Prometheus 6   

WHO OWNS NATIVE CULTURE? By Michael F. Brown.

via the NY Times

The courage in Brown's book is his insistence that we live in a morally complex world. Part of the complexity stems from the fact that, despite some of the illusory claims associated with the Western Enlightenment, modern, postmodern and premodern values continue to coexist even in the developed world; and they make powerful and contradictory claims on our sympathy and judgment. No one really owns culture is Brown's message: cultural elements are too hard to define, too easily copied or too long detached from their points of original creation. Contact between cultures and processes such as borrowing, appropriation, migration and diffusion have been ubiquitous for so long that little remains of the authentically indigenous (southern Italian cuisine got its tomatoes from the New World, the Navaho got some of their current practices from the Hopi); which is just as well, and a very good thing for the creative and innovative side of the human search for meaning.

The bottom line in Brown's book is his challenge to both multiculturalists and liberal individualists. For he believes we can develop informal social norms of decency and respect that are responsive to the concerns of indigenous peoples without turning our society into a patchwork of legally empowered illiberal cultural enclaves. He seeks the middle road. Not the postmodern path, at the end of which there is a free flow of everything, all boundaries are down, everything is up for sale and nothing is sacred. And not the premodern path either, at the end of which everything is private, secreted and shielded from the interest and interests of outsiders, and the intellectual and social commons have been destroyed. It remains to be seen whether in a commercial and legalistic society such as ours there really is a middle road.