observe, analyze, generalize

This past weekend I attended the Power of Place festival at the Harbourfront centre (Toronto, Canada). A quick glance at the program reveals the wild variety of performers from all corners of the world. It is this culturally rich because it looks to attract the culturally diverse audience of the Toronto scene, the majority of which are immigrants which have no other place to go to express their pride for their heritage.

Walking among such a crowd can be overwhelming, but a couple of hours of this dose was sufficient to come up with a method for assimilating foreign culture:

  • Observe: look around. There are always other people that seem to know what they are doing. Whether they know exactly how to eat a particular dish, how to dance at the sound of some rhythm or behave in a particular social setting, it is obvious they belong. They are likely the agents of culture, those who have brought a snippet of global culture to this place.
  • Analyze: say you’re listening to a live concert, but much of what you hear is new. As most cultural manifestations, a performance such as this is a very complex aggregate of many simpler cultural expressions. An effort to decompose the performance into its fundamental parts will help you discover those that you can relate to. You may, for example, realize that the beats of percussion are powerful and inviting, with a very familiar sound. This discovery will give you an opportunity to study those agents that you have been observing in relation to this isolated sound and realize that to them it is the core driver for their dancing movements.
  • Generalize: you have a different background and a very rich cultural heritage too. Imitation would be too easy. Better yet, your newly discovered relationship between beats and movement can be applied not only to the particular performance, but will likely help you do it again in new settings, whenever the same patterns reoccur. It may not be the same music or even the same genre, but the discovery of that special relationship will give you a new tool for enjoying culture in the first person.

Throughout the night, thousands of bodies of all colors, races and ages ended up dancing in a very uniform movement which I would be tempted to describe as trance if it wasn’t for the fact that every person was well aware of their surroundings and realized that for those couple of hours they had discovered home, among strangers. This place was amazingly familiar and yet completely new to most of them. This is the place where global culture is born.

July 3rd, 2006 | Category: Culture, Global Culture, Immigration, Multiculturalism, Uncategorized | One comment

some strange street

Via one of the Creative Commons features I came across the openDemocracy online magazine. Reading about their articles filed under “arts & culture” I found a little experiment they ran a couple of years that resonated a lot with what we’ve set to do here. The first post of a discussion forum says:

openDemocracy readers are all over the world. As we anticipate the launch of our multiculturalism debate, we’d like you to tell us about life, or the view, or an event, on your street. Give other readers a glimpse of your world and see if they find it strange or familiar…

What I found particularly interesting was the final words of this request: “strange or familiar”. People all over the world did post for a few months and the debate probably didn’t go too far, but as you read through those little snapshots of life at any given street around the world, the mission to decide whether they are strange or familiar resonates as possibly a very important clue to determine the difussion of certain elements across cultural contexts:

We have “popsicle parties” on warm days in their front yard, shaded by a huge tree.

The President and his official aircraft occupy space above sometimes, craning necks for a few seconds whenever something large, noisy and governmental flies overhead. He lives a relatively short distance up one of the highways here, but hasn’t invited anyone to help the Secret Service boys barbecue a weekend brisket.

Oddly, the last glaciation left our notoriously boggy area with two drumlins running north and south with the lakes inbetween and our little town is between the lakes

The good thing about the street is that feel safe. Because it is a small side street, hardly anyone knows it so gangs of youth don’t bother to hang here. I’m a 22 year-old student who has travelled backstreets in South-Africa and Nairobi and survived, but too many of my friends have been mugged, beaten up or harassed by such gangs not to worry.

Reading through the posts you will catch a glimpse of what could very well be your own street, but once in a while there are snippets that will shift your mind into a completely different reality.
If you were to measure the degree of “strangeness” compared to your own cultural baseline the resulting map would likely show you those places that would be very interesting to visit, and possibly not all of them would be all the way around the world.

June 10th, 2006 | Category: Global Culture, Multiculturalism | One comment
 
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