Culture, music, encounters

Ethan Zuckerman has a fascinating post up about a presentation at the Berkman Center on "nu world music." The whole thing is definitely worth reading, but I was caught by this excerpt:

They suggest that four things might happen when we encounter media from another culture:
• We might embrace it and it could overwhelm our local culture. (This is a fear often cited with regards to the spread of US culture — the fear of the McDonaldization of the world — and used to justify cultural protection legislation.)
• We might violently reject the other culture and ban it, as the Taliban has done with aspects of western culture
• We might embrace the outside influences and incorporate them into a hybrid culture, creating something new and interesting, like the majestic Bánh mì sandwich, in my opinion, the tastiest byproduct of European colonialism yet discovered.
• We might encounter the other culture, acknowledge it as different and choose not to incorporate or reject it.

I was interested in part because this aligns in some ways with Richard Shweder’s suggestions about “seeing through cultures” (about which I’ve written numerous times).