Western colonial globalization made traditional cultures hybrids, not fixed entities

Evidence

However, since the inception of the global “project” of the West at the end of the fifteenth century, this Tradition/Modernity binary has been progressively undermined. Colonized traditional cultures remained distinctive, but they inevitably became “conscripts of modernity.” They may be more strongly bounded than so-called modern societies. But they are no longer (if ever they were) organic, fixed, self-sustaining, self-sufficient entities. As a result of globalization in its longer, historical sense, many have become more “hybrid” formations, though some, in reaction against globalization, have become more “traditional.” Tradition functions, in general, less as doctrine than as significant repertoires of meaning. Increasingly, individuals draw upon these frameworks, and the attachments they inscribe to help them to make sense of the world, without being rigorously bound by and into them in every detail of existence. They have become part of a larger dialogical relation to “the other.” Precolonial cultures were—to very different degrees—progressively convened, globally under the rubric of Western capitalist modernity and the imperial system without their distinctiveness being wholly erased. This left them (as C. L. R. James once remarked of the Caribbean) “in but not of Europe.” As Aijaz Ahmad (no natural ally of the hybridizing intelligentsia) has observed, “The cross fertilization of cultures has been endemic to all movements of people … and all such movements in history have involved travel, contact, transmutation, hybridization of ideas, values and behavioural norms” (Ahmad 1995). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 347

Categorization

• DEFINE: Reframes ‘tradition’ as a repertoire of meaning drawn upon selectively rather than a binding doctrine — essential vocabulary for deflating Orientalist claims about ‘set-in-stone’ cultures.
• XREF: The claim that colonized cultures became ‘conscripts of modernity’ aligns with Hall’s own hybridity thesis in the 1997 lecture ‘The Local and the Global’ and with the broader postcolonial critique of fixed cultural essence. — connects to: Many colonial-period intellectuals stood outside the Western tradition. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 862