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‘Not Something We're New To. Its Something We Grew To’

Reflections on Urban Cultural Identities, Anthropology and Cultural Representations

Hannah Smith is at the School of Health and Social Sciences, Middlesex University, UK. E-mail: hansta{at}hotmail.com.

On a global scale, new images are chasing out the old. Contemporary cultural experiences have new international inflections and connections: ‘households’ cross continents, teenagers in the Philippines don sequinned flares with nostalgia for the days of Elvis, white English city kids use Jamaican Creole and African American slang to articulate their experiences, and British-born second-generation West Indians identify with bhangra music and pan-Africanism. As ‘insights into other cultures... are brought into one's living room’ (McGrane 1989: 115), the ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1994) that comprise our social and cultural worlds show us that there are multiple ways of knowing, doing and being. As members of families, neighbourhoods, institutions, academies, cities, classes and so on, we are all living in, and engaged in making, an ‘all change world’ (Prescod 1997). In a context of the daily reworking and reconstruction of meaning-making processes, the question becomes ‘how are we to live in the world?’ (Rushdie 1981[1991]: 17). The following discussion looks at how ideas about culture and cultural diversity have changed since Boas’ time; how societies have themselves changed; and how contemporary social research, and the subjects of study, are continually developing ways to understand and represent ‘the diversity of ideologies and discourses that they both consume and engage with’ (Back 1996: 53).

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