Culture Is Dynamic
Culture does not exist outside of human beings. This means that cultures are not static relics, stagnant behaviors, or sterile values. Steven Arvizu’s wonderful description of culture as a verb rather than a noun captures this essence of culture beautifully.4 That is, culture is dynamic, active, changing, always on the move. Even within their native contexts, cultures are always changing as a result of political, social, and other modifications in the immediate environment. When people with differ- ent backgrounds come in contact with one another, such change is to be expected even more.
But cultural change is not simply a one-way process. The popular conception of cultural change is that it is much like a transfusion: As one culture is emptied out of a person, a new one is poured in. In this conception, each culture is inert and permanent and human beings do not influence the process to any significant degree. But the reality is that cultures are always hybrids, and people select and reject particular ele- ments of culture as suitable or not for particular contexts. Cultural
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values are not gotten rid of as easily as blood. Nor are new ones simply infused. For instance, there is ample ethnographic evidence that in spite of the enormous political, social, and economic changes among Native Americans in the past one hundred years, their child-rearing practices, although they have, of course, changed, have also remained quite stable.5 Likewise, among immigrants to the United States, there are indications that ethnic values and identities are preserved to some extent for many generations.6
In some ways, we can think of culture as having both surface and deep structure, to borrow a concept from linguistics (Chomsky 1965).7
For instance, in previous research,8 when interviewing young people of diverse backgrounds I was initially surprised by the seeming homo- geneity of the youth culture they manifested. That is, regardless of racial, ethnic, or linguistic background, or time in the United States— but usually intimately connected to a shared urban culture and social class—the youths often expressed strikingly similar tastes in music, food, clothes, television viewing habits, and so on. Yet, when I probed more deeply, I also found evidence of deeply held values from their ethnic heritage. For example, Marisol, a young Puerto Rican woman, loved hip hop and rap music, pizza, and lasagna. She never mentioned Puerto Rican food, and Puerto Rican music to her was just the “old- fashioned” and boring music her parents listened to. Nonetheless, in her everyday interactions with her parents and siblings, and in the answers she gave to my interview questions, she reflected deep aspects of Puerto Rican culture such as respect for elders, a profound kinship with and devotion to family, and a desire to uphold important tradi- tions such as staying with family rather than going out with friends on important holidays. Just as there is no such thing as a “pure race,” there is likewise no “pure culture.” That is, cultures influence one another, and even minority cultures and those with less status have an impact on majority cultures, sometimes in dramatic ways. Rap music, with its accompanying style of talk, dress, and movement, is a notable example among young people of diverse backgrounds in urban areas.
In terms of schooling, the problem with thinking of culture as static is that curriculum and pedagogy are designed as if culture indeed were unchanging. This issue was well expressed by Frederick Erickson, who has argued that when culture is thought of as fixed, or simply as an aesthetic, the educational practice derived from it supports the status quo. This is because reality itself can then be perceived as inher- ently static. Erickson goes on to say, “When we think of culture and
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social identity in more fluid terms, however, we can find a foundation for educational practice that is transformative.”9 The view of culture as dynamic rather than fixed is unquestionably more befitting a concep- tion of multicultural education as liberating pedagogy based on social justice.