S605-e3

"Culture in Danger"

"Cultures"-3

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"To kill a CULTURE is to kill a People"

This is what Milan Kundera [1] tells us , and he adds, with implacable lucidity: "destroy his books, his memory, his stories, and you will only have to invent new narratives, a false culture, without roots" .

To destroy a Culture or a People is in truth to assassinate a Living System.

To kill a culture is to squander an invaluable heritage, a precious capital, unique to its heirs and useful to other cultures.

This is a waste that humanity cannot afford.

Culture is a Living Production of Humans

A People becomes aware of itself around shared cultural fragments:

• "an imagined community" Benedict Anderson tells us [2] ,

• "ethnic roots" Anthony D. Smith tells us [3] ,

• "social structures" Claude Lévi-Strauss tells us [4] .

The People produce their Culture as the tree creates its fruits, and Culture, in return, keeps it alive.

Both are living, human systems, intimately linked, to the point that one and the other almost seem to merge into one.

We will defend this postulate: a Culture and a People are true living systems.

If we accept this premise, then the disappearance of a culture is as tragic, if not more so, than that of a person. It should move us, worry us, even revolt us as much, if not more, than the disappearance of a person.

The future of humanity, its greatness or its defeat, will probably be played out in this fragile balance between Peoples and their Culture.

Treasures of experiences

Each member of a People is the custodian of a part of the Culture forged by his or her "cultural ancestors".

From the consciousness or from the depths of his "INSU", his collective unconscious, he receives a History woven from emotions and experiences of thousands of years: joys and sorrows, terrors and hopes, successes and failures, beliefs and doubts.

This heritage is a human capital, a treasure of several millennia, engraved in Language, Symbols, Knowledge, Morality, Law, Religion, Art, Myths. All of it is organized according to unconscious laws, common to all humans, regardless of their soil or their gods.

We cannot allow such treasures to be devastated.

Every threatened culture, every people in peril, is a warning to all humanity.

What would we be like if we allowed that which deeply connects us to one another to be destroyed in this way?

Culture in danger

Faced with complex national or international conflicts, through ignorance of the profound meaning of Culture, or through ideological blindness, we are prevented from imagining new, disruptive responses capable of resolving cultural conflicts that we believe to be insoluble.

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References

[1] Milan Kundera, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", Ed. Gallimard, 1979.

[2] Benedict Anderson , "The National Imaginary: Reflections on the Origin and Rise of Nationalism," ed. La Découverte, 1996.

[3] Anthony D. Smith , "The Ethnic Origins of Nations", ed. Fayard, 1999.

[4] Claude Lévi-Strauss , ''The Elementary Structures of Kinship'', ed. PUF, 1949.

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