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| Pix Credit NPR |
Culture is a fragile thing. Its management cannot be left to its members, but like all other aspects of collective life, culture must be husbanded (and I note the gendered origins of the term here with some irony) as it morphs in its expression and forms. Culture has been caged in the methods and technologies of its production, especially where that culture expressions its own self discipline in the zoo, in the museum, in the menagerie--and always with the gentle guiding hand of the curator, the shepherd--or in the terms of the movie 'The Matrix' the engineer. But this i little more than the cultural expression of the fundamental contradiction of semiotics--meanings confined within cages--of text, of image, of language--and now of the abstracted spaces of the meta-verse created through the reconstitution of social collectives not in themselves but in digitized images of themselves.
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| Pix Credit here |
At the same time that curation of the collective identification of meaning moves from the literary traditions of hispanicity to culture as a series of Tik-Tok moments, so many little beads in a complicated collar that speaks to many orishas--state, ethnos, religion, language, etc. and its hybridities. It speaks as well to the hybridity essential to the (re)construction of the disasporic. Within those cages space must be allocated to all mass collectives--organized in forms that may be 'natural' or convenient to those tasked with the goal of inclusion within the curated spaces the detritus of which is understood as culture and its production. Thus beyond the discipline of cultural expectation (eg one cannot be a member of 'x' culture unless one conforms to 'p-q-z-s' opinions, behaviors and performances) comes the discipline of herding (cultural discipline requires that all members be housed within the same cages for appropriate policing or in the language of the curator class, of monitored participation). And thus to the production of some essentialized amalgam presented to the outside and to each other--an object that is useful in the bartering among cultures for space on the even larger cultural checkerboard of cultural life in the United States.
This is not meant to suggest the dystopian; rather the reverse: cultural cohesion requires either its expression through the aggregation of practice erupting from the bottom--or its careful shepherding disciplined from the top. And therein the warning for those who seek empowerment through control of cultural tropes and the borderlands of the Hispanic in the Americas. Today in whatever form culture assumes, the taste for managing from the top is practically irresistible, and thus becomes a subject beyond debate. Within the cage there is the comfort of membership and inclusion; the outside is either populated by the disloyal, the betrayers, or those exiled as heretics or cultural enemies. These become invisible to the community--excised like a corrupting bacillus., and where necessary treated as dangerous aberrations What becomes unforgivable in this semiotically orthodox structuring universe is for otherwise conforming members to be left out of the cultural corral where they can thrive within the warm glow of the community and guided toward happy and healthy expressions of cultural alignment. The insinuation of the practices of cultural colonialism and the imperialism of meta cultural orthodoxies that freeze frame cultural mapping in a vertically organized space then curated is something that those colonized from outside out to be sensitive to when the impulse becomes irresistible translated within. Cultural policing, like morality policing in other cultures, can only end in oppression, exclusion, and sometimes in blood.
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