Civilizational identity is fluid, not fixed or walled off
Evidence
The world is not as simple as Lewis and Huntington want it to be. They desperately want to hold onto a world in which the difference between “us” and “them” is clear. What they ignore, argues Said, is that civilizational identity is not fixed but fluid. All civilizations and cultures, including so-called Western civilization, have intense, often contentious internal debates about how to define themselves. Civilizations are also shaped and transformed by all sorts of migrations and movements between peoples of different cultures. Finally, it is hard to imagine a culture today that, in the past or the present, has walled itself off from other cultures. In fact, every culture has been and continues to be involved in transformative exchanges, contacts, and conversations with other cultures. — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 232
Categorization
- XREF: The counter-thesis to the reader’s existing ‘clash of civilizations’ framework; connects to Huntington’s model as the foil. — connects to: Some beings hold an unresolved dual nature that can never become one thing — , A Year of World Stories, 15751; The human-synthetic boundary is performative and politically charged — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 1599; The Mediterranean Sea, not the European continent, unified Greek and Roman civilization (+21 more)
Broader Connections
- Medieval identity formed through ethnogenesis rather than national statehood
#corroborates(0.80) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 86 - Orientalism’s ontological rigidity makes its fantasies nearly impossible to dismantle
#contradicts(0.80) - Orientalist civilizational essentialism is a pillar of race making
#contradicts(0.70) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1277 - Medieval identity was localized rather than European or continental
#expands(0.70) - Ideologies connect to subjects through contingent, breakable articulations rather than necessity
#expands(0.50)