Cultures cannot be isolated or defined but only change through contact

Evidence

It is at their undefinable limits, through “precipitate contact,” that cultures move. Can we keep them safe, isolate them, “create” them by definition? Can we preserve them from the blIout (pressure or domination) that will take place within them? The tendency, reinforced by how situations are reported, to distinguish between a North and a South, industrialized countries and countries existing in absolute poverty, barely disguises the scorn felt by the former for the latter. Nor does it conceal the pitiless, agreed-upon stakes, maintaining and exacerbating distances; nor, alas, the inability of pOOl’ countries on their own, or through decisive effort by those who govern them, to progress beyond the twilight zone of deprivation. But this distinction, sanctioning an established fact, does not permit its full-sense to be completely isolated. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 828

Categorization

• XREF: Glissant’s ‘precipitate contact’ and the refusal to define or isolate cultures directly bears on the reader’s strategic essentialism problem: any attempt to ‘create’ an identity by definition is precisely the essentialist move Spivak worried collapses into residence. Connects to Foucault’s race-struggle counter-histories and the borders of group identity. — connects to: Culture does not divide into one coherent culture per community — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 369; Pure-identity frameworks cannot grasp cultures defined by intermingling — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and…, 377; All cultures are heterogeneous mixtures, making purity-versus-hybridity a false dichotomy (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultures are never fixed or originary but constantly changed by movement and history #corroborates (0.95) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1204
• All cultures are heterogeneous mixtures, making purity-versus-hybridity a false dichotomy #expands (0.85)
• Preserving an ethnographic object requires isolating it from all contact #contradicts (0.85) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 26
• Pure-identity frameworks cannot grasp cultures defined by intermingling #corroborates (0.80) — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 377
• Culture does not divide into one coherent culture per community #corroborates (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 369
• Encountering another culture can dissolve one’s own sense of meaning #exemplifies (0.70) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 14