It's easy to assume that people mean the same things we mean by "culture" when they use the word. Anthropology of the past 60 years is at fault, in my opinion, for making people believe that "culture" has some kind of static meaning which falls neatly in the realm of common sense and always looks like what we expect to see.
New Zealand "culture" is also "new" in the sense that white people have not been there very long. But an exploration of Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum of New Zealand, exposes a great deal of depth to New Zealand "culture" which, in my opinion, derives its strength from the friction where different sets of traditions, beliefs, and practices rub against one another. One manifestation of this is the way in which the Museum respects a particular interpretation of tino rangatiritanga which has required it to have two Directors, one a tangata tiriti (person of the treaty) and one a Maori. The Museum's response to the complexities of culture has been to attempt to illuminate the contradictions, rather than simplify them. That, I think, reveals the depth and sophistication of New Zealand culture better than could a Museum of a more traditional variety, although they still have more work to do.
I think all "cultures" have had the same amount of time. We're all living in the same present day. Humanity has had the same amount of history, which it has taken with it everywhere it has gone in the world. When people settled New Zealand between 1000 and 1300 CE, they didn't erase the culture they brought with them from the rest of the Pacific Islands and start over, and when white people began to land there starting in 1642, they didn't leave behind their European-informed cultures and start all over either. Neither did that happen in Australia, where people have been living for about 45,000 years or more.
For me, the depth and sophistication of a "culture" is based on the value placed on it by its members, how they keep, nurture, and grow their traditions, how they adapt to changes or resist them, and how they respect and include the voices of their own people in all their richness and diversity. This holds for a people's visual art, performance, storytelling, religion, philosophy, governance, and science. Over time this "culture" will change in many ways, but I have seen no measure of "depth" or "sophistication" that is satisfactory to me other than the one I've just proposed, which happens not to be dependent on time.
To assume that the word "culture" means "pop culture," or perhaps "gallery art culture," or some other set of what people who look at the world like I do recognize as "culture," is to give to a colonial value system too much power. We could say that "pop culture" is dependent on time, yes, but to say that is almost a tautology; "pop culture" is the culture which is currently popular, or (as in "pop culture of the 1950's") the culture which was popular at some given point in the past. So I can't believe that that's what Henson meant, or if so I think he needs to say a little more to be worth my attention. |
