From: glhewitt@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Gary Livingston Hewitt)
Subject: Re: World Culture and Western Culture
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 01:28:59 GMT

Two comments on world culture and western culture.

(1) Regarding "western music."  According to several interlocutors,
milli vanilli and heavy metal are the bad contributions of "Western"
culture to the world.  This follows the serious argument that Mr.
McCarthy made about the dominance/superiority of Western music -- in
this case, through the fact that the world listens to western pop music.
That argument, unforunately, is pretty shallow.  It seems to me that the
world listens to West African music, translated through the experiences
of rural Afro-Americans, and then through a wide variety of Americans,
urban and rural, etc...  Then this music is sold by Western commercial
networks to the rest of the world.  Is it "Western culture?"  Hard to
say.  Can you separate the means by which this music is sold from the
"origins" (whatever they are) of the music?  Seems to me that this is an
amalgamated culture that grew out of a shared experience of (in this
case) West African and American cultures, reprocessed in a variety of
places (even Japan and England).  Sounds like WORLD culture, to me, in a
world where precisely that kind of transmission has become possible.

(2) Regarding the conquest of Amerindians, specifically in Mexico.  It
doesn't seem to me that either the idea that Indians percieved Spaniards
as "Gods" or technological superiority gets us very far.  The dynamics
of war in these two cultures differed remarkably -- the very goals of
war were different -- Indians (across the Americas) waged war for
captives, Europeans for territory (and for slaughter).  How do you stop
a war when the very notion of battle differs?  Cortes decidedly did NOT
want to destroy Tenochtitlan -- but he ends up doing just that, because
he doesn't know how to communicate to the Aztecs how to stop fighting,
because they aren't fighting by each others' rules.

The other point brought up by Mr. McCarthy, about the ability of Spanish
RELIGION to penetrate into Mexico, is an interesting one.  I think there
are truly few religions as dismal as Mesoamerican ones -- bloody,
pessimistic, forbidding (and the Aztecs raised this to the hundredth
degree).  Catholicism, especially after the collapse of 85-95% of one's
population, might provide a more hopeful view on the world.  Is this
cultural superiority?  Who knows.

ALSO, if one looks at what happens to Mexican Catholicism, you can tell
that it isn't the same as late medieval Spanish Catholicism that the
friars were coming over to evangelize.  As usual, when the natives get
converted, they convert their religion at the same time.  The Virgin of
Guadelupe, the brown Virgin Mary in the Mexico City Cathedral, etc....

The poit being, both here and in (1), that Western culture stops being
"Western" and starts being something much much more as soon as Europe
begins expanding.  And whether that speak to European "superiority" I
don't know -- I personally doubt it.  I think it speaks to the way human
affiars work out, when cultures come into contact.

Gary
readings follow, press n to skip 

Inga Clendinnen, "Cortes, Signs and the Conquest of Mexico," in Grafton, ed.,
THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE (Phila.: U. of Penn
Press, 1990).
J.H. Parry, THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE EUROPEAN HEGEMONY (NY, 1961).
Clendinnen, THE AZTECS: AN INTERPRETATION (1991) 

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  ||    |    Gary| L. Hewitt|       |   ||  HELP!  I've been imprisoned
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