Cultural Boundaries

Author(s): Simon Harrison

Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 15, No. 5 (Oct., 1999), pp. 10-13
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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boundaries

Cultural
SIMON

HARRISON

Theauthor is Reader
in social anthropologyat
the Universityof Ulster.

Introduction
Writers on globalization often point to an apparent paradox: namely, that increasing transnational flows of
culture seem to be producing, not global homogenization,
but growing assertions of heterogeneity and local distinctiveness (Friedman 1994; Sibley 1995: 183-4). Meyer and
Geschiere, for example, argue that contemporary 'global
flows' of culture tend often to provoke reactive attempts at
'cultural closure' :
There is much empiricalevidence that people's awarenessof
being involved in open-endedglobal flows seems to triggera
searchfor fixed orientationpoints and actionframes,as well as
determined efforts to affirm old and construct new boundaries... It looks as if, in a world characterisedby flows, a great
deal of energy is devoted to controlling and freezing them:
graspingthe flux often actuallyentails a politics of 'fixing' - a
politics which is, above all, operative in struggles about the
constructionof identities (Meyer & Geschiere 1999: 2, 5).
Anthropologists may have now abandoned assumptions
of objectively bounded societies and cultures (see
Hannerz 1992). But the communities and actors we study
often seem strongly inclined - even increasingly so - to
represent the world as if it were composed, or ought to be
composed, of delimited groups of very much this sort,
each possessing its own discrete 'culture' (Handler 1988;
Stolke 1995).
Hastrup reminds us that to claim an 'inviolable and
autonomous culture' in this way can be a vital means of
resistance, perhaps even of survival, for many communities (1995: 155; see also Nadel-Klein 1991: 514-515).
Similarly, Anthony Cohen argues that communities may
often mobilize themselves by representing themselves as
having clear boundaries which are endangered - as having
essential qualities, for instance, or distinctive ways of life,
which are under threat from the outside (as they may
indeed truly be) (A.P. Cohen 1985: 109; 1986).
In short, at a time when it has become no longer possible
for anthropologists to assume the existence of bounded
cultures and societies, it seems to be increasingly vital for
us to understand the ways that those whom we study
employ representations of boundedness of very much this
sort. With this aim in mind, I wish to examine a specific
problem in the understanding of ethnicity: namely, the
nature of the boundedness of the cultural repertoires by
which ethnic groups define themselves. I am thinking here
of the way that such groups express their identities by
means of diacritical 'inventories' - to borrow Kopytoff's
(1986: 73) useful term - of practices and symbols: modes
of dress, of livelihood, language, cuisine, music, ritual,
religious belief or other symbolic content conceived as
distinguishing one group from another.
I will refer to differences perceived or asserted to exist
between such ethnic repertoires as 'cultural' boundaries.
By the term 'ethnic' boundaries, on the other hand, I mean
distinctions drawn between a group's members and those
of other groups, demarcating ethnic collectivities (cf.
Barth 1969). Cultural boundaries, by contrast, can be
viewed as demarcating the bodies of symbolic practices
which these collectivities attribute to themselves in
seeking to differentiate themselves from each other

10

expressively. In the field of ethnic identity symbolism, the

difference between Self and Other thus takes the form of a
boundary drawn between one's own group's cultural identity symbols and those of other groups.
Of course, ethnic boundaries and cultural boundaries
are obviously closely connected. Movements of cultural
practices and meanings, for example, may accompany
movements and interactions of populations; a group trying
to keep out foreign cultural practices or ideas is therefore
likely to try to keep out foreign people, and vice versa.
Indeed, cultural boundaries can be viewed essentially as
rhetorical devices with which actors try, successfully or
otherwise, to convince others of the truth of their perceptions and definitions of ethnic boundaries.
My argument is that two principal kinds of cultural
boundary imagery are employed in the construction of
ethnic identity. There are quite possibly other kinds as
well, but these two varieties do seem to me to be particularly widespread. They also seem connected to each other
in significant ways which I will try to describe later. One
key feature they have in common is that they represent a
group's cultural boundaries as endangered - with very
much the kinds of politically mobilizing import noted by
Anthony Cohen. But there is a crucial difference between
them: one represents these boundaries as threatened by the
intrusion of foreign cultural forms, while the other represents them as threatened by the foreign consumption or
misappropriation of local cultural forms. In short, one
employs a rhetoric of cultural pollution, and the other a
rhetoric of cultural appropriation, piracy or theft. Let me
illustrate each of them in turn.
Identity pollution
The key analysis of the role of notions of purity and pollution in the construction of ethnonationalist identity is
undoubtedly Handler's (1988) study of cultural politics in
the province of Quebec in Canada. Quebec nationalists
envisage their nation as forever menaced with being overwhelmed politically, economically and culturally by
larger and more powerful entities such as English Canada
and the United States. To the nationalists, these collectively comprise 'not-Quebec', the defiling cultural Other
that threatens perpetually to adulterate and extinguish
their identity as embodied in the French language, rural
folk traditions, and so forth. Fundamental to Quebec
nationalism and, Handler suggests, to all nationalisms, are
these sorts of images of the nation as an entity bounded
against an outside world envisaged as a source of contamination and extinction (1988: 47-51).
Ohnuki-Tierney (1995) examines certain comparable
ideas of purity and impurity entailed in the construction of
Japanese national identity. For much of Japanese history,
food - and in particular, rice - has served important roles
in Japanese representations of identity in relation to other
peoples. Especially significant is the symbolic contrast
drawn between imported, 'foreign' rice, viewed as infeand Japanese,
rior, impure and contaminating,
whose
native-grown rice,
perceived 'purity' is both a
metaphor and a metonym for the purity of the Japanese
national self.

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I amgratefulto NickDodge,
JoeMcCormack,
andtwo
refereesfor
anonymous
A.T.,forcommentson
earlierdraftsof thisarticle.

Identity piracy
While ideas of purity and pollution play an important role
in the construction of cultural boundaries, a rather different set of ideas often plays a similar role too. To
understand these, one needs to turn to a recent development in anthropology and some related disciplines:
namely, the appearance of a rapidly growing literature on
what has come to be known as 'cultural appropriation'.
This term covers the entire range of ways in which the cultural knowledge, traditions and identities of minority
peoples can appear to be exploited by outsiders. Here, I
can do no more than draw briefly on some the major
studies in this emergent field (Brown 1998; Coombe
1998; Root 1998; Ziff & Rao 1997). Discussion has perhaps tended to focus principally on the commercial
exploitation of indigenous cultures, especially their
graphic arts, music and pharmacological knowledge (Ziff
& Rao 1997; Posey 1990). Increasingly, indigenous peoples and their supporters seek to protect such
commercially valuable aspects of their cultural heritage
with intellectual property law. A related development is
the growing resistance which some communities seem to
be starting to show to the unauthorized use of their cultural
imagery in corporate advertising and publicity. Two
recent examples are the action brought by the Lakota
against a beer distributor over the use of the name Crazy
Horse as a trademark (Coombe 1998: 199-204; Newton
1997), and the damages sought by a Pueblo community
for the unlicensed use of their sun symbol as an emblem
by the state of New Mexico (Brown 1998: 197).
According to Brown, some of the harshest criticisms of
cultural appropriation have come from Native Americans
objecting to what they perceive as the misappropriation of
their traditional religious ceremonies and beliefs by adherents of 'New Age' spirituality:

Interplay
Possessions
Indigenous Art I Colonial Culture
Nicholas Thomas
Tribalarthasbeena hugeinspirationfor
20th-centuryWesternartists.Butis thisa
discoveryto be celebrated,or justone more
exampleof Westerncolonialappropriation?
Focusingon settlersocietiesin Australiaand
New Zealand,thisrevelatorybookexplores
the complexissuesof culturalexchange.
20 incolour
183illustrations,
304ppPaperbackISBN0 500 280975
?16.95

Thames

& Hudson

[NJative religious leaders express horror at the monstrous

cloning of their visions of the sacred. For them, the New Age
is a kind of doppelg?nger,an evil imitationclose enough to the property rights by means of new extensions or analogues
real thing to upset the delicate balanceof spiritualpower main- of the law of copyright. Conceivably, such legislation
tained by Indianritualspecialists. (Brown 1998: 201; see also
might give ethnic communities proprietary rights, for
Root 1998:87-106)
example, in their religious knowledge or ceremonies. As
An issue particularly close to anthropologists, of course, Brown points out, one of the problems with such prois the vulnerability of their own discipline to being repre- posals is their assumption that every particular ceremony,
sented as a modality of cultural appropriation, and the or myth, or religious symbol 'belongs' unambiguously to
increasing readiness of many communities to assert pro- such-and-such a culture, and that people too are always
prietary rights over the results of scholarly research: to ethnically categorizable in exactly the same unequivocal
seek to control or restrict access to field notes, photo- way. To my mind, an important part of the significance of
graphs and other ethnographic records, to repatriate these proposals is their role in the rhetoric of contempomuseum artefacts, and so forth. A debate in the field of lit- rary identity politics: they are, at least in part, assertions of
erature, with close parallels to the debates on ethnographic rigid cultural boundaries, and thus of unambiguous - if not
- ethnic identities (see Harrison
writing within anthropology, concerns the appropriation reified and essentialized
of authorial 'voice': the issue of whether it is acceptable in press).
for white novelists, for instance, to adopt ethnic minority
personae in their writing, and thus appear to speak for Mixed discourses
minority groups to which they do not belong (Coombe I have tried so far to illustrate two alternative ways in
which a community may represent its cultural identity as
1997; Hart 1997).
Taken together, the examples I have mentioned point to at risk. It may, on the one hand, be concerned to protect the
an increasing resistance by many indigenous communities
'purity' and integrity of its culture from adulteration by
to what they perceive as appropriations of their cultures by foreign influences. Alternatively, it may be preoccupied
outsiders, perceptions which to some degree involve the with protecting its cultural practices and symbols against
reification of their cultural heritage as a form of property. unauthorized use or reproduction by outsiders. If the prinCoombe is perhaps right to see this tendency as part of a cipal concern of some groups is with keeping foreign
more general postmodern process of enclosure, as she culture out, with preventing or limiting its diffusion
calls it, of the intellectual commons: the progressive ero- inwards, the concern of others seems to be with keeping
sion of a public domain of culture by the increasing their own indigenous culture in, with limiting or controlprivatization and commoditization of all kinds of cultural ling its diffusion outwards.
In both situations, a group thereby implicitly defines its
imagery and information (1998: 53).
Brown (1998) very usefully examines radical proposals social world as divided into two radically distinct kinds of
made by some indigenous activists and their supporters to people: insiders and outsiders. What differs is the grounds
expand the legal recognition and protection of cultural on which this distinction is drawn. One kind of rhetoric
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11

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defines insiders as those who faithfully uphold the group's

traditions, customs, doctrines and so forth, while outsiders
are those who follow other ways, deemed inferior and
defiling. Another rhetoric represents insiders as those who
are entitled to reproduce the group's traditions, customs
and beliefs; outsiders are those excluded from these rights.
In one case, the demarcation between in-group and outgroup is drawn in the idiom of cultural purity, and in the
other it is drawn in the idiom of cultural ownership.
In both cases, the collective Self is constructed in opposition to a potentially or actually threatening Other. But
this menacing Other may, it seems, be envisaged in two
opposite ways: either as intrusive, expansionist and contaminating, an invasive influence which has to be repelled,
or as a covetous, acquisitive, extractive Other from whom
one's culture has to be sequestered away. In short, some
groups seem to enclose themselves in boundaries against
the pollution of their culture, and others in boundaries
against the piracy of their culture.
Case One: West Indian culture in Britain
Of course, groups may often employ both of these discourses (and perhaps others too), and the problem for the
observer is usually therefore to understand the ways in
such rhetorics are in practice combined in concrete situations. Let me give two examples. My first comes from
Abner Cohen's (1993) rich and fascinating analysis of the
history of the Notting Hill Carnival, and of the key role
this festival played in the emergence of West Indian identity in Britain.
For the first five years or so of its existence (1966-70)
this carnival was a relatively small, working-class event
attended by a few thousand people. Although several
ethnic communities were involved in it (there were Irish,
Turkish-Cypriot and Czechoslovak bands, for example),
the overall symbolism of the carnival was predominantly
British or English, the themes of the masquerades
including English monarchs, the novels of Dickens, and
scenes from Victorian London. Politically, the carnival
expressed opposition to landlords and local authorities
over issues such as housing shortages and extortionate
rents (Abner Cohen 1993: 10-20).
During the first half of the 1970s, a collective West
Indian ethnic identity developed in London, arising out of
shared experiences of unemployment, police harassment
and poor housing conditions, and this emergent community adopted the carnival as its focal symbol. Within a few
years, the carnival had became exclusively West Indian in
its leadership and in musical and cultural form, a process
accomplished, firstly, through the deliberate removal of
all artistic and cultural content not deemed to be West
Indian (Abner Cohen 1993: 1-2, 21-32). Cohen writes of
one of the main organizers of the carnival at this time:

and so recovering it as their rightful property: 'The West

Indians had tended to reify the concept of carnival, that is
to treat it as if it were a material object, and to regard it as
being exclusively their own' (Abner Cohen 1993: 76).
Their appropriation (but to them, repossession) of the
carnival as a symbol of identity eventually came to be
legitimized by a revision of its history. From the start, a
white community worker had been acknowledged by
everyone as the carnival's originator and as its leader for
its first few years. But in the mid-1980s, some of the West
Indian leaders 'discovered' that the carnival had actually
been founded by a West Indian woman in the late 1950s
(Abner Cohen 1993: 5-6, 62-78).
While the West Indian community took the Trinidad
Carnival (itself originally an expression of black emancipation, protest and resistance) as their model, this
community did not predominantly originate from Trinidad
but from a variety of islands, many of which did not have
a tradition of carnival (Abner Cohen 1993: 5, 21-32). The
great interest and significance of Cohen's study is therefore that it is one of relatively few detailed analyses of the
historical genesis of an ethnic identity and its cultural
symbolism. This identity symbolism was constructed, I
would argue, by selecting an existing cultural form (essentially, a working-class street festival) and subjecting it two
processes of exclusion: one concerned with pollution
(removing all but 'West Indian' cultural and artistic content from it) and the other with ownership (extricating the
festival itself from its predominantly white working-class
cultural context). Both processes crucially involved, of
course, the removal of outsiders from decision-making
and leadership roles.
Case Two: Greek nationalism
In short, it was not that an already-formed West Indian
community took over the carnival as its cultural heritage.
Rather, this West Indian identity seems to have generated
or produced itself, as it were, in the very process of appropriation itself. It did so, moreover, primarily in relation to
one cultural Other: namely, British white majority culture.
But some cultural identities are defined, or generate themselves, in contrast to more than one cultural alter, and may
present different kinds of boundaries to each of them.
Greek national identity is a case in point. Greek nationalism arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in
relation to two primarily significant alters: the Ottoman
empire and Western Europe (see Friedman 1994: 118123; Herzfeld 1987, 1995; Stewart 1994). Greek
nationalists viewed their language and culture as having
been adulterated over the centuries by Turkish influences
which had to be thoroughly rooted out if Greeks were to
reassert their true national identity. At the same time, these
nationalists were greatly concerned with the custodianship
of the classical past, much of which they saw as having
been appropriated by Western European nations, particularly Britain and Germany. While these concerns tended to
focus on the proprietorship of material culture such as
antiquities and museum objects, the deeper issue at stake
for the nationalists was the much more abstract, moral
right to be recognised as the true successors of the classical Hellenes and their civilization (Herzfeld 1987,

He jealously developed and guardedthe West Indiancharacter

of the celebrationand discouragedthe incursion of 'foreign'
culturalforms into its structure... [F]romthe start,duringthe
first few years of the carnivalwhen it was multiculturalin its
artsandmusic andmulti-ethnicin attendance,andwas referred
to as a fair, he strivedto turnit into an exclusively West Indian
celebration,to 'purify'it of the contaminationof native British
culturalforms... [T]herewas at the time a sustained,conscious
effort to establish culturaland social boundaries,to achieve a
distinctivenessthat would markthe identity and exclusiveness 1995).
thatwould be necessaryfor the articulationof a corporateWest
Like West Indian identity in Britain, the formation of
Indianorganization.(1993: 113-114)
Greek national identity seems to have involved two simulTo many of its West Indian organizers, the carnival was taneous processes of exclusion. But in the Greek case each
a quintessentially West Indian cultural event which had, in process was directed at a different cultural Other: one,
effect, been misappropriated by outsiders and adulterated directed toward the Ottoman East, was intended to reclaim
by white British culture. As they saw it, establishing a dis- Greek culture from pollution; the other, directed toward
tinctive West Indian collective identity involved removing the European West, was concerned with reclaiming Greek
these admixtures from this key symbol of their heritage culture from appropriation. These two processes were intiANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 15 No 5 October 1999

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mately connected: to the nationalists, the Greek nation had

to 'purify' itself of Turkish adulterations to re-establish
itself as authentically Greek and thus as the rightful inheritor of the classical Hellenic legacy.
I earlier described cultural boundaries as rhetorical
devices. But clearly, they are often more than just this;
ethnic groups do at times try actually to engineer such barriers and to exercise very real control over cultural flows
(see, for instance, Tomlinson 1991: 17-18). Efforts of this
sort are perhaps particularly marked when nascent groups
are struggling to establish themselves against opposition.
Greek nationalists, for example, did not portray their
national identity as a novel construction, of course, but as
the revival or reconstruction of something that had existed
all along. To them, the Greek nation was, and always had
been, historically continuous with classical Greece
(though, as Friedman [1994: 118] points out, the very
image of classical civilization to which they referred was
in fact an historically quite recent invention of the Western
European Renaissance). The problem, as they saw it, was
that their nation had lain submerged for centuries under
Turkish influences, and dispossessed of much of its patrimony by Western Europe. What was therefore needed for
this identity to re-emerge was to reverse the cultural flows
which had compromised it the first place: to purify Greek
culture of its Turkish accretions, and to reassemble the
classical heritage in Greek hands.
Folk concepts of cultural identity
I have tried to contrast two related kinds of discursive
imagery which seem often involved in the construction of
cultural identity. One kind comprises discourses of cultural pollution: here, a group represents its identity as
threatened by invasion and replacement by others. The
other comprises discourses of cultural piracy: here, a
group represents its identity as threatened by being purloined or incorporated by others.
Both discourses evoke images of transgressive movements of cultural symbols across imagined boundaries.
But they differ in the direction - inward into the Self, or
outward from the Self - of these conceived transgressive
flows. A proper understanding of an ethnic group's selfconstructions therefore involves, I suggest, understanding
the ways in which it seeks to draw particular types of
boundaries around its cultural repertoire - boundaries of
purity (defending it from pollution), of ownership
(defending it from appropriation), and perhaps of other
kinds - thus representing itself as differentiated from its
sociocultural environment.
I suggest that these two discourses are most usefully
viewed as actually parts of a single set of underlying conceptions which actors seem often to employ in claims
concerning ethnic and national identity. This implicit folk
theory of cultural identity might be roughly summed up in
the following way. Firstly, cultural practices and symbols
are in certain respects things (they are 'objectified' as
Handler [1988: 14-16] puts it), and are capable of being
transmitted, circulated, accumulated and so forth, much
like objects. Second, discrete and enduring cultural identities come into existence through the imposition of an
order, in which the unrestricted movement of these objects
is brought under control and discontinuities are introduced
into the unregulated flow of cultural forms and practices.
This folk model thus seems implicitly to posit a kind of

potential condition of uncurbed cultural diffusion, through

whose control and negation collective identities crystallize, each attached to a stable, fixed inventory of cultural
'traits'.
But a consequence of this model is that every such
inventory appears susceptible to loss, dispersal and extinction. A group's cultural identity is therefore always to
some degree provisional, insecure, conceived as something it can 'lose'. This loss of distinctive identity can be
conceived to occur through the replacement of one's local
culture by alien ones (flows of foreign culture inward),
through the appropriation of one's culture by foreign ones
(flows of local culture outward), or through combinations
of both of these processes. The implication is that a group
must safeguard its cultural identity by controlling the flow
of cultural forms into, and out of, its repertoire of symbolic
practices, because if it does not protect its cultural boundaries in this way it will be absorbed and dissolve back into
its environment.
Conclusion
Let me close by noting two general questions which the
argument of this article raises (see Harrison in press for
some suggestions toward answering them). The first concerns the situations in which ethnic groups and actors
employ particular kinds of cultural boundary discourses. It
is important to discover why, for instance, communities
may be preoccupied with the perceived pollution of their
culture in some circumstances or in relation to certain
kinds of cultural Others; and why they may sometimes
find they can most effectively mobilize themselves collectively through discourses of cultural appropriation (or
perhaps some other sorts of discursive imagery).
A second problem is why ethnic groups and actors may
seek to draw these cultural boundaries more or less?
strongly or sharply. Some communities seem to maintain
relatively rigid and precise distinctions between their own
practices and those of others, claiming to be able to place
any cultural attribute unambiguously on one side or the
other of these boundaries. Others seem to tolerate more
permeable boundaries, and may value change or indeterminacy in the perceived distribution of cultural
characteristics among groups. For example, one can point
to innumerable cases in which communities have been
quite indifferent to the adoption of many of their practices
by outsiders, or have welcomed this sort of borrowing, or
indeed have forced their practices on others. Conversely,
one can also think of many examples of groups which
have been highly acquisitive culturally, attributing foreign
ways with considerable prestige value and adopting them
eagerly (see, for instance, Tomlinson 1991: 92-94).
The folk rhetorics of identity which I have tried to outline thus certainly allow groups to represent themselves as
more or less outward-looking, more or less amenable to
various sorts of mutually enriching cultural give-and-take
- so long as their cultural boundaries are not erased altogether and all distinction lost between inside and outside.
For according to these discourses of identity (to return to
my central point) the distinction between the cultural Self
and Other depends irreducibly on stopping at least some
transmission of culture between them: on regulating the
movement of foreign culture inward, or of local culture
outward, or both, so preserving this critical yet imagined
boundary against erosion.D

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 15 No 5, October 1999

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