Constituting Cultures

Constituting Cultures
This is especially applicable to a line of research that flourished during the 1980s and early 1990s: the invention of tradition and identity.

A global trend of signal importance has been the elaboration of explicit construction of local custom and identity.

Although related to earlier ideas of local folklore, unprecedented as a cultural phenomenon the objection of culture at national, regional, and local levels has become singularly powerful over the last twenty years.

Everywhere from the margins of Britain and eastern Europe to Oceania and the Amazon, peoples have become conspicuously oriented toward the rhetorical elaboration of their identity, often toward cultural affirmation, autonomy, or separatism.

No doubt, these projects of identity are more heterogeneous than they appear but the vocabulary employed is often that of a popularized anthropology: though all peoples’ cultures are different, they seem to be becoming the same to the extend that they are concerned to affirm their different cultures.

Epistemologically, the question is an extremely salient one for the anthropological analyst who conforms what in some cases turn out to be recast ethnological constructs.

The expert has argued, there is indeed a historical similarity between the anthropological concept of “culture’ and the self constituted national identities first thrown into sharp relief by the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century.
Constituting Cultures