Cultures are never fixed or originary but constantly changed by movement and history

Evidence

I became aware of the fact that, discursively, cultures always represent themselves as fixed, exclusive, originary, and unchanging, but, historically, when you look at them, that cannot be the case. Some change very slowly, some more rapidly: but they all change. They are all interrupted by movement, by conquest, by colonization, by trade, by migration, free and forced. They are disrupted by external influences, as well as evolving internally. Culture—the forms through which individuals and societies make sense of themselves and represent their real conditions of life, symbolically, to themselves—cannot be outside of history. Cultures are changed within and changed by history. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1204

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames ‘culture’ as a definitional concept: always historical, diasporic, never originary — foundational vocabulary for the field.
• XREF: Connects to the later Islamophobia readings on how ‘culture’ is essentialized to construct an unchanging ‘Other’; echoes Anderson on imagined communities and Said on Orientalism’s timeless Orient. — connects to: Human beings are perpetual travellers who never truly settle anywhere — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 948; Cultures cannot be isolated or defined but only change through contact — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 828; Geocultural aggregates shift so fast they cannot ground fixed ontology. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 710 (+1 more)