Cultural Identity

1. Cultural Identity

2. Learning objectives 1. Better understanding of culture and identity and argument around them 2. Comprehension of ethnic factor and national identity, and cultural identity 3. Understanding the diversity of culture and identity in Southeast Asia 4. Comprehension of variation of identity in Southeast Asia 5. Understanding the argument of the shared culture in Southeast Asia 6. Understanding the shared identity argument in Southeast Asia 7. Ability to comment on facilitation of regional identity

3. Learning outcomes 1. Ability to comprehend the concept of culture and identity in general. 2. Ability to comment on aspects of culture and identity 3. Ability to comment on diversity of culture and identity issues in Southeast Asia 4. Ability to evaluate impact of globalization on culture and identity 5. Ability to engage in the debate on regional culture and identity 6. Understanding the mechanism to promote regional culture and identity.

4. Key information/content 1.1 Definition • a way of life (Lintion, 1945) • Culture is an integral composed of partly autonomous, partly co-ordinated institutions. It is integrated on a series of principles such as the community of blood through procreation; the specialization in activities ; and last but not least, the use of power in political organization. Each culture owes its completeness and self-sufficiency to the fact that it satisfies the whole range of basic, instrumental and integrative needs (Malinowski, 1969 : 40) 1. Brief discussion on culture

5. (Culture) denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life (Geertz, 1973 : 89)- Culture is the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group and in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs (UNESCO 2001) • Culture refers to the customs, practices, languges, values and world views that define social groups such as those based on nationality, ethnicity, region or common interests (http:// socialseport.msd.govt.ng/cultural-identity page 1, accessed on March 12, 2012)

6. 1.2 Classical semantic distinction of culture • Meaning or connotation or characteristics, that make up the concept : (1) comprehensiveness (total, sum, total, complex whole), (2) legacy (tradition, social heritage, (3) norms (folkways, way of life), (4) psychological characteristics (learning, habit), (5) structural (system, integrated, patterned), (6) genesis (creation, man-made, transmittable) • Reference/denotation or a set of real-life phenomenon. Culture denotes capability and habits of human beings, thus closely linked with civilization with understanding that culture refers to cultural identity of small community while civilization refers to externally large community. Bases of civilization are of two kinds (1) religion and (2) historical legacy. (Lane & Ersson, 2005 : 18-28)

7. Or, other type of distinction of culture • humanistic sense of culture : singular and evaluative. Culture is what a person ought to acquire in order to become a fully worthwhile moral agent. Some people are more cultured, some human products are more cultural than others. • anthropological sense of culture : plural and relativistic. World is divided into different cultures worthwhile in its way. A person is a product of a particular culture. Differences between human beings are to be explained by differences in their cultures, not their race. (Barnard and Spencer, 1996 : 136)

8. 1.3 Role of Culture • Social science assigns two crucial roles to culture: • 1. culture provides meaning such as by organized religion, • 2. culture provides rules of social action which affords human beings in a society to understand each other such as those prescribed by major religions (Hall, 2003 : 134)

9. - identifying with a particular culture helps people feel they belong and gives them a sense of security. • However, strong cultural identity expressed in the wrong way can contribute to barriers between groups. Members of smaller cultural groups can feel excluded from society. • (http://socialreport.msd.govt.mz/cultural-identity, page1)

10. 1.4 Disputations on culture • High culture or Culture • - (culture as) the best that has been thought and said in the world • - a civilization, or culture is the high point of civilization • - a concern of an educated minority elite • - an aesthetic and elitist concept • - concept of beauty, harmony, form and quality

11. Low culture, mass culture, popular culture • - raw, uncultivated (mass) • - authentic common culture of the people • - ordinariness • - culture as a production of capitalist corporations • - mass – produced culture • - commodities produced by cultural industry • - authentic folk culture produced by the people (Barker, 2008 : 40-54)

12. 1.5 Cultural identity • culture can be analysed in terms of ethnic cultures, religious cultures, historical legacies, and universal cultures • culture is identified with group, or better, community. What is important is the nature of ties among members of the groups measured by compactness • high level of compactness means the group maintain strongly shared cultural identity, capable of collective action. • low level of compactness means members seldom interact or with few common ties • cultural compactness may increase overtime when groups are increasingly more conscious of the cultural identity

13. Group and cultural identity

14. Culture, seen at macro level or the society, is often discussed in term of cultural homogeneity which is the case of society supports a single culture, the unity of the people behind the culture while cultural heterogeneity means fragmentation within society (Lane and Ersson, 2005 : 3-5, 7) • cultural identity = self and communal definitions based around specific, usually political inflected, differentiations: gender, sexuality, class, religion, race and ethnicity, nationality. (Tomlinson, 2003 : 272)

15. the concept of cultural identity incorporates the shared premises, values, definitions, and beliefs and the day-to-day, largely unconscious patterning of activities. • the concept of cultural identity can be used in two different ways: • (1) it can be employed as a reference to the collective self-owareness that a given group embodies and reflects. Normally, it is defined by majority group. • (2) it revolves around the identity of the individual in relation to his or her culture. (Adler, 1977)

16. 1.6 Cultural diversity • There normally finds within a nation various cultures each of which identifies with locality, customs, ethnicity, religion, language or a combination of some of them which the dominant culture is promoted as national culture. • Culture assumes varied forms such as song, dance, musical instrument, poetry, literature, scripts, ornament, garment, sport, recreation, architecture, artifact, food, ritual, divination, etc.

17. In a nation, there hardly find a single culture, even among the presumably homogenous one such as China, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam while Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Malaysia are known for multiculture components. • Southeast Asia as multicultural areas with interplay of religion, ethnicity, language, custom and historical legacy. (Wolters, 1981). • The motto of Indonesia, “unity in diversity” emphasizes multiplicity of different factors, culture no less. The motto is now applied to ASEAN

18. 2.1 Brief discussion of identity • denoting sameness and continuity • identity is about sameness and difference • referring to properties of uniqueness and individuality • qualities of sameness whereby persons may associate themselves, or be associated by others, with groups or categories on the basis of same salient common features 2. Identity

19. Three distinctions of identity : (1) subjectivity which is the condition of being a person and a process by which we become a person, (2) self-identity which is verbal conceptions we hold about ourselves and our emotional identification with those self-descriptions, and (3) social identity which is the expectations and opinions that others have of us. (Barker, 2008 : 215) • Personal identity locates deep in the unconsciousness as a durable and persistent sense of sameness of the self • in anthropology, it emphasizes the individual’s social and cultural surroundings and the mechanism of socialization and cultural acquisition • The sense of sameness or identity refers to commonalities associated with groups or categories (Byson, 1996 : 292)

20. Defining identity is linked to the way in which a community constructs conceptions of people and life. • Identity crisis begins with the finding that W.W.II causes a number of people feeling the loss of a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity. In modern usage it suggests that a shared community has largely dissolved, leaving people without a clear sense of identity. • Identity politics, prominent since late 1960’s is associated with ethnic and religious minorities, as well as with feminist and lesbian, and gay movements, (Plummer, 2003 : 281-2)

21. 2.2 Race and ethnicity Race originates in biological discourses of social Darwinism that stresses lines of descent and type of people. Concept of race refers to alleged biological and physical characteristics, the most obvious of which is skin pigmentation. This frequently links to intelligence and capability which help ranking groups in a hierarchy of social and material superiority and subordination. Racial classification constituted by power is at the root of racism. Radicalization or race formation is founded on the argument that race is a social construction and not a universal or essential category of biology.

22. Ethnicity : a cultural concept centered on the sharing of norms, values, beliefs, cultural symbols and practices. Formation of ethnic groups relies on shared cultural signifiers that have developed under specific historical, social and political contexts. It is also argued that ethnic groups are not based on primordial ties or universal cultural characteristics possessed by specific group. Ethnicity is formed by the way we speak about group.

23. Ethnicity is a relational concept that is concerned with categories of self-identification and social ascription. Thus, what we think of as our identity is dependent on what we think we are not. Ethnicity is constituted through power relations between groups. It signals relations of marginality, of the centre and the pherifery. This occurs in the context of changing historical forms and circumstances. The centre and the margin are to be grasped through politics of representations. (Barker, 2008 : 247-251)

24. 3.1 - The nation-state, nationalism and national identity are not “naturally” occurring phenomena but contingent historical-cultural formations. They are socially and culturally constructed as collective forms of organization and identification. - The nation-state is a political concept that refers to an administrative apparatus deemed to have sovereignty over a specific space or territory within the nation-state system. - National identity is a form of imaginative identification with the symbols and discourse of the nation-state. - National identity is a form of identification with representations of shared experiences and history. These are told through stories, literature, popular culture and media. 3. National identities

25. Nations are not simply political formations but systems of cultural representation by which national identity is continually reproduced through discursive action. The nation-state as a political apparatus and a symbolic form also has a temporal dimension since political structure endure and change. The symbolic and discursive dimensions of national identity narrate and create the idea of origins, continuity and tradition. • However, national cultural identities are not conterminous with state borders. Various global diasporas – African, Jewish, Indian, Chinese, Polish, English, Irish, etc. – attest to national and ethnic cultural identities that span the borders of nation-states. Few states have ethnically homogeneous populations.

26. 3.2 Imagined community - Nation is an imagined community • It is imagined because the member of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the images of their communion • The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion living beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie another nations. • It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordered hierarchicaldynastic realm.

27. Finally, it is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is in this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. (Anderson, 1983 : 15-16)

28. 4.1 Sources of culture : Pre – religion – supernaturalism, ancestor worship 4. Culture in Southeast Asia

31. Globalization refers to an intensified compression of the world and our increasing consciousness of the world. Other than economic perspective, globalization is concerned with issues of cultural meaning where values and meanings attached to places now involve networks extended far beyond immediate physical locations. (Held et all, 1999). • Globalization effects seen in terms of an unstoppable intrusion of the Western, industrialized or modernized form of cultural expression though consumerist lifestyle, entertainment and cosmopolitanism, has been hurting developing country’s cultural identity, causing degradation among the young generation. Globalization and cultural identity

32. Globalization is seen as an extension of western cultural imperialism. The argument is made of the obvious power of globalized capitalism to distribute and promote its cultural goods. • However, it is counter argued that cultural identity is much more the product of globalization than its victim. Tomlinson (2003) argues the case of the up surging power of local culture that offers resistance to the force of capitalist globalization. State promotes national : identity deliberately constructed and maintained and amplified, regulated it through law, education and media.

33. 4. Argument for shared culture in Southeast Asia

35. 5. Argument for shared identity in Southeast Asia

36. 6. Factors facilitating regional identity • Based on identifiable shared cultural practice and observable identity. • Identifying certain obvious commonalities particularly those concerning daily life. - This is to raise awareness of being the same through what people witness daily among them and those among their neighbouring countries. Awareness will generate belongingness. Strategy to forge awareness or belonging should be based on (1) exposure, (2) representation, (3) promotion, and (4) prioritization.

37. 3. Promotion of people-to-people contact in (1) physical contact facilitated by better tourism/travel arrangement, (2) visual contact through popular media such as newspaper, radio and particularly television plus internet, and (3) perceptual contact whereby people internalize what they read, hear and see. (Withaya 2010 : ) 4. State and public sector cooperation in promotion regional identity.

38. List of possible questions/discussion themes

41. Adler, Peter (1977). “Beyond Cultural Identity : Reflections on Multiculturalism” in Richard Buslin, ed., Culture Learning. East-West Center Press : 24-41. Anderson,Ben (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London : Verso. Barker, Chris (2008). Cultural Studies : Theory and Practice. Sage, 3rd edition. Barnard, Alan and Jonathan Spencer, eds., (1996). “Culture” in Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London and New York : Routledge : 136-142. Beeson, Mark (2004) ed., Contemporary Southeast Asia : Regional Dynamics, National Differences. Pal grave. List of teaching sources/references

42. Berger, Mark T. (2002). “Battering down the Chinese Walls: The Antinomies of Anglo-American Liberalism and the History of East Asian Capitalism in the Shadow of Cold War,” in C.J.W. – L. Wee, eds, Local Culture and the New Asia: Culture and Capitalism in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies : 77-106. Burling, Robbins (1965). Hill Farms and Padi Fields : Life in Mainland Southeast Asia. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice Hall Inc. Byron, Reginald (1996). “Identity” in Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, eds., Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge : 292. Daweewarn, Dawee (1982). Brahmanism in Southeast Asia (From the Earliest Time to 1445 A.D.). New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited.

43. Farnham, England (2009). Southeast Asia Culture and Heritage in a Globalized World. Ash gate. Hall, John A. (2003). “Culture” in The Blackwell, Dictionary of Modern Social Thought. ed., William Outwait, Blackwell Publishing : 133-7. Held , D. et all (1999). Global Transformations : Politics, Economic and Culture. Cambridge, Polity. Higham, Charles (2002). Early Culture of Mainland Southeast Asia. Bangkok : River Books. Jones, David Martin (2010). Democratization, Civil Society and Liberal Middle Class Culture in Pacific Asia. London and New York: Routledge.

44. Keyes, Charles F. (1977). The Golden Peninsula : Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia. Macmillan Publishing. Labadi, Sophia (2010), “Introduction : Investing in Cultural Diversity” International Social Science Journal. 199, March : 5-13. Lane, Jan-Erik and Svante Ersson, (2005). Culture and Politics: A Comparative Approach. Ashgate, 2nd edition. Maryanoa, Gerald F. (1967). Culture Contact and Culture Conflict in Southeast Asia : An Exploration in International Politics. Northern Illinois University. McVey, Ruth (1992) ed., Southeast Asian Capitalists. Southeast Asia Program. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University.

45. Plummer, Ken (2003). “Identity” in William Outwait ed. The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought. Blackwell Publishing : 280-2. Roxaslim, Aurora (2005). Southeast Asia Art and Culture : Ideas, Forms and Societies. Jakarta. Souchou, Yao (2001). House of Glass, Modernity and the State in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Tarling, Nicholas (1998) ed., Nations and State in Southeast Asia. Cambridge University Press. Thomas, William L. (1970). Land, Man and Culture in Mainland Southeast Asia. Ann Abor : University Microfilm International.

46. Tilakasiri, Jayadeva (1999). The Asian Shadow Play. Sri Lanka: Vishva Lekha Publications. Tomlison, John (2003). “Globalization and Cultural Identity,” : 269-277. Turton, Andrew and Shigeharu Tanabe (1984), eds., History and Peasant Consciousness in Southeast Asia. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. UNESCO (2001) UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Available from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/00127i/127160m.pdf

47. Van Esterik, Penny (2008). Food Culture in Southeast Asia. Save WestPoint, Conn. : Greenwood Place. Wangard, David B. (2008) ed., Culture and Development in Southeast Asia. Bangkok : White Lotus. Withaya Sucharithanarugse (2010). “The Advancement of People to People Relations,” Indonesia-Thailand Relations after 60 years and beyond. Bangkok : The Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia : 76-85.

48. Wolters, O.W. (1981). “Culture, History and Region in Southeast Asian Perspective” in R.P. Anand and Purification V. Quisumbing, ed., ASEAN Identity, Development and Culture. University of the Philippines Law Center and East-West Center : 1-40. Wolters,O.W. (1999). History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asia. Cornell University. Woodier, Jonathan Save (2008). The Mainland Political Change in Southeast Asia : Karaoke Culture and the Evolution of Personality. Cheltenham, U.K. : Edward Edgar.

49. Teaching methodology 1. Compilation of list of national culture and identity by the student. 2. Identifying the pro and con of mass culture. 3. Short essay on identity crisis of a nation. 4. Quiz on student’s perception of certain traditional or national culture 5. A term paper of globalization on cultural identity of a country.