisonSource: Anthropology Today, Vol. 15, No. 5 (Oct., 1999), pp. 10-13Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678369 .

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Cultural boundaries

SIMON HARRISON

The author is Reader in social anthropology at the University of Ulster.

Introduction Writers on globalization often point to an apparent par- adox: namely, that increasing transnational flows of culture seem to be producing, not global homogenization, but growing assertions of heterogeneity and local distinc- tiveness (Friedman 1994; Sibley 1995: 183-4). Meyer and

Geschiere, for example, argue that contemporary 'global flows' of culture tend often to provoke reactive attempts at 'cultural closure' :

There is much empirical evidence that people's awareness of being involved in open-ended global flows seems to trigger a search for fixed orientation points and action frames, as well as determined efforts to affirm old and construct new bound- aries. .. It looks as if, in a world characterised by flows, a great deal of energy is devoted to controlling and freezing them: grasping the flux often actually entails a politics of 'fixing' - a politics which is, above all, operative in struggles about the construction of identities (Meyer & Geschiere 1999: 2, 5).

Anthropologists may have now abandoned assumptions of objectively bounded societies and cultures (see Hannerz 1992). But the communities and actors we study often seem strongly inclined - even increasingly so - to

represent the world as if it were composed, or ought to be

composed, of delimited groups of very much this sort, each possessing its own discrete 'culture' (Handler 1988; Stolke 1995).

Hastrup reminds us that to claim an 'inviolable and autonomous culture' in this way can be a vital means of

resistance, perhaps even of survival, for many communi- ties (1995: 155; see also Nadel-Klein 1991: 514-515). Similarly, Anthony Cohen argues that communities may often mobilize themselves by representing themselves as

having clear boundaries which are endangered - as having essential qualities, for instance, or distinctive ways of life, which are under threat from the outside (as they may indeed truly be) (A.P. Cohen 1985: 109; 1986).

In short, at a time when it has become no longer possible for anthropologists to assume the existence of bounded cultures and societies, it seems to be increasingly vital for us to understand the ways that those whom we study employ representations of boundedness of very much this sort. With this aim in mind, I wish to examine a specific problem in the understanding of ethnicity: namely, the nature of the boundedness of the cultural repertoires by which ethnic groups define themselves. I am thinking here of the way that such groups express their identities by means of diacritical 'inventories' - to borrow Kopytoff's (1986: 73) useful term - of practices and symbols: modes of dress, of livelihood, language, cuisine, music, ritual,

religious belief or other symbolic content conceived as

distinguishing one group from another. I will refer to differences perceived or asserted to exist

between such ethnic repertoires as 'cultural' boundaries.

By the term 'ethnic' boundaries, on the other hand, I mean distinctions drawn between a group's members and those of other groups, demarcating ethnic collectivities (cf. Barth 1969). Cultural boundaries, by contrast, can be viewed as demarcating the bodies of symbolic practices which these collectivities attribute to themselves in

seeking to differentiate themselves from each other

expressively. In the field of ethnic identity symbolism, the difference between Self and Other thus takes the form of a

boundary drawn between one's own group's cultural iden-

tity symbols and those of other groups. Of course, ethnic boundaries and cultural boundaries

are obviously closely connected. Movements of cultural

practices and meanings, for example, may accompany movements and interactions of populations; a group trying to keep out foreign cultural practices or ideas is therefore

likely to try to keep out foreign people, and vice versa.

Indeed, cultural boundaries can be viewed essentially as rhetorical devices with which actors try, successfully or

otherwise, to convince others of the truth of their percep- tions and definitions of ethnic boundaries.

My argument is that two principal kinds of cultural

boundary imagery are employed in the construction of ethnic identity. There are quite possibly other kinds as

well, but these two varieties do seem to me to be particu- larly widespread. They also seem connected to each other in significant ways which I will try to describe later. One

key feature they have in common is that they represent a

group's cultural boundaries as endangered - with very much the kinds of politically mobilizing import noted by Anthony Cohen. But there is a crucial difference between them: one represents these boundaries as threatened by the intrusion of foreign cultural forms, while the other repre- sents them as threatened by the foreign consumption or

misappropriation of local cultural forms. In short, one

employs a rhetoric of cultural pollution, and the other a rhetoric of cultural appropriation, piracy or theft. Let me illustrate each of them in turn.

Identity pollution The key analysis of the role of notions of purity and pol- lution in the construction of ethnonationalist identity is

undoubtedly Handler's (1988) study of cultural politics in the province of Quebec in Canada. Quebec nationalists

envisage their nation as forever menaced with being over- whelmed politically, economically and culturally by larger and more powerful entities such as English Canada and the United States. To the nationalists, these collec-

tively comprise 'not-Quebec', the defiling cultural Other that threatens perpetually to adulterate and extinguish their identity as embodied in the French language, rural folk traditions, and so forth. Fundamental to Quebec nationalism and, Handler suggests, to all nationalisms, are these sorts of images of the nation as an entity bounded

against an outside world envisaged as a source of contam- ination and extinction (1988: 47-51).

Ohnuki-Tierney (1995) examines certain comparable ideas of purity and impurity entailed in the construction of

Japanese national identity. For much of Japanese history, food - and in particular, rice - has served important roles in Japanese representations of identity in relation to other

peoples. Especially significant is the symbolic contrast drawn between imported, 'foreign' rice, viewed as infe-

rior, impure and contaminating, and Japanese, native-grown rice, whose perceived 'purity' is both a

metaphor and a metonym for the purity of the Japanese national self.

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I am grateful to Nick Dodge, Joe McCormack, and two anonymous referees for A.T., for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Identity piracy While ideas of purity and pollution play an important role in the construction of cultural boundaries, a rather dif- ferent set of ideas often plays a similar role too. To understand these, one needs to turn to a recent develop- ment in anthropology and some related disciplines: namely, the appearance of a rapidly growing literature on what has come to be known as 'cultural appropriation'. This term covers the entire range of ways in which the cul- tural knowledge, traditions and identities of minority peoples can appear to be exploited by outsiders. Here, I can do no more than draw briefly on some the major studies in this emergent field (Brown 1998; Coombe

1998; Root 1998; Ziff & Rao 1997). Discussion has per- haps tended to focus principally on the commercial

exploitation of indigenous cultures, especially their

graphic arts, music and pharmacological knowledge (Ziff & Rao 1997; Posey 1990). Increasingly, indigenous peo- ples and their supporters seek to protect such

commercially valuable aspects of their cultural heritage with intellectual property law. A related development is the growing resistance which some communities seem to be starting to show to the unauthorized use of their cultural

imagery in corporate advertising and publicity. Two recent examples are the action brought by the Lakota

against a beer distributor over the use of the name Crazy Horse as a trademark (Coombe 1998: 199-204; Newton

1997), and the damages sought by a Pueblo community for the unlicensed use of their sun symbol as an emblem

by the state of New Mexico (Brown 1998: 197).

According to Brown, some of the harshest criticisms of cultural appropriation have come from Native Americans

objecting to what they perceive as the misappropriation of their traditional religious ceremonies and beliefs by adher- ents of 'New Age' spirituality:

[NJative religious leaders express horror at the monstrous cloning of their visions of the sacred. For them, the New Age is a kind of doppelg?nger, an evil imitation close enough to the real thing to upset the delicate balance of spiritual power main- tained by Indian ritual specialists. (Brown 1998: 201; see also Root 1998:87-106)

An issue particularly close to anthropologists, of course, is the vulnerability of their own discipline to being repre- sented as a modality of cultural appropriation, and the

increasing readiness of many communities to assert pro- prietary rights over the results of scholarly research: to seek to control or restrict access to field notes, photo- graphs and other ethnographic records, to repatriate museum artefacts, and so forth. A debate in the field of lit-

erature, with close parallels to the debates on ethnographic writing within anthropology, concerns the appropriation of authorial 'voice': the issue of whether it is acceptable for white novelists, for instance, to adopt ethnic minority personae in their writing, and thus appear to speak for

minority groups to which they do not belong (Coombe 1997; Hart 1997).

Taken together, the examples I have mentioned point to an increasing resistance by many indigenous communities to what they perceive as appropriations of their cultures by outsiders, perceptions which to some degree involve the reification of their cultural heritage as a form of property. Coombe is perhaps right to see this tendency as part of a more general postmodern process of enclosure, as she calls it, of the intellectual commons: the progressive ero- sion of a public domain of culture by the increasing privatization and commoditization of all kinds of cultural

imagery and information (1998: 53). Brown (1998) very usefully examines radical proposals

made by some indigenous activists and their supporters to

expand the legal recognition and protection of cultural

property rights by means of new extensions or analogues of the law of copyright. Conceivably, such legislation might give ethnic communities proprietary rights, for

example, in their religious knowledge or ceremonies. As Brown points out, one of the problems with such pro- posals is their assumption that every particular ceremony, or myth, or religious symbol 'belongs' unambiguously to such-and-such a culture, and that people too are always ethnically categorizable in exactly the same unequivocal way. To my mind, an important part of the significance of these proposals is their role in the rhetoric of contempo- rary identity politics: they are, at least in part, assertions of

rigid cultural boundaries, and thus of unambiguous - if not reified and essentialized - ethnic identities (see Harrison in press).

Mixed discourses I have tried so far to illustrate two alternative ways in which a community may represent its cultural identity as at risk. It may, on the one hand, be concerned to protect the

'purity' and integrity of its culture from adulteration by foreign influences. Alternatively, it may be preoccupied with protecting its cultural practices and symbols against unauthorized use or reproduction by outsiders. If the prin- cipal concern of some groups is with keeping foreign culture out, with preventing or limiting its diffusion

inwards, the concern of others seems to be with keeping their own indigenous culture in, with limiting or control-

ling its diffusion outwards. In both situations, a group thereby implicitly defines its

social world as divided into two radically distinct kinds of

people: insiders and outsiders. What differs is the grounds on which this distinction is drawn. One kind of rhetoric

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defines insiders as those who faithfully uphold the group's traditions, customs, doctrines and so forth, while outsiders are those who follow other ways, deemed inferior and

defiling. Another rhetoric represents insiders as those who are entitled to reproduce the group's traditions, customs and beliefs; outsiders are those excluded from these rights. In one case, the demarcation between in-group and out-

group is drawn in the idiom of cultural purity, and in the other it is drawn in the idiom of cultural ownership.

In both cases, the collective Self is constructed in oppo- sition to a potentially or actually threatening Other. But this menacing Other may, it seems, be envisaged in two

opposite ways: either as intrusive, expansionist and con-

taminating, an invasive influence which has to be repelled, or as a covetous, acquisitive, extractive Other from whom one's culture has to be sequestered away. In short, some

groups seem to enclose themselves in boundaries against the pollution of their culture, and others in boundaries

against the piracy of their culture.

Case One: West Indian culture in Britain Of course, groups may often employ both of these dis- courses (and perhaps others too), and the problem for the observer is usually therefore to understand the ways in such rhetorics are in practice combined in concrete situa- tions. Let me give two examples. My first comes from Abner Cohen's (1993) rich and fascinating analysis of the

history of the Notting Hill Carnival, and of the key role this festival played in the emergence of West Indian iden-

tity in Britain. For the first five years or so of its existence (1966-70)

this carnival was a relatively small, working-class event attended by a few thousand people. Although several ethnic communities were involved in it (there were Irish,

Turkish-Cypriot and Czechoslovak bands, for example), the overall symbolism of the carnival was predominantly British or English, the themes of the masquerades including English monarchs, the novels of Dickens, and scenes from Victorian London. Politically, the carnival

expressed opposition to landlords and local authorities over issues such as housing shortages and extortionate rents (Abner Cohen 1993: 10-20).

During the first half of the 1970s, a collective West Indian ethnic identity developed in London, arising out of shared experiences of unemployment, police harassment and poor housing conditions, and this emergent commu-

nity adopted the carnival as its focal symbol. Within a few

years, the carnival had became exclusively West Indian in its leadership and in musical and cultural form, a process accomplished, firstly, through the deliberate removal of

all artistic and cultural content not deemed to be West Indian (Abner Cohen 1993: 1-2, 21-32). Cohen writes of

one of the main organizers of the carnival at this time:

He jealously developed and guarded the West Indian character of the celebration and discouraged the incursion of 'foreign' cultural forms into its structure... [F]rom the start, during the first few years of the carnival when it was multicultural in its arts and music and multi-ethnic in attendance, and was referred to as a fair, he strived to turn it into an exclusively West Indian celebration, to 'purify' it of the contamination of native British cultural forms... [T]here was at the time a sustained, conscious effort to establish cultural and social boundaries, to achieve a distinctiveness that would mark the identity and exclusiveness that would be necessary for the articulation of a corporate West Indian organization. (1993: 113-114)

To many of its West Indian organizers, the carnival was a quintessentially West Indian cultural event which had, in

effect, been misappropriated by outsiders and adulterated

by white British culture. As they saw it, establishing a dis- tinctive West Indian collective identity involved removing these admixtures from this key symbol of their heritage

and so recovering it as their rightful property: 'The West Indians had tended to reify the concept of carnival, that is to treat it as if it were a material object, and to regard it as

being exclusively their own' (Abner Cohen 1993: 76). Their appropriation (but to them, repossession) of the

carnival as a symbol of identity eventually came to be

legitimized by a revision of its history. From the start, a white community worker had been acknowledged by everyone as the carnival's originator and as its leader for its first few years. But in the mid-1980s, some of the West Indian leaders 'discovered' that the carnival had actually been founded by a West Indian woman in the late 1950s

(Abner Cohen 1993: 5-6, 62-78). While the West Indian community took the Trinidad

Carnival (itself originally an expression of black emanci-

pation, protest and resistance) as their model, this

community did not predominantly originate from Trinidad but from a variety of islands, many of which did not have a tradition of carnival (Abner Cohen 1993: 5, 21-32). The

great interest and significance of Cohen's study is there- fore that it is one of relatively few detailed analyses of the historical genesis of an ethnic identity and its cultural

symbolism. This identity symbolism was constructed, I would argue, by selecting an existing cultural form (essen-

tially, a working-class street festival) and subjecting it two

processes of exclusion: one concerned with pollution (removing all but 'West Indian' cultural and artistic con- tent from it) and the other with ownership (extricating the festival itself from its predominantly white working-class cultural context). Both processes crucially involved, of

course, the removal of outsiders from decision-making and leadership roles.

Case Two: Greek nationalism In short, it was not that an already-formed West Indian

community took over the carnival as its cultural heritage. Rather, this West Indian identity seems to have generated or produced itself, as it were, in the very process of appro- priation itself. It did so, moreover, primarily in relation to one cultural Other: namely, British white majority culture. But some cultural identities are defined, or generate them-

selves, in contrast to more than one cultural alter, and may

present different kinds of boundaries to each of them. Greek national identity is a case in point. Greek nation- alism arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in relation to two primarily significant alters: the Ottoman

empire and Western Europe (see Friedman 1994: 118-

123; Herzfeld 1987, 1995; Stewart 1994). Greek nationalists viewed their language and culture as having been adulterated over the centuries by Turkish influences which had to be thoroughly rooted out if Greeks were to

reassert their true national identity. At the same time, these

nationalists were greatly concerned with the custodianship of the classical past, much of which they saw as having been appropriated by Western European nations, particu- larly Britain and Germany. While these concerns tended to

focus on the proprietorship of material culture such as

antiquities and museum objects, the deeper issue at stake for the nationalists was the much more abstract, moral

right to be recognised as the true successors of the clas- sical Hellenes and their civilization (Herzfeld 1987,

1995). Like West Indian identity in Britain, the formation of

Greek national identity seems to have involved two simul-

taneous processes of exclusion. But in the Greek case each

process was directed at a different cultural Other: one, directed toward the Ottoman East, was intended to reclaim Greek culture from pollution; the other, directed toward

the European West, was concerned with reclaiming Greek

culture from appropriation. These two processes were inti-

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Brown, M.F. 1998. Can culture be copyrighted? Current Anthropology 39(2): 193-222.

Cohen, Abner. 1993. Masquerade politics: explorations in the structure of urban cultural movements. Oxford/Providence: Berg.

Cohen, A. P. 1985. The symbolic construction of community. London: Tavi stock.

-(ed.). 1986. Symbolising boundaries: identity and diversity in British cultures. Manchester: U. P.

Coombe, R.J. 1997. The properties of culture and the possession of identity:? postcolonial struggle and the legal imagination. In B. Ziff & P.V.Rao (eds) Borrowed power: essays on cultural appropriation, pp. 74-96. New Brunswick: Rutgers U. P.

Coombe, R.J. 1998. The cultural life of intellectual properties: authorship, appropriation and the law. Durham: Duke U. P.

Friedman, J. 1994. Cultural identity and global process. London: Sage.

Handler, R. 1988. Nationalism and the politics of culture in Quebec. Madison: U. of Wisconsin P.

Hannerz, U. 1992. Cultural complexity: studies in the social organization of meaning. New York: Columbia U. P.

Harrison, S.J. In press. Identity as a scarce resource. Social Anthropology.

Hart,J. 1997. Translating and resisting empire: cultural appropriation and postcolonial studies. In B. Ziff & P.V.Rao (eds) Borrowed power: essays on cultural appropriation, pp. 137-168. New Brunswick: Rutgers U. P.

Hastrup, K. 1995. A passage to anthropology: between experience and theory. London: Routledge.

Herzfeld, M. 1987. Anthropology through the looking-glass: critical ethnography in the margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.

Herzfeld, M. 1995. Hellenism and Occidentalism: the permutations of performance in Greek bourgeois identity. In J.G. Carrier (ed.) Occidentalism: images of the West, pp. 218-233. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kopytoff,I. 1986. The cultural biography of

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mately connected: to the nationalists, the Greek nation had to 'purify' itself of Turkish adulterations to re-establish itself as authentically Greek and thus as the rightful inher- itor of the classical Hellenic legacy.

I earlier described cultural boundaries as rhetorical devices. But clearly, they are often more than just this; ethnic groups do at times try actually to engineer such bar- riers and to exercise very real control over cultural flows

(see, for instance, Tomlinson 1991: 17-18). Efforts of this sort are perhaps particularly marked when nascent groups are struggling to establish themselves against opposition. Greek nationalists, for example, did not portray their national identity as a novel construction, of course, but as the revival or reconstruction of something that had existed all along. To them, the Greek nation was, and always had

been, historically continuous with classical Greece

(though, as Friedman [1994: 118] points out, the very image of classical civilization to which they referred was in fact an historically quite recent invention of the Western

European Renaissance). The problem, as they saw it, was that their nation had lain submerged for centuries under Turkish influences, and dispossessed of much of its patri- mony by Western Europe. What was therefore needed for this identity to re-emerge was to reverse the cultural flows which had compromised it the first place: to purify Greek culture of its Turkish accretions, and to reassemble the classical heritage in Greek hands.

Folk concepts of cultural identity I have tried to contrast two related kinds of discursive

imagery which seem often involved in the construction of cultural identity. One kind comprises discourses of cul- tural pollution: here, a group represents its identity as threatened by invasion and replacement by others. The other comprises discourses of cultural piracy: here, a

group represents its identity as threatened by being pur- loined or incorporated by others.

Both discourses evoke images of transgressive move- ments of cultural symbols across imagined boundaries. But they differ in the direction - inward into the Self, or outward from the Self - of these conceived transgressive flows. A proper understanding of an ethnic group's self- constructions therefore involves, I suggest, understanding the ways in which it seeks to draw particular types of boundaries around its cultural repertoire - boundaries of

purity (defending it from pollution), of ownership (defending it from appropriation), and perhaps of other kinds - thus representing itself as differentiated from its sociocultural environment.

I suggest that these two discourses are most usefully viewed as actually parts of a single set of underlying con-

ceptions which actors seem often to employ in claims

concerning ethnic and national identity. This implicit folk

theory of cultural identity might be roughly summed up in the following way. Firstly, cultural practices and symbols are in certain respects things (they are 'objectified' as Handler [1988: 14-16] puts it), and are capable of being transmitted, circulated, accumulated and so forth, much like objects. Second, discrete and enduring cultural identi- ties come into existence through the imposition of an

order, in which the unrestricted movement of these objects is brought under control and discontinuities are introduced into the unregulated flow of cultural forms and practices. This folk model thus seems implicitly to posit a kind of

potential condition of uncurbed cultural diffusion, through whose control and negation collective identities crystal- lize, each attached to a stable, fixed inventory of cultural 'traits'.

But a consequence of this model is that every such

inventory appears susceptible to loss, dispersal and extinc- tion. A group's cultural identity is therefore always to some degree provisional, insecure, conceived as some-

thing it can 'lose'. This loss of distinctive identity can be conceived to occur through the replacement of one's local culture by alien ones (flows of foreign culture inward), through the appropriation of one's culture by foreign ones

(flows of local culture outward), or through combinations of both of these processes. The implication is that a group must safeguard its cultural identity by controlling the flow of cultural forms into, and out of, its repertoire of symbolic practices, because if it does not protect its cultural bound- aries in this way it will be absorbed and dissolve back into its environment.

Conclusion Let me close by noting two general questions which the

argument of this article raises (see Harrison in press for some suggestions toward answering them). The first con- cerns the situations in which ethnic groups and actors

employ particular kinds of cultural boundary discourses. It is important to discover why, for instance, communities

may be preoccupied with the perceived pollution of their culture in some circumstances or in relation to certain kinds of cultural Others; and why they may sometimes find they can most effectively mobilize themselves collec-

tively through discourses of cultural appropriation (or perhaps some other sorts of discursive imagery).

A second problem is why ethnic groups and actors may seek to draw these cultural boundaries more or less?

strongly or sharply. Some communities seem to maintain

relatively rigid and precise distinctions between their own

practices and those of others, claiming to be able to place any cultural attribute unambiguously on one side or the other of these boundaries. Others seem to tolerate more

permeable boundaries, and may value change or indeter-

minacy in the perceived distribution of cultural characteristics among groups. For example, one can point to innumerable cases in which communities have been

quite indifferent to the adoption of many of their practices by outsiders, or have welcomed this sort of borrowing, or indeed have forced their practices on others. Conversely, one can also think of many examples of groups which have been highly acquisitive culturally, attributing foreign ways with considerable prestige value and adopting them

eagerly (see, for instance, Tomlinson 1991: 92-94). The folk rhetorics of identity which I have tried to out-

line thus certainly allow groups to represent themselves as more or less outward-looking, more or less amenable to various sorts of mutually enriching cultural give-and-take - so long as their cultural boundaries are not erased alto-

gether and all distinction lost between inside and outside. For according to these discourses of identity (to return to

my central point) the distinction between the cultural Self and Other depends irreducibly on stopping at least some transmission of culture between them: on regulating the movement of foreign culture inward, or of local culture

outward, or both, so preserving this critical yet imagined boundary against erosion.D

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Root, D. 1998. Cannibal culture: art, appropriation and the commodification of difference. Boulder: Westview.

Sibley, David. 1995. Geographies of exclusion: society and difference in the West. London: Routledge.

Stewart, C. 1994. Syncretism as a dimension of nationalist discourse in modem Greece. In C. Stewart and R. Shaw (eds.) Syncretism/anti- syncretism: the politics of religious synthesis, pp. 127-44. London: Routledge.

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