The struggle – and it has to include play and festival, and in healthy portions, or it becomes an ascetic agonism – itself is how a person/community decolonizes while using old memories and making personal and shared ones.
The above from Mr. Crow. Enough for me to riff on…
Jack makes a valid point about the link between memory and culture. Culture is a collective scrapbook. Culture is what is recognizable when you take the individuals out of the picture. It’s the recipes, the fashions, the mores, and the prejudices. It is the acceptable behavior of “the one”, as in “One does such and such in this situation.” It is bowing, handshakes, kisses and personal space.
Culture is also a collection of laws. Not the laws of the court or legislature, but the more stringent, immediately enforceable laws of face-to-face interaction. There are immediate consequences when these laws are broken. No need for courts, judges or juries. We are all judges in the court of culture. These laws are not interpreted by jurisprudence, but rather by tradition. One definition of a conservative might be one who adheres to and enforces ones own cultural identity most exactingly. That’s why all religions are conservative. To be otherwise is to forfeit whatever authority the institution is purported to have in the first place.
Culture is not moral, it is the merest of custom. (Morality is custom, too, but of greater consequence being potentially trans-cultural).
To kill ones culture is a sort of suicide. What’s left when the culture is removed? Free will?
So long as we continue to live together, culture will exist. The propagation of culture is a form of colonization (to use Jack’s terms). Good enough. So we decolonize as we willfully replace that culture with something else.
I don’t see that happening. Culture cannot be changed by individual will. Each individual must overcome the culture on his/her own. And there’s no use trying to create a new culture on your own. You might as well try to create your own language (see Wittgenstein).
Each must be a Superman without a culture.
