Cultural Loss: How Real is the Threat?

Francis X. Hezel, SJ

A Tidal Wave or a Deadly Virus?

Culture change is upon us, many fear, like a tsunami advancing rapidly to the shore threatening
to engulf whole populations, erasing them and all memory of what they once held dear. Once
the wave washes over the island and retreats again, all we can expect to find is the debris of
what formerly had been a living and vibrant culture. The assumption here is that a people can
endure only so much change, just as waves can beat against a building for only so long and
with only such an intensity before the entire building collapses. At some point at the height of
the storm, the waves will topple the edifice just as the impact of cultural change topples the
culture. If the force of the cultural change persists, the culture is doomed.

Take, for instance, the Re Mataw, those "sea people" from the Central Carolines with their
colorful and distinctive way of life who are generally regarded as symbolic of all that is special
about Micronesia. They now cook with iron pots and blend some store-bought goods into their
local diet. Shots of vodka are sometimes passed around the drinking circle with tuba, or local
brew. Although most of them still wear traditional clothing, there may come a time when this will
change. If the lavalavas and loincloths disappear, and the old navigational system vanishes,
and sailing canoes are no longer made, then the process of cultural attrition could well continue
until the last of the distinctive features of these people is lost. At that point, this model suggests,
our worst fears would be realized and the culture would be extinct.

In another model close to the first, cultural change is viewed as a deadly virus or microbe that
attacks one of the bodily systems rendering it dysfunctional and leading to complications in
others systems as well. An illness that affects the liver will very likely lead to problems in the
kidneys, with debilitating side effects in other parts of the body. The final result may be a
shutdown of the entire organism, even death. Likewise, when social changes resulting in part
from a new cash economy infect the cultural system to the point where they bring about a
radical reorganization of the basic family, they can be expected to have an impact on other parts
of the culture as well. The damaging effects of these changes could well interfere with the
functioning of the other systems deep in the culture. Before long the culture is dead, a victim of
the fatal virus that seemed so harmless at the start.

This is the model that underlies some of the classical anthropological works on culture change:
"Steel Axes for Stone-age Australians," for instance. That article describes the cultural impact
occurring when modern steel axes, which were a status marker and restricted to older males,
were passed out to young men and women. Axes are much more than tools, the articles shows
us; they can overturn the status and authority system in a society and touch other parts of the
culture as well, wreaking havoc as the causal chain progresses. If the foreign cultural "microbe"
burrows deeply enough into the system, it can have the same fatal results as a virus. We are
warned that cultures, like bodies, can contract deadly illness. Once this happens, little can be
done but wait until the end comes.
Is Preservation the Answer?

All this is based on the supposition, of course, that cultures can become extinct just like the
various species of plant and animal life. Everywhere in the islands these days we are confronted
by posters urging us to protect our endangered local wildlife–the Pohnpeian Serehd, the
Chuukese Monarch, the Micronesian Kingfisher. Other posters warn us that invasive species,
mostly weeds, are threatening to overwhelm and kill off our indigenous plant forms. We are
called on to redouble our efforts to ensure that the last of these distinctive birds or plants does
not die, all the more so because these life forms are so intimately associated with these islands.
These calls to preservation are evocative of our fears regarding the very cultures of these
islands. If we are being summoned to save the local birds and plants, it would seem reasonable
to expend even greater effort to preserve as many of those distinctive features associated with
culture as possible. Otherwise, the local culture could become as extinct as the other forms of
life we are urged to protect. Needless to say, this would be a disaster for the people of that
society, but it would also bother others, if only because the world would be losing one more
species of culture, thus subtracting a bit from the colorful bouquet of folkways on the planet and
thereby impoverishing its cultural diversity.

The watchword, then, is cultural preservation: keeping a close lookout for whatever might
imperil the culture, eradicating anything that threatens to suffocate those cultural forms we know
as customs, employing the same measures we have learned to take to preserve our wildlife. But
doing so with redoubled diligence since we would be losing not just some form of life symbolic
of the culture, but the culture itself. Therefore, we man the watchtowers and keep a vigilant eye
out for massive change–that last attacking force that will overwhelm the citadel, or the final
towering wave that will wash away the remainder of our culture.

Although the human reaction is understandable, the model upon which it is based is apocryphal
in the extreme. If the flood is already upon us, what response can we make other than stoically
to await the end? Cultural change in Micronesia has been occurring for centuries, but never
more intensely than during the past fifty years. The waves have long since started washing over
these islands, and there is no indication that the storm will abate in this present era of
globalization. We can expect much more of the same in the years ahead. Under these
conditions, it would appear that our cultures are doomed.

If this is the way you think of culture change and possible culture loss, please read on. The
models of culture extinction described above, although commonly held, are grossly inadequate
and unduly alarmist. If uncorrected, they could sap energy and divert attention away from
constructive approaches. In the remainder of this article I will attempt to offer what I hope is a
more balanced view of culture change.

Do These Models Fit the Facts?

If these models were accurate, my own culture would have perished long ago. We no longer
dress the way my father's generation did, to say nothing of a much earlier age. The mandatory
hats men once wore whenever they went out have been discarded, and the only men who wear
suits to work are bankers, lawyers and high government officials. Women's bonnets can be
seen only in museums and old movies, and even dresses have given way to pantsuits and other
attire. There are no longer blacksmiths or coopers or milkmen or junk collectors or street
sweepers. We have not used horses as our means of transportation for about a hundred years;
the only ones to be seen on city streets are police mounts used for crowd control in cities like
New York and Philadelphia. Horse-driven buggies have yielded to trains and automobiles and
buses and planes. The day when most Americans lived in farmhouses with their extended
families is long past; they have moved into the cities to find new types of jobs, and now move
from one place to another, changing jobs with a frequency that was formerly unimaginable. The
tools of our trades now are far more often computers than plows. Many of what we today
consider the staples of American society are post-World War II innovations: motels, fast food,
television, and shopping malls, as well as computers, stereo sets, Nintendo games, VCRs and
DVDs.

But let's consider other types of change besides the technological or material. A few years ago,
a Jesuit high school in New York City found that 40 percent of its students were living in single-
parent families. It appears that just as the extended family in Micronesia is being transformed
into a two-parent family, the US is well along the way in making the transition to single-parent
families. When I was growing up, our neighbors would point to one of the houses on the block
and whisper shrewish things about the divorced woman living there. Social norms since then
have changed to the degree that not only is divorce accepted, but so are open same-sex
relationships.

America has always prided itself on being able to make room for everyone, but for a century or
more "everyone" meant those of European descent. Today, not only has the society had to
make room for Jews and Afro-Americans, so often excluded in the past, but for dozens of Asian
and Hispanic sub-cultures. These ethnic minorities are incorporated into the general culture
somehow, even while retaining the trappings of their own sub-cultures, including specialty
stores selling their own food, churches and use of their own languages. American culture seems
flexible enough to embrace these groups representing a panoply of different cultures into its
own broad cultural network.

In view of the sheer number of changes that the US has absorbed over the past century,
American culture should have been swept away. Or, to shift models, we might expect that the
host of changes that clearly transformed the social organization of the family would have
proceeded to bring about so many other malfunctions that the entire cultural system would
simply collapse. But the dramatic changes that might have seemed so destructive were
absorbed by the culture. If this resilience were owing to the power of the US and the strength of
its culture, we would not find the same resilience in other, less dominant cultures throughout the
world. But we do, whether we look in East Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East.

Cultures, then, appear to survive for centuries despite sweeping changes. This raises the
question: When the facts don't fit the model, do we adjust the facts or throw out the model?

The Meaning of Culture

In older anthropology textbooks, culture was identified with the products that a particular society
produced: not just material artifacts (food and clothing and house styles), but also institutions
(village authority system, land inheritance patterns), beliefs (for instance, that sickness is the
work of spirits), concepts (the particular view of the universe that people hold), values (like the
importance of sharing, or disdain for boasting), and guidelines for behavior (such as fanning
flies for a guest at a meal, or keeping the eyes lowered when speaking to someone of higher
status). All these translate into an observable pattern of behavior. In the old definition, a culture
was the sum total of all these things–the behavior of people, along with everything that they
produced: shrines, food, housing, burial rituals, and so forth, while taking account of the intricate
network of relationships between all these cultural products.

In the newer model, however, culture is understood to mean not the observable cultural
phenomena themselves, but the design or plan for living that is passed on from one generation
to another. This design may be, and often is, altered from one generation to another as new
influences are brought to bear on a society. What does it mean, for instance, to be a Re Mataw?
Surely not simply to wear a loincloth, or to observe the respect behavior that was used forty
years ago, or even to know the old stories or the history of the island. At bottom, it is to be
raised by the people who call themselves Re Mataw and to be imprinted with the pattern of
living that they call their own at that particular time. The last phrase here is important because
the norm of a culture must always be the way people live today, not the way they might have
lived fifty or a hundred years ago.

This new understanding of culture may make it a little more abstract, but it locates culture where
it belongs: within the people who pass it along–and who change it, in big ways and small, as
they are forever doing. Customs, which are sometimes mistakenly regarded as synonymous
with culture, are far more colorful and evocative than an abstract "design for living," but they
change every few generations and so could not serve as the polar star for a cultural identity with
any permanence.

Just as there can be no culture without the people who transmit it, so there can be no people
without a culture of some form. It is the social air that people breathe, the glue that binds them
to one another, the shared understandings that make it possible for them to communicate with
one another and so to live together. What could it possibly mean, then, to say that people have
lost their culture? Is this supposed to mean that they are now utterly devoid of any organized
pattern of living at all?

The organizational unity in a culture may be loose, especially if a society undergoing a time of
rapid transition, but it is real. During my college days, I was trained to think of culture as a tightly
integrated whole, with each part related closely to other parts of this system. Clifford Geertz,
one of the pioneers of symbolic anthropology, however, has his doubts about this. Culture, he
writes, is "more like the octopus, whose tentacles are in large part separately integrated,
neurally quite poorly connected with one another..., and yet who manages to get around and
preserve himself as a viable, if somewhat ungainly entity." A culture that is heavily bombarded
by change may be octopus-like in its loose unity, but like the octopus, it is still capable of
reproducing itself. The cultural pattern, however knobby, remains a pattern that provides
continuity from one generation to the next.

The Amazing Continuity of Culture

Cultures manage to survive for hundreds of years despite the many mutations they have
undergone. A striking example of this is Japanese culture. What does life in urban Tokyo today,
with men and women in Western business dress commuting to work by subway or bullet train,
have in common with the days of the sworded samurai and the daimyos they served? Not
much, on the surface of it all. But might not there be a spirit that could be called Japanese,
however difficult it may be to articulate the features of this spirit? Does it have to do with the
formal courtesy that Japanese pay to those with whom they deal? Is it related to the spareness
of Japanese decor, the preference for focusing on a single detail and somehow finding all of life
embodied in one leaf or one blossom? None of these really comes close to summing up what it
means to be a Japanese, of course. Yet it does suggest that there may be a combination of
distinctive features that goes into the making of a Japanese, even a young one with spiked
purple hair who sleeps on a park bench when he is not skateboarding. Not all these features
can be articulated, not all of them are even discernible, and certainly not all of them are to be
found in each individual from that culture. But there is an imprint of how life is meant to be lived
that is passed down from one generation to the next–not through the DNA, but through the
social environment with its hundreds of personal interactions, each exemplifying in some way
how people ought to conduct themselves.

The identity of any culture rests on much more than the similarity between the lifestyle of a
people and their descendants three hundred years later. It lies in the continuity of the culture
(pattern of life) transmitted, inasmuch as this pattern of life has been handed down from one
generation to another for that entire period. Naturally it has evolved, perhaps very substantially,
but its sameness is rooted in the people this design for living serves. This sense of continuity
over the centuries, nourished by a remembrance of their past, provides a people with a sense of
cultural identity. A distinctive language helps nourish this sense of identity, but it is not an
essential feature of cultural identity. Although Americans speak the same language as
Englishmen, no one doubts that the two cultures are distinct. Nor do I have any doubt that my
father's family, who once spoke German even after immigrating to the US, were rapidly taking
on the cultural characteristics of their new home even eighty years ago.

Adaptation As Key to Cultural Survival

If we have assumed that culture is the sum total of the products of a people, we may have been
focusing too exclusively on preservation of customs and the external features of that culture in
our efforts to ensure cultural survival. Yet, culture is not a display of exotic artifacts–feathered
headdresses, shell belts, and stone pounders–to be displayed in the showcase of a museum. It
is the pattern of life, the design for community living, that is found in a real people as they exist
today. As long as these people survive, their culture is alive and well. How could any people
possibly exist in a cultureless void, after all?

Perhaps our emphasis in cultural survival is misplaced. Instead of guarding the ramparts against
breaches of culture, we should be encouraging adaptation as a means of survival. Life forms,
including humans, will survive only to the extent that they are prepared to accommodate to
changes in environment, as Charles Darwin taught us back in the mid-19th century. He
furnished us with many marvelous examples of adaptation in birds and mammals to such
changes. If the forest is cut back and humans can no longer survive by a hunting-gathering type
of existence, then it may be time to take up domestic agriculture. If globalization dictates further
changes today, then our paramount concern should be to adapt as necessary. This does not
mean indiscriminate rejection of all that has served so well in the past; it simply means altering
what must be changed to guarantee survival, biological and societal, today. And doing so, I
might add, with the confidence that as long as the social group remains intact, the culture will
live on in its people.

The key to cultural survival, then, is not purely conservatism–hanging on tightly to all that we
have received in the past–but a genuine sense of dynamism and a readiness to adapt to a
changing world. Strategies for economic development that entail change, therefore, may be
seen as ways of promoting survival, material and cultural. Some of what we have understood in
the past as either-or dichotomies ought to be re-examined in the light of this new model of
culture.
This is not to say that cultural preservation should be dropped from the agenda. We ought to be
wary about discarding features of the culture on the grounds that they are outmoded and
useless. Often these features, or the spirit behind them, prove to be just what is needed in
facing up to modernity. But some changes are necessary, even inevitable. We should not be
afraid to adopt and adapt.

The Risk of Accommodation?

Earlier models of social change tend to underscore the threat of cultural upheaval. Let the
enemy get a foot in the gates and before you know it the cultural citadel will be overwhelmed
and taken. In this model there are two forces, the attacking army and the defenders, one of
which will win the battle and take the city. Hence, for people who see themselves as belonging
to a smaller and weaker society, accommodation is bound to raise specters of out-and-out
cultural defeat.

Let's look at Guam as a test case. Guam, which has remained under the rule of colonial powers
for over 300 years, has had long history of accommodation to foreign influences, some forced
on it and some freely chosen. The island has been host to a large US military presence since
World War II, while a booming tourist industry has grown up over the past thirty years. The
Guamanian-born population has been reduced to a minority on its own island as various ethnic
groups have moved in. These same outside influences, particularly television, have resulted in
an alarming decline in the use of the Chamorro language among the local population.

While Guamanians seem generally pleased with the advances the island economy has made
and the conveniences that modernization has brought, many rue the loss of so much of the style
of island life they themselves remember from their childhood. Even so, have they suffered the
obliteration of their culture? It could appear this way at first, but if you scratch the surface you
find something distinctively Micronesian about the people of Guam. The government, over
which local Guamanians have maintained strong control throughout all the changes, has an
island flavor to it. So does the church life of the people, with its plethora of novenas and
rosaries. The fiestas and family parties and barbeques, opportunities to spend time with family
and neighbors, are the sorts of events at which any Islander could feel at home. The respect
forms have changed a little, but they're still very much there. So is the humorous way of dealing
with unpleasant events–a trait I find everywhere in Micronesia. Whether all this is being done in
Chamorro or English, my judgment is that the local culture is alive and well on Guam,
notwithstanding all the accommodations it has had to make over the years.

If the island culture of Guam has not been swallowed whole over 300 years of colonial rule and
during the intensive modernization over the past fifty years, what are the chances that the
dreaded globalization is going to be able to do so? Perhaps about the same as the probability
that Italy will look and smell and sound just like Germany after a given number of years of
shared membership in the European Union. The widely shared fear throughout the world that
globalization will extract the exotic taste from all cultures so that peoples will be blended into the
same bland batch of cultural dough is groundless. There are certainly legitimate concerns about
globalization, but this hardly seems one of them.

Over the years, I have been impressed by the strange ways in which cultural uniqueness will
burst out, even in countries that complain of being saturated with westernization. TV soap
operas may be an American invention, but Japanese or Filipino or Latin American soap operas
are clearly stamped with their own unique style. McDonalds serves up burgers in many
countries around the world, but the menu reflects the subtle difference in taste from one place to
the next. The same is true of music, whether rhythm and blues, rock or even rap. In Micronesia,
the nose flute has given way to the guitar and lately to the keyboard, but the music today still
reflects a distinctive island sound. The cultural genius of a people will not be denied.

Conclusion

Can cultures be lost? Only if the societies themselves are lost. If everyone from the Central
Carolines, for instance, were to pick up and move to Oklahoma, they might survive as a
subculture for a time, but intermarriage and bleaching could well lead to full assimilation of this
sub-culture into mainstream Oklahoma society. On the other hand, if a country like Japan were
to pour such a great number of migrants into these islands as to dwarf the local population, then
over time the culture might be lost as the islands became a colony of Japan, with its older
population blending entirely into the colony. But both scenarios are highly unlikely. And so is the
cultural extinction that is so often feared.

As a dabbler in history, I have read dozens of eulogies and elegies of Pacific cultures–eulogies
exclaiming the wonder of these cultures and elegies predicting that the end is near. In the early
part of the 19th century French and Russian naval captains were lamenting the loss of the
island cultures, with Germans and English visitors bemoaning the same thing toward the end of
that century. Since then, just about everyone has taken a turn at it. While it's heartwarming to
see such a display of affection for local island cultures from foreigners of all stripes, it's probably
time to call a halt to this silly game. The Pacific Islands are not a living museum for the
entertainment and edification of outsiders, to remind them that the world still contains
uncomplicated places with warm, friendly populations; they are the home of thousands of
people who must bravely face the future, just as the people of other nations must.

It doesn't help to frame their present situation in false dichotomies: the choice, for instance,
between economic development and retention of their culture; or between education for life in
the global village or in the island village. Americans or Europeans are not tormented by the fear
that they will be making such colossal choices every time they decide whether a waterline or
power line should be extended to a rural community. Why should Micronesians?

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