The spread of humanity across the globe has fostered diversity of cultures and lifestyles. As people have adapted to their local climate and landscape conditions their daily practices have evolved over time to become unique ways of knowing. Migration in recent times has witnessed the meeting of diverse cultures in settings that are creating new lifestyles of cultural fusion. Multi-cultural perspectives are providing opportunities for discovery and fresh approaches to global problems. Giving voice to young people in political arenas is viewed as part of the change needed within societal structures which are facing cracks from environmental, economic, and social upheaval.
“Concessions, then, are the best way of coming to win, only if, sooner or later, they actually win the fight that is never over and done.” —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope (1993, p. 199)
TopCultural Fusion
The culturally diverse and hybrid world of humanity is a product of migration and settlement over millennia. No matter the origins of the species – some would say in central Africa and others maintain humans first emerged in Mesopotamia and surrounds – the movement of people has generated differences. Climatic conditions, local affordances of land and sea masses have resulted in a myriad of racial, cultural, linguistic, culinary, economic, and spiritual practices – all reflected in locally unique ontological and epistemological knowing. The passage of time helps tighten the ties between land, nature, and human occupancy such that indigenous cultures connect with constructs of ‘my people’, ‘my land’ as inseparable. Fast track to the industrial and scientific revolutions along with the age of Enlightenment, from the 17th century onwards, migration has reignited the process of human population distributions with new patterns that are changing the old-world orders. European colonisation of the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia helped spread intellectualism in these lands. New ideas, education, transport connection with railways, commerce and trade all contributed to change in the ‘new’ lands. At the same time amid all this optimism and growth, colonial occupancy repressed local cultures and created conflicts that endure today. Identity differences have contributed to a bifurcation of human occupancy and subaltern status of the less powerful and those considered to be socially weak. In summary, geographical differences in humanity are linked with history and reflected in racial, social, and cultural divisions. The past versus the present, public and private spaces, individual and collective behaviours, all contribute to the identity of people and the complexity that exists within contemporary nations. As critical theorists attest these are not simple issues for analysis (see Gieseking & Mangold, 2014).
The wounds of cultural conflict are deeply felt in many parts of the world and well-illustrated in Edward Said’s Orientalism. Published in 1978, Said’s analysis of west versus east perspectives was a wakeup call that set a new tone and code of ethics for any notion of ontological supremacy. In the Forward of his republished book Said states: “Orientalism is a book tied to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history…neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any prolonged ontological stability; each is made of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other” (1994, p. xvii). Following this lead is the thinking of Homi Bhabha (1994) who critiques post-colonial thought and matters related to identity and other polarities.
For the demography of the new internationalism is the history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees……What is striking about the ‘new’ internationalism is that the move from the specific to the general, from the material to the metaphoric, is not a smooth passage of transition and transcendence. The ‘middle’ passage’ of contemporary culture, as with slavery itself, is the process of displacement and disjunction that does not totalize experience. (p. 5)
The Soviet/Ukraine conflict is an example. The ramifications of the violence in their respective homelands have encouraged migration of their citizens with outreach to diasporas scattered throughout the world. Each diaspora supports its own people with an apparent fervency illustrative of national pride and belonging to their birth land. Through recent migrations such carriage of identity to homes in new lands is a reminder of the sense of belonging attached to place of origin and family. The adopted home of recent migration may be the location for building a new lifestyle and future but is secondary in the cultural sense of belonging. Bhabha would argue that their futures lie in the “the vanishing point of two familiar traditions in the discourse of humanity: The philosophical tradition of identity as the process of self-reflection in the mirror of (human) nature; and the anthropological view of the difference of human identity as located in the division of Nature/Culture”. (1994, p. 46). This is not a rapid process and in some cases is never resolved.
The World Migration Report (20221) summarises the pattern of recent movements.