essay on local culture

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Importance of Incorporating Local Culture into Community Development

Introduction

Developmental trajectories of communities are usually explained by reference to economic history, human capital deficits, and/or the structure of local labor markets. Rarely is local culture seen as playing a significant role in development outcomes. Nor does empirical research routinely consider the role of local culture in fostering a more complete understanding of community development. Instead, culture is often viewed as an outgrowth of a particular region and dependent upon economic and other experiences, not an independent force.

Such perspectives miss an important aspect of the development process. The culture of a community significantly shapes debate and action. Local culture also presents unique options for locally based economic and other development. Local understandings and interpretations of a community's history reflect past events that feed into, and are partially driven by the demands, sentiments, and interests of those in the present. This makes it crucial for community development practitioners to consider the importance of culture in efforts to improve local well-being. By paying attention to, and incorporating unique cultural values, traditions, and related factors, more efficient and effective development efforts can be achieved.

Local culture provides a sense of identity for rural communities and residents. This identity facilitates common understandings, traditions, and values, all central to the identification of plans of action to improve well-being. Culture contributes to building a sense of local identity and solidarity. It influences the confidence rural communities have for coming together to address specific needs and problems. This local commitment among residents, regardless of economic or political conditions, can serve as a valuable tool in shaping the effectiveness of development options and local actions. Such commitment, based on culture and common identity, can be seen as a potentially important tool in sustaining local government, development, and social improvement efforts.

Providing a local linkage and cultural basis for development is important. People are likely to take part in and remain committed to development efforts to which they have a direct connection. Development efforts that consider or focus on culture provide a mechanism for linking local residents to the development process. Through such efforts, local residents can encourage development that preserves or promotes their culture. This is particularly important in development efforts that seek to elicit local participation, volunteerism, and community action. In understanding the place of culture in the development process, it is important to consider the social basis of culture, its relationship to interaction, and the types of development and local actions it can contribute to.

Role of Local Culture

The concept of culture has many definitions and interpretations. In social settings, it is often used broadly to represent entire ways of life. Included in such ways of life are rules, values, and expected behaviors. At its most basic level, culture can be seen as the shared products of a society. These products have a common meaning that accumulates over time and also reflect shared attachments among community members.

Culture can be seen as consisting of ideas, rules, and material dimensions. Ideas include such things as the values, knowledge, and experience held by a culture. Values are shared ideas and beliefs about what is morally right or wrong, or what is culturally desirable. Such values are abstract concepts and are often based in religion or culture in that they reflect ideals and visions of what society should be. Such values often shape expected behavior and rules. These rules are accepted ways of doing things and represent guidelines for how people should conduct themselves and how they should act towards others.

Values and rules are often taken for granted and assumed to reflect a common understanding. Both, however, have direct origins and developed in response to conflicts or needs. At the core of such values and norms is a process of interaction that led to their emergence and acceptance. This process shapes the actions of individuals and social systems within their communities. Culture provides belonging and an arena in which residents can make a difference. At the same time, culture contributes to exclusionary practices and has been seen as a drag on development efforts. Regardless, it is clear that culture plays a critical role in local community action.

Applied Uses of Culture in Development

The inclusion of culture into community and economic development models can take many shapes and forms. Culture can serve as the central focus. Included would be tourism and other efforts that focus largely on the promotion, preservation, or enhancement of local or regional cultures. Culture can also be a factor that needs to be addressed to determine its impact on new or existing development programs (resource management, environmental protection). In facing development, the programs that communities are willing to accept and embrace are likely to depend largely on cultural factors. It is therefore vital that problems and potential solutions be defined in a manner consistent with the local culture.

Culture as a Focus of Development

Regional or local culture can serve as a basis for development. Such efforts can serve to promote the local identity, regional languages, and minority cultures. Efforts can focus on preservation or promotion of a culture, but can also use culture to mobilize the local population. Examples of cultural preservation or efforts focusing solely on a culture are often seen in relation to tourism and conservation efforts. Included are renovation of villages (architectural rehabilitation, etc.), highlighting the architectural heritage of an area (restoring historic sites to serve as a focal point for tourists), cultural venues (local heritage centers, traditional cultural events), traditional craft and artistic skills (development of industry and employment based on the production of items which are symbolic of the local culture), and cultural based entertainment and cultural dissemination (organization of cultural activities, festivals, permanent exhibitions). Equally important is the environmental aspects of culture, where traditional uses of natural resources or events symbolize local cultural ties to environmental processes (solstice festivals, harvest festivals, agriculture progress days).

These efforts serve as a basis for development, but also serve to maintain cultural traditions and ways of life. Furthermore, such forms of development highlight the importance of rural cultures and identify their role in shaping wider society. Finally, through such development, community and cultural identities are reinforced and collective identities strengthened. Such interaction can lead to an improved state of community and social well-being.

Culture and Territorial Development

It is argued by some that development should focus clearly on specific sectors of the economy, while others argue that rural development should be more tailored to the unique cultural characteristics of rural areas and highlight their territorial elements. These sectoral approaches have been central to most "top-down" or government-led development. Sectoral programs have however received criticism. Such programs are often seen as being too broad in scope and application to account for the diversity and unique needs of rural areas.

In response to such conditions, a shift from sectoral to territorial rural development policy has been suggested. In such policies, social cohesion and comprehensive planning have been included. Territorial approaches are best suited to meet the unique and complex conditions present in rural areas. The local culture is part of this later development model. As a result, increasing attention is being given to local level and "bottom-up" approaches which focus on culture, territory, local diversity, and the optimization of local resources. Territorial approaches seek to enhance the particular strengths of a rural locality by developing the potential of local resources such as individuals, businesses, and communities. Such perspectives tend to include a recognition of the total environment in which local rural development operates. Such methods attempt to address the interdependencies of people, the environment, and the communities within a locality. Enhancing or focusing on local culture serves this process.

Conclusion and Implications for Extension Programming

The perceptions of rural and urban areas, their economic bases, and means for their development will need to be more closely considered in future policy efforts. This is particularly true when considering the changing character of rural areas and the diversity of communities there. Local culture plays a central role in shaping community development, local character, and responses to needs. Continuing to ignore culture's critical role will constrain development efforts, rendering them little more than short-term solutions for endemic rural problems.

The relationship between culture and community development is vast. However, this important relationship is rarely accorded a significant role in the design of development efforts. Using an interactional approach to community development provides opportunities for incorporating insights into the role and place of culture. Further, it means conceptualizing development so as to highlight the importance of establishing and enhancing social relationships. Aligning such development with cultural promotion and preservation can serve as a tool for successful development. Moreover, focusing on the erosion of solidarity or culture would provide insight into the lack of progress or the presence of obstacles impeding existing development efforts.

Future decisions will need to be made about the types of development activities pursued. In this light, territorial perspectives that focus on local cultures and their attributes appear to provide a more comprehensive approach than those that focus on specialized economic sectors. Local culture is a fundamental component of community life which shapes the unique character, needs, and possibilities of individual rural areas. Indeed, it differentiates communities making one-size-fits-all policies and programs largely irrelevant.

Culture and attachment to it can be used as a motivating factor in opposing "anti-local development" activities such as extra local development and exploitation. Using culture to motivate community members can serve as a tool for policy makers and others interested in encouraging development at the local level. Culture can be seen as presenting both the means and ends of development. To a great extent, it is by emphasizing the wealth and diversity of their cultural heritage that rural areas will be able to develop those activities that enhance social and economic well being. Communities and rural development specialists will need to understand and learn to capitalize on the strengths of community solidarity and culture.

References and Suggested Reading

Bhattacharyya, J. 1995. "Solidarity and agency: Rethinking community development."  Human Organization. 54(1):60-69

Luloff, A.E., and J. Bridger. 2003. Community Agency and Local Development. Pp. 203-213 in,  Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century , edited by D. Brown and L. Swanson . University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Ramsay, M. 1996. Community, culture, and economic development . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Brennan, M. A. 2005a. " The Importance of Local Community Action in Shaping Development ." EDIS . Gainesville, FL: Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida. Publication number: FCS 9209.

Brennan, M. A. 2005b. " Empowering Your Community: Stage 3, Goal Setting and Strategy  Development." EDIS. Gainesville, FL: Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida. Publication number: FCS 9213.

Brennan, M. A. and C. Regan. 2005. " Empowering Your Community: Stage 2, Organization of Sponsorship." EDIS. Gainesville, FL: Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida. Publication number: FCS 9212.

• Community and Leadership Development
• International Development
• Research Methods and Statistics
• Social Change/Social Movements
• Rural Sociology
• Environmental/Natural Resource Sociology

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What is local culture?

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. –Wallace Stegner, "The Sense of Place," 1983

Local culture is everything that we create and share as part of our lives in the place where we live or work.

Local culture recognizes the expertise that people have in living their daily lives. People bring a wealth of knowledge to their activities – where to buy the freshest meats, how to machine a part within a thousandth of an inch, when to move the infield closer to the plate for a bunt, what types of patterns go well with each other, how to reach consensus on a cooperative’s committee.

Local culture recognizes that people’s daily knowledge comes from shared life experiences and information transmitted to them by family, friends, neighbors and co-workers.

Local culture has connections to all aspects of the curriculum, including:

• art, music, theater,
• geography, history, sociology, economics, political science, psychology, anthropology, folklore,
• reading, writing, speaking, listening,
• foreign languages, English as a second language,
• media and technology, international education,
• natural history and environmental education,
• family and consumer education.

We create and share local culture as part of our lives in specific places-urban and rural. The common factor is place, yet each discipline investigates place in a different way.

Where is local culture?

Local culture is everywhere.

Local culture resides in our relations with the local environment and landscapes, in our local music and artistic expressions, in our community’s history and contemporary social issues, and in our family’s stories.

Want to explore some examples?

C lick on the map to launch an interactive exploration of local in Wisconsin.

Examples include:

• Finnish names in Washburn
• An Ojibwe story from Ashland
• Ojibwe fish decoys in Lac du Flambeau
• A tall tale from Tomahawk
• A Menominee story from the Menominee Nation
• A lumberjack story from Rice Lake
• Norwegian polka from Mondovi
• A Hmong story from Eau Claire
• A Belgian festival in Algoma
• Polish weddings near Custer
• A Czech celebration near Hillsboro
• African American gospel from DeForest
• African American quilting in Milwaukee
• Swiss yodeling in Monroe

The Work of Local Culture

Each year the Iowa Humanities Board offers a talk by a distinguished humanities scholar focusing on a theme important to the people of Iowa. Under the theme of the Exemplary Project, "A Sense of Place," the 1988 Iowa Humanities Lecture featured Wendell Berry.

FOR MANY YEARS MY WALKS HAVE TAKEN ME down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather's farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land-surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.

The old bucket started out a far better one than you can buy now. I think it has been hanging on that post for something like fifty years. I think so because I remember hearing, when I was just a small boy, a story about a bucket that must have been this one. Several of my grandfather's black hired hands went out on an early spring day to burn a tobacco plantbed, and they took along some eggs to boil and eat with their dinner. When dinner came time and they look around for something to boil the eggs in, they could find only an old bucket that at one time had been filled with tar. The boiling water softened the residue of tar, and one of the eggs came out of the water black. The hands made much sport of seeing who would have to eat the black egg, welcoming their laughter in the midst of their days work. The man who had to eat the black egg was Floyd Scott, whom I remember well. Dry scales of tar still adhere to the inside of the bucket. 

However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—which will be its culture. And these two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.   

IN THE WOODS, THE BUCKET IS NO METAPHOR; it simply reveals what is always happening in the woods, if the woods is let alone. Of course, in most places in my part of the country, the human community did not leave the woods alone. It felled the trees, and replaced them with pastures and crops. But this did not revoke the law of the woods, which is that the ground must be protected by a cover of vegetation, and that the growth of the years must return—or be returned—to the ground to rot and build soil. A good local culture, in one of its most important functions, is a collection of the memories, ways, and skills necessary for the observance, within the bounds of domesticity, of this natural law. If the local culture cannot preserve and improve the local soil, then, as both reason and history inform us, the local community will decay and perish, and the work of soil-building will be resumed by nature. 

A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this. Once we have acknowledged this principle, we can only be alarmed at the extent to which it has been ignored. For though our present society does generate a centripetal force of great power, this is not a local force, but one centered almost exclusively in our great commercial and industrial cities, which have drawn irresistibly into themselves both the products of the countryside and the people and talents of the country communities. 

There is, as one assumes there must be, a countervailing or centrifugal force that also operates in our society, but this returns to the countryside, not the residue of the land's growth to refertilize the fields, not the learning and experience of the greater world ready to go to work locally, and not, or not often, even a just monetary compensation. What are returned, instead, are overpriced manufactured goods, pollution in various forms, and garbage. A landfill on the edge of my own rural county in Kentucky, for example, daily receives about eighty truckloads of garbage. About fifty of these loads come from cities in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Thus, the end result of the phenomenal modern productivity of the countryside is a debased countryside, which becomes daily less pleasant, and which will inevitably become less productive. 

The cities, which have imposed this inversion of forces upon the countryside, have been unable to preserve themselves from it. The typical modern city is surrounded by a circle of affluent suburbs, eating its way outward, like ringworm, leaving the so-called "inner city" desolate, filthy, ugly, and dangerous.  

MY WALKS IN THE HILLS AND HOLLOWS around my home have inevitably produced in my mind the awareness that I live in a diminished country. The country has been and is being reduced by the great centralizing process that is our national economy. As I walk, I am always reminded of the slow, patient building of soil in the woods. And I am reminded of the events and companions of my life—for my walks, after so long, are cultural events. But under the trees and in the fields I see also the gullies and scars, healed or healing or fresh, left by careless logging and bad farming. I see the crumbling stone walls, and the wire fences that have been rusting out ever since the 1930's. In the returning woods growth out of the hollows, I see the sagging and the fallen barns, the empty and ruining houses, the houseless chimneys and foundations. As I look at this evidence of human life poorly founded, played out, and gone, I try to recover some understanding, some vision, of what this country was at the beginning: the great oaks and beeches and hickories, walnuts and maples, lindens and ashes, tulip poplars, standing in beauty and dignity now unimaginable, lying deep at their feet—an incalculable birthright sold for money, most of which we do not receive. Most of the money made on the products of this place has gone to fill the pockets of people in distant cities who did not produce the products. 

If my walks take me along the roads and streams, I see also the trash and the junk, carelessly manufactured and carelessly thrown away, the glass and the broken glass and the plastic and the aluminum that will lie here longer than the lifetime of the trees—longer than the lifetime of our species, perhaps. And I know that this also is what we have to show for our participation in the American economy, for most of the money made on these things too has been made elsewhere.

It would be somewhat more pleasant for country people if they could blame all this on city people. But the old opposition of country versus city—though still true, and truer than ever economically, for the country is more than ever the colony of the city—is far too simple to explain our problem. For country people more and more live like city people, and so connive in their own ruin. More and more country people, like city people, allow their economic and social standards to be set by television and salesmen and outside experts. Our garbage mingles with New Jersey garbage in our local landfill, and it would be hard to tell which is which. 

As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities, or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized sales talk, entertainment, and education. This loss of local knowledge and local memory—that is, of local culture—has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper "prices of progress", or made the business of folklorists. Nevertheless, local culture has a value, and part of its value is economic. This can be demonstrated readily enough. 

For example, when a community loses its memory, its members no longer know each other. How can they know each other if they have forgotten or have never learned each other's stories? If they do not know each other's stories, how can they know whether or not to trust each other? People who do not trust each other do not help each other, and moreover they fear each other. And this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lose one another's help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued. 

We don't trust our "public servants" because we know that they don't respect us. They don't respect us, as we understand, because they don't know us; they don't know our stories. They expect us to sue them if they make mistakes, and so they must insure themselves, at great expense to them and to us. Doctors in a country community must send their patients to specialists in the city, not necessarily because they believe that they are wrong in their diagnoses, but because they know that they are not infallible, and they must protect themselves against lawsuits, at great expense to us. 

The government of my home county, which has a population of about 10,000 people, pays an annual liability insurance premium of about $34,000. Add to this the liability premiums that are paid by every professional person who is "at risk" in the county, and you get some idea of the load we are carrying. Many decent family livelihoods are annually paid out of the county to insurance companies for a service that is only negative and provisional.

All of this money is lost to us by the failure of the community. A good community, as we know, insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy. It depends upon itself for many of its essential needs and is thus shaped, so to speak, from the inside—unlike most modern populations that depend upon distant purchases for almost everything, and are thus shaped from the outside by the purposes and the influence of salesmen.   

I WAS WALKING ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON several years ago with an older friend. We went by the ruining log house that had belonged to his grandparents and great-grandparents. The house stirred my friend's memory, and he told how the old time people used to visit each other in the evenings, especially in the long evenings of winter. There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as "sitting till bedtime." After supper, when they weren't too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other stories. They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they had all heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories, and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he said, "They had everything but money."

They were poor, as country people often have been, but they had each other, they had their local economy in which they helped each other, they had each other's comfort when they needed it, and they had their stories, their history together in that place. To have everything but money is to have much. And most people of the present can only marvel to think of neighbors entertaining themselves for a whole evening without a single imported pleasure and without listening to a single minute of sales talk. 

Most of the descendants of those people have now moved away, partly because of the cultural and economic failures that I mentioned earlier, and most of them no longer sit in the evenings and talk to anyone. Most of them now sit until bedtime, watching TV, submitting every few minutes to a sales talk. The message of both the TV programs and the salestalks is that the watchers should spend whatever is necessary to be like everybody else.

By television and other public means, we are encouraged to imagine that we are far advanced beyond sitting till bedtime with the neighbors on a Kentucky ridgetop, and indeed beyond anything we ever were before. But if, for example, there should occur a forty-eight hour power failure, we would find ourselves in much more backward circumstances than our ancestors. What, for starters, would we do for entertainment? Tell each other stories? But most of us no longer talk with each other, much less tell each other stories. We tell our stories now mostly to doctors or lawyers or psychiatrists or insurance adjusters or the police, not to our neighbors for their (and our) entertainment. The stories that now entertain us are made up for us in New York or Los Angeles or other centers of such commerce. 

But a forty-eight hour power failure would involve almost unimaginable deprivations. It would be difficult to travel, especially in cities. Most of the essential work could not be done. Our windowless modern schools and other such buildings that depend on air conditioning could not be used. Refrigeration would be impossible; food would spoil. It would be difficult or impossible to prepare meals. If it was winter, heating systems would fail. At the end of forty-eight hours many of us would be hungry. 

Such a calamity—and it is a modest one among those that our time has made possible—would thus reveal how far most of us are now living from our cultural and economic sources, and how extensively we have destroyed the foundations of local life. It would show us how far we have strayed from the locally centered life of such neighborhoods as the one my friend described—a life based to considerable extent upon what we now call solar energy, which is decentralized, democratic, clean and free. If we note that much of the difference we are talking about can be accounted for as an increasing dependence upon energy sources that are centralized, undemocratic, filthy and expensive, we will have completed a sort of historical parable.   

HOW HAS THIS HAPPENED? There are many reasons for it. One of the chief reasons is that everywhere in our country the local succession of the generations has been broken. We can trace this change through a series of stories that we may think of as cultural landmarks.

Throughout most of our literature the normal thing was for the generations to succeed one another in place. The memorable stories occurred when this succession became difficult or was threatened in one way or another. The norm is given in Psalm 128, in which succession is seen as one of the rewards of righteousness: "thou shalt see thy children's children, and peace upon Israel." 

The longing for this result seems to have been universal. It presides also over The Odyssey , in which Odysseus' desire to return home is certainly regarded as normal. And this story is much concerned with the psychology of family succession. Telemachus, Odysseus' son, comes of age in preparing for the return of his long-absent father. And it seems almost that Odysseus is enabled to return home by his son's achievement of enough manhood to go in search of him. Long after the return of both father and son, Odysseus' life will complete itself, as we know from Teiresias' prophecy in Book XI, much in the spirit of Psalm 128:

a seaborn death soft as this hand of mist will come upon you when you are wearied out with sick old age, your country folk in blessed peace around you.

The Bible makes much of what it sees as the normal succession—in such stories as those of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David and Solomon—in which the son completes the work or the destiny of the father. The parable of the Prodigal Son is prepared for by such Old Testament stories as that of Jacob, who errs, wanders, returns, is forgiven, and takes his place in the family lineage. 

Shakespeare was concerned throughout his working life with the theme of the separation and rejoining of parents and children. It is there at the beginning in The Comedy of Errors , and he is still thinking about it when he gets to King Lear and Pericles and The Tempest . When Lear walks onstage with Cordelia dead in his arms, the theme of return is fulfilled, only this time in the way of tragedy.

Wordsworth's poem, "Michael," written in 1800, is in the same line of descent. It is the story of a prodigal son, and return is still understood as the norm; before the boy's departure, he and his father make a "covenant" that he will return home and carry on his father's life as a shepherd on their ancestral pastures. But the ancient theme here has two significant differences; the son leaves home for an economic reason, and he does not return. Old Michael, the father, was long ago "bound/ In surety for his brother's son." This nephew has failed in his business, and Michael is "summoned to discharge the forfeiture." Rather than do this by selling a portion of their patrimony, the aged parents decide that they must send their son to work for another kinsman in the city in order to earn the necessary money. The country people all are poor; there is no money to be earned at home. When the son has cleared the debt from the land, he will return to it to "possess it, free as the wind/ That passes over it." But the son goes to the city, is corrupted by it, eventually commits a crime, and is forced "To seek a hiding place beyond the seas." 

"Michael" is a sort of cultural watershed. It carries on the theme of return that goes back to the beginnings of Western culture, but that return now is only a desire and a memory; in the poem it fails to happen. Because of that failure, we see in "Michael," not just a local story of the Lake District in England, which it is, but the story of rural families in the industrial nations from Wordsworth's time until today. The children go to the cities, for reasons imposed by the external economy, and they do not return; eventually the parents die and the family land, like Michael's, is sold to a stranger. By now it has happened millions of times.

And by now the transformation of the ancient story is nearly complete. Our society, on the whole, has forgot or repudiated the theme of return. Young people still grow up in rural families, and go off to the cities, not to return. But now it is felt that this is what they should do. Now the norm is to leave and not return. And this applies as much to urban families as to rural ones. In the present urban economy the parent-child succession is possible only among the economically privileged. The children of industrial underlings are not likely to succeed their parents at work, and there is not reason for them to wish to do so. We are not going to have an industrial "Michael" in which it is perceived as tragic that a son fails to succeed his father on an assembly line.

According to the new norm, the child's destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them; succession has given way to supersession. And this norm is institutionalized, not in great communal stories, but in the education system. The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance which it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to the future, of the child. The orientation is thus necessarily theoretical, speculative, and central. The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community. And parents with children in school are likely to find themselves immediately separated from their children, and made useless to them, by the intervention of new educational techniques, technologies, methods and languages. School systems innovate as compulsively and eagerly as factories. It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, "educators" tend to look upon the parents as a bad influence, and wish to take the children away from home as early as possible. And many parents, in truth, are now finding their children an encumbrance at home – where there is no useful work for them to do – and are glad enough to turn them over to the state for the use of the future. The extent to which this order of things is now dominant is suggested by a recent magazine article on the discovery of what purports to be a new idea:

The idea that a parent can be a teacher at home has caught the attention of educators... Parents don't have to be graduates of Harvard or Yale to help their kids learn and achieve...

Thus the home as a place where a child can learn has become an idea of the professional "educator," who retains control of the idea. The home, as the article makes clear, is not to be a place where children may learn on their own, but a place where they are taught by parents according to the instructions of professional "educators." In fact, "The Home and School Institute, Inc., of Washington, D.C." (known, of course, as "The HSI") has been "founded to show... how to involve families in their kids' educations."

In such ways as this, the nuclei of home and community have been invaded by the organizations, just as have the nuclei of cells and atoms. And we must be careful to see that the old cultural centers of home and community were made vulnerable to this invasion by their failure as economies. If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to each other. When people are no longer useful to each other, then the centripetal force of family and community fails, and people fall into dependence upon exterior economies and organizations. The hegemony of professionals and professionalism erects itself upon local failure. And from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods as a source of "raw material," human and natural. The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the government's economy and the economy's government. Unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom. Professionalism means more interest in salary and less interest in what used to be known as disciplines. And so we arrive at the idea, endlessly reiterated in the news media, that education can be improved by bigger salaries for teachers – which may be true, but not, as the proponents too often imply, by bigger salaries alone. There must also be love of learning and of the cultural tradition and of excellence. And this love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and community. Without this love, education is only the importation into a local community of centrally prescribed "career preparation" designed to facilitate the export of young careerists. 

Our children are educated, then, to leave home, not to stay home, and the costs of this have been far too little acknowledged. One of the costs is psychological, and the other is at once cultural and ecological.

The natural or normal course of human growing-up must begin with some sort of rebellion against one's parents, for it is clearly impossible to grow up if one remains a child. But the child, in the process of rebellion and of achieving the emotional and economic independence that rebellion ought to lead to, finally comes to understand the parents as fellow humans and fellow sufferers, and in some manner returns to them as their friend, forgiven and forgiving the inevitable wrongs of family life. That is the old norm, of which the story of the Prodigal son is an example.

The new norm, according to which the child leaves home as a student and never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with the parents. Of course, such a return and reconciliation cannot be achieved without the recognition of mutual practical need. However, in the present economy where individual dependences are so much exterior to both household and community, family members often have no practical need or use for one another. Hence, the frequent futility of attempts at a purely psychological or emotional reconciliation.

And this interposition of rebellion and then of geographical and occupational distance between parents and children may account for the peculiar emotional intensity that our society attaches to innovation. We appear to hate whatever went before, very much as an adolescent hates parental rule, and to look upon its obsolescence as a kind of vengeance. Thus we may explain industry's obsessive emphasis upon "this year's model," or the preoccupation of the professional "educators" with theoretical and methodological innovation. And thus, in modern literature we have had for many years an emphasis upon "originality" and the "anxiety of influence" (an adolescent critical theory), as opposed, say, to Spenser's filial admiration for Chaucer, or Dante's for Virgil.

But if the norm interrupts the development of the relation between children and parents, that same interruption, ramifying through a community, destroys the continuity and so the integrity of local life. As the children depart, generation after generation, the place loses its memory of itself, which is its history and its culture. And the local history, if it survives at all, loses its place. It does no good for historians, folklorists, and anthropologists to collect the songs and the stories and the lore that comprise local culture and store them in books and archives. They cannot collect and store, because they cannot know, the pattern of reminding that can survive only in the living human community in its place. It is this pattern that is the life of the local culture, and that brings it usefully or pleasurably to mind. Apart from its local landmarks and occasions, the local culture may be the subject of curiosity or of study, but it is also dead.  

THE LOSS OF LOCAL CULTURES IS, IN PART, A PRACTICAL LOSS and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally, the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used, and moreover the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly. The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures. 

Lacking an authentic local culture, a place is open to exploitation, and ultimately destruction, from the center. Recently, for example, I heard the dean of a prominent college of agriculture interviewed on the radio. What have we learned, he was asked, from last summer's drouth? And he replied that "we" need to breed more drouth resistance into plants, and that "we" need a government "safety net" for farmers. He might have said that farmers need to reexamine their farms and their circumstances in light of the drouth, and to think again on such subjects as diversification, scale, and the mutual helpfulness of neighbors. But he did not say that. To him, the drought was merely an opportunity for agribusiness corporations and the government, by which the farmers and rural communities could only become more dependent on the economy that is destroying them. This is as good an example as any of the centralized thinking of a centralized economy—to which the only effective answer that I know is a strong local economy and a strong local culture. 

For a long time now, the prevailing assumption has been that if the nation is all right, then all the localities within it will be all right also. I see little reason to believe that this is true. At present, in fact, both the nation and the local economy are living at the expense of localities and local communities—as all small town and country people have reason to know. In rural America, which is in many ways a colony of what the government and the corporations think of as a nation, most of us have experienced the losses that I have been talking about; the departure of young people, of soil and other so-called natural resources, and of local memory. We feel ourselves crowded more and more into a dimensionless present, in which the past is forgotten, and the future, even in our most optimistic "projections," is forbidding and fearful. Who can desire a future that is determined entirely by the purposes of the most wealthy and the most powerful, and by the capacities of machines?

Two questions, then, remain: Is a change for the better possible? And who has the power to make such a change? I still believe that a change for the better is possible, but I confess that my belief is partly hope and partly faith. No one who hopes for improvement should fail to see and respect the signs that we may be approaching some sort of historical waterfall, past which we will not, by changing our minds, be able to change anything else. We know that at any time an ecological or a technological or a political event that we will have allowed may remove from us the power to make change and leave us with the mere necessity to submit to it. Beyond that, the two questions are one: the possibility of change depends upon the existence of people who have the power to change. 

Does this power reside at present in the national government? That seems to me extremely doubtful. To anyone who has read the papers during the recent presidential campaign, it must be clear that at the highest level of government there is, properly speaking, no political discussion. Are the corporations likely to help us? We know, from long experience, that the corporations will assume no responsibility that is not forcibly imposed upon them by government. The record of the corporations is written too plainly in verifiable damage to permit us to expect much from them. May we look for help to the universities? Well, the universities are more and more the servants of government and the corporations.

Most urban people evidently assume that all is well. They live too far from the exploited and endangered sources of their economy to need to assume otherwise. Some urban people are becoming disturbed about the contamination of air, water, and food and that is promising, but there are not enough of them yet to make much difference. There is enough trouble in the "inner cities" to make them likely places of change, and evidently change is in them, but it is desperate and destructive change. As if to perfect their exploitation by other people, the people of the "inner cities" are destroying both themselves and their places. 

My feeling is that, if improvement is going to begin anywhere, it will have to begin out in the country and in the country towns. This is not because of any intrinsic virtue that can be ascribed to country people, but because of their circumstances. Rural people are living, and have lived for a long time, at the site of the trouble. They see all around them, every day, the marks and scars of an exploitive national economy. They have much reason, by now, to know how little real help is to be expected from somewhere else. They still have, moreover, the remnants of local memory and local community. And in rural communities there are still farms and small businesses that can be changed according to the will and the desire of individual people.

In this difficult time of failed public expectations, when thoughtful people wonder where to look for hope, I keep returning in my own mind to the thought of the renewal of the rural communities. I know that one resurrected rural community would be more convincing and more encouraging than all the government and university programs of the last fifty years, and I think that it could be the beginning of the renewal of our country, for the renewal of rural communities ultimately implies the renewal of urban ones. But to be authentic, a true encouragement and a true beginning, this would have to be a resurrection accomplished mainly by the community itself. It would have to be done, not from the outside by the instruction of visiting experts, but from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home.

This article is shared here with permission.  

Wendell Berry  lives and farms with his wife, Tanya, on the banks of the Kentucky River. His published works include The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, What are People For?, numerous poetry anthologies, novels, and essays. For further information about Mr. Berry’s books, contact Counterpoint Press, your local independent bookseller, or your local library. 

Mr. Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, and received both his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Kentucky. He has taught at many colleges and universities. Mr. Berry has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; the American Academy of Arts & Letters Jean Stein Award; and the Kentucky Governor's Milner Award in the Arts. Currently Mr. Berry is a professor at the University of Kentucky, and continues to farm 125 acres in the county of his birth.

A prolific writer, Wendell Berry is the author of ten books of poetry, nine collections of essays, and four novels, including Remembering, published in the fall of 1988. He is a frequent, popular lecturer, including both the 1980 and 1986 Annual E.F. Schumacher Society Lectures. Mr. Berry is considered to be the foremost advocate for rural culture in America.

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What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Local’ in Hawai‘i?

A honolulu-born writer reflects on how demographic and economic change are making an idealized aloha state identity obsolete.

A statue in Honolulu depicts an idealized image of Hawaiian identity. Courtesy of Shutterstock .

by Peter Hong | October 9, 2018

The story of the modern Hawai‘i diaspora is a paradox: Many of us who grew up in Hawai‘i in the second half of the 20th century developed a powerful sense of “local” identity—but were compelled by economics to live elsewhere in the United States.

I am one of many in this long diaspora who still refers to Hawai‘i as “home.” And if you ask me what it means to be from Hawai‘i today, the question is tough to answer. It’s especially hard if you were influenced by the transformative period—sometimes referred to as the Hawaiian Renaissance—that began a little more than a decade after the arrival of U.S. statehood in 1959.

Members of the diaspora cling to a set of beliefs about our identity—as Hawaiʻi “locals” shaped by the islands where we were born in raised—that are increasingly removed from today’s realities.

I was born in Honolulu in 1965 to parents who had recently emigrated from Korea for graduate studies at the university. My family then lived in a dingy apartment in the headquarters of the Korean National Association (KNA) on Rooke Avenue. The Mediterranean Revival compound had once housed a prominent island Portuguese family, and some still knew it as the “Canavarro Castle.”

The KNA’s roots dated back to 1909, when exiled Koreans in Honolulu and San Francisco organized to raise funds and strategize for Korean independence from Japan. Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KNA became a local community organization. By the time we were living there in the 1960s, the headquarters building had become a convening spot for occasional weekend festivities for local Koreans. Along with our family, a couple other units were rented to elderly former plantation laborers who had been among the first Korean immigrants to the United States in the early 1900s.

By the time I started kindergarten in 1970, my parents had divorced, and my mother, brother, and I had moved to another modest apartment, this one a low-rise walk-up in the Mōʻiliʻili area of Honolulu across the canal from the new high-rise hotels at Waikīkī.

I attended Ala Wai Elementary school, which was, then and now, a gateway for many families who had recently arrived from another country or state. I remember sometimes beginning our pickup football games with a raucous Samoan chant and seeing new kids arrive from places like Taiwan and Texas.

Yet the legacy of earlier agricultural immigrant waves from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal, and Puerto Rico surrounded us. There was judo and sumo in the community center. For about a year, an ancient “manapua man” sold steamed pork buns from pails suspended from a wooden pole slung across his shoulders. His industrial age competitor sold his treats from a white Volkswagen beetle. When the original manapua man no longer made his rounds, the kids swore they had seen the VW manapua man run him down; it was a childish tall tale, but contained some truths about the force of modernity.

My walk home from school passed the ʻIolani School campus, where Sun Yat-sen, who eventually overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty to become the country’s first president, was graduated in 1882. (Sun had a brother in Honolulu who paid for his education.) My own brother and I liked to stop in at the 100th Infantry Battalion clubhouse to get a drink from their water fountain and gawk at the display case of World War II weapons, which, if my memory isn’t too hazy, contained a German water-cooled machine gun. We would learn later of the heroics of the Japanese-American soldiers and the role of returning veterans in democratizing Hawaiʻi’s politics and breaking down the caste-like plantation economy.

In the early 1970s, there was an idealized view of Hawaiʻi as a progressive, multicultural state that might be a model for a new, transpacific United States. At least, that was the pretty picture broadcast to millions on “Hawaii Five-O.” “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry said the multiracial crew of the S.S. Enterprise was inspired by what he saw in Hawaiʻi when he was based there as a pilot during the war. This “Paradise of the Pacific” image was pushed by the tourism industry and taught to us in school.

It was a flawed paradise. The rise of the upwardly mobile middle class was fueled by organized labor, federal defense, and infrastructure spending, and the growth of tourism. But many native Hawaiians were left behind economically, or actively displaced from their housing, by Americanization. Poverty and incarceration rates were alarming, and the indignity of suppressing the native language and culture would no longer be tolerated. Things fell apart.

By the mid-1970s, open revolt against Americanization and displacement had begun. The actions were both entirely peaceful and undeniably forceful. In Kalama Valley on Oʻahu, farmers refused to leave their leased lands to make way for residential real estate development. Activists began regular landings on Kahoʻolawe island to protest its use by the Navy as a bombing range. Hundreds of homeless native Hawaiians cleaned up the land around the Sand Island garbage dump to build a fishing village.

The physical protests and reclamations of land produced mixed results. Kalama Valley was turned into an expensive suburb in spite of the farmers’ protests. The Sand Island residents were evicted, their homes bulldozed. But military use of Kahoʻolawe ceased.

More important, these actions raised Hawaiian consciousness and galvanized a sophisticated critical mass of native leadership well-versed in law and public organizing. On a parallel course, a Hawaiian renaissance in language, culture, and the arts largely succeeded in establishing a distinctive regional identity.

By the late ‘70s, as I entered my teens, there was growing talk of Hawaiian sovereignty .

By the late 1980s, when I finished college in Los Angeles, Hawaiian sovereignty was still building momentum; today it is inseparable from any substantial discussion of Hawaiʻi’s political future.

At the same time, the high cost of living, especially for housing, meant many in my generation could not afford to make a life on the islands. The trend continues today, even more intensely. New homes on Oʻahu are routinely priced in the seven figures, and luxury condominium units actually sell in the eight figures. The market resembles that of California, where few can afford to live in the neighborhoods their parents settled in the 1960s or 1970s. Hawaiʻi continues to have negative net migration with the rest of the United States. Most newcomers are whites from other parts of the continental United States. So many native Hawaiians have left that the numbers of native Hawaiians on the U.S. continent far outnumber those in Hawaiʻi.

So what does it mean to be of Hawaiʻi today? The answer lies in an ongoing dispute over whether native Hawaiian ancestry is a requisite to being a Hawaiian.

For those without native blood, there has often been a belief that if you held certain values, or ate certain foods, or spoke the Hawaiian language to some degree and pidgin English fluently, you were “local.” In his 1986 book Kū Kanaka , George Kanahele noted that one answer given to the question, “Who and what is a Hawaiian?” was “someone who eats palu (a relish made of the head or stomach of a fish, mixed with kukui nut, garlic, and chili peppers).” Kanahele himself held that any Hawaiʻi resident with a “true understanding of the values of Hawaiian culture” was a Hawaiian.

But today’s demographic and economic trends in Hawai‘i are making that identity obsolete. The “locals” are dying or leaving.

What is then left? One answer comes from the diaspora itself, which is defining the values of Hawai‘i culture, even though they don’t actually live in Hawai‘i. Thanks to the diaspora, you can now find multiple hula hālau (schools teaching the ancient Hawaiian dance form) in several U.S. metro areas. Numerous Facebook groups for Hawaiʻi expats exist to answer questions like, “Where can I get luau leaf in Seattle?”

But such extensions of Hawai‘i identity to the continental U.S. don’t solve the tough questions that face the state. Can Hawaiʻi exist as a place where more children will grow up to move elsewhere than remain? Will the pattern of large-scale local and native out-migration become permanent?

Or will this large and ongoing diaspora inspire a backlash at home? Will those left in Hawai‘i seek to protect themselves in ways that force a dramatic upheaval in the demography and economy of the islands? For example, could native Hawaiians respond to the outflow of their friends, and the arrival of American strangers, by seeking some form of political sovereignty—including independence from the United States itself? And would such a rupture bring Hawai‘i locals and other members of the diaspora home?

George Kanahele, in that 1986 book, noted that the Hawaiian cultural resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s was tied to similar U.S. and global movements. The population outflow of Hawaiʻi today is also tied to broader U.S. and global trends.

Oʻahu shares its stratospheric housing costs with cities from Vancouver to Tokyo to Auckland, all of which have seen backlashes from locals displaced by wealthy new arrivals. Mass homelessness and stubborn wage stagnation are fueling frustration and reassessment in Honolulu and in other U.S. cities. Will Hawaiʻi’s still-distinctive culture yield homegrown solutions, like its current and innovative homelessness project ? Or will Hawaiʻi be the first to act on a Brexit-like rejection of the American status quo?

The paths of Hawaiʻi’s people at home and abroad could well become a case study in the long-term viability of statehood and citizenship for many nations.

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Adapt to a New Culture – but Don’t Go Too Far

• Andy Molinsky

First, you need to understand the cultural code.

One of the most popular pieces of advice that people receive when operating across cultures is, “When in Rome, Act Like the Romans.” This advice essentially means that in order to be successful in a situation different from your own, you need to adapt to the local customs, whatever they happen to be. But what happens when you don’t have a perfect read on what these customs or rules exactly are?

• Andy Molinsky is a professor of Organizational Behavior and International Management at Brandeis University and the author of Global Dexterity , Reach , and Forging Bonds in a Global Workforce . Connect with him on LinkedIn and download his free e-booklet of 7 myths about working effectively across cultures .

Partner Center

Cultural Globalization: A Critical Analysis of Identity Crises in the Developing Economies

• First Online: 26 April 2019

Cite this chapter

• M. Rezaul Islam 2 , 3 ,
• Haris Abd. Wahab 3 ,
• Cristiano Franco Burmester 4 &
• Shofiqur Rahman Chowdhury 3 , 5  

Part of the book series: Contributions to Economics ((CE))

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2 Citations

Cultural globalization and local identity are two indivisible words. There is a crucial debate whether cultural globalization thrives or deteriorates local identity. The main objective of this chapter is to justify whether cultural globalization is a threat to local identity. This study used a qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis (QIMS) that reviews literature on cultural globalization in the developing economies. Results showed that in many countries especially in the developing one, cultural globalization has emerged as a threat to local identity. As a result, these countries perceive a number of socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological problems such as poverty and social inequality, erasure of local cultures and heritages, regional disparity, and lack of development ownership. Many of these aspects are closely related with the threat to local identity. This chapter argues that there are many benefits of globalization, but the vast negative consequences are related with the scope of local identity such as cultural dislocation and displacement, cultural realm, breaking cultural autonomy, diffuse cultural traits, and destruction of local traditions and occupations. The finding would be useful to development thinkers, policymakers, and cultural activists.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by the University of Malaya under the Equitable Society Research Cluster (ESRC) research grant RP0 24C-15SBS.

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M. Rezaul Islam

Department of Social Administration & Justice, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

M. Rezaul Islam, Haris Abd. Wahab & Shofiqur Rahman Chowdhury

Department of Journalism, Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Cristiano Franco Burmester

Department of Social Work, Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh

Shofiqur Rahman Chowdhury

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Islam, M.R., Wahab, H.A., Burmester, C.F., Chowdhury, S.R. (2019). Cultural Globalization: A Critical Analysis of Identity Crises in the Developing Economies. In: Faghih, N. (eds) Globalization and Development. Contributions to Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14370-1_16

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To Protect Local Culture, Tourism Should be Banned in Some Areas, or Banning Tourism will have no Benefits? - IELTS Essay

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Model Essay 1

The debate surrounding tourism and its impact on local culture presents a conundrum: while some advocate for restrictions to preserve cultural integrity, others argue that change is a natural progression, rendering such bans futile. This essay contends that while protective measures are essential, they should be balanced to foster cultural exchange and economic development.

Opponents of tourism argue that it frequently leads to the dilution of local traditions, as cultural practices are commodified to meet tourist expectations. For instance, at various historical landmarks, traditional ceremonies are often transformed into mere spectacles for visitors, thus eroding their authentic cultural significance. This perspective emphasizes the need for stringent regulations or even prohibitions on tourism in particularly sensitive regions to protect the authenticity of local cultures. Advocates of this stance are convinced that such preventive measures are indispensable for maintaining the unique cultural identities of communities in an increasingly globalized world, thereby preventing the complete assimilation into a homogenized culture.

On the other hand, proponents of tourism argue that cultural exchange is not only inevitable but also immensely beneficial. They posit that being exposed to diverse cultures promotes a deeper understanding and appreciation, potentially leading to the reinforcement and preservation of cultural heritage, rather than its degradation. Furthermore, tourism acts as a vital economic engine, providing substantial income and creating numerous employment opportunities for local communities, thus contributing to their sustainable development. The example of Bhutan serves as an ideal model, demonstrating how controlled tourism practices can result in significant economic advantages without sacrificing the country’s cultural integrity. This approach highlights tourism’s capability to positively influence both economic growth and the conservation of cultural heritage, assuming it is implemented with careful consideration and respect for the local environment and traditions.

In conclusion, while the protection of local culture is paramount, outright bans on tourism might not be the most effective strategy. A nuanced approach, recognizing the benefits of cultural exchange and economic development, offers a more sustainable path forward. By embracing controlled and respectful tourism, we can ensure the protection of cultural heritage while benefiting from the global interconnectedness it brings.

Model Essay 2

The discourse on the intersection of tourism and local culture is polarized, with one camp arguing for stringent measures to protect cultural sanctity, while the other heralds tourism as a catalyst for cultural exchange and economic growth. This essay posits that an equilibrium between conservation and openness can preserve cultural identities while embracing the benefits of globalization.

Critics of unrestricted tourism contend that it dilutes local cultures, transforming sacred traditions into tourist attractions. This commodification, they argue, undermines the authenticity of cultural expressions and rituals, making them performative rather than genuine. For example, in many indigenous communities, rituals and dances with deep spiritual significance are often repackaged for entertainment, losing their original context and meaning. This viewpoint underscores the importance of imposing limitations on tourism in culturally sensitive areas to prevent the erosion of distinct cultural identities, suggesting that such protective measures are vital for communities to maintain their heritage in the global village.

In contrast, tourism advocates argue that interaction between cultures is both inevitable and beneficial, promoting mutual respect and understanding. They highlight tourism’s role as an economic lifeline, generating revenue and employment for locals. Through the lens of sustainable tourism, practices can be designed to both celebrate and preserve cultural heritage while fostering economic development. The strategy employed by countries like Japan, where cultural sites and practices are thoughtfully integrated into the tourism experience, showcases how tourism can enhance cultural appreciation without compromising authenticity. This perspective emphasizes the potential of well-managed tourism to serve as a bridge between economic advancement and cultural preservation.

In conclusion, while the protection of cultural integrity is paramount, an outright ban on tourism is not the sole solution. A balanced approach, encouraging responsible tourism that respects and uplifts local cultures, can forge a path toward sustainable development. Cultivating an environment where cultural heritage thrives alongside tourism requires innovative policies that prioritize both preservation and progress.

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In many western countries there are an increasing number of couples choosing to have no children. What advantages and disadvantages to couples no children

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The Effect of Globalization on a World Culture Essay

Introduction, globalization and culture.

Scientific innovations and inventions have accelerated the growth of globalization. Nations can easily trade, socialize, share ideas, and assist each other in different spheres of life.

Improved international relations have enabled the movement of factors of production among nations with minimal barriers to trade. The cooperation has led to social, political, and economical globalization; although neither of the above three classifications of globalization have been fully attained, their effects can be felt in economic, political, and social spheres of life.

Critics of globalization appreciate that it has positive effect on economic wellbeing of countries. However they are quick to point out that globalization has high culture and identity loss/costs (Sheila 56). They are of the opinion that modernization has the potential of running roughshod over the world’s distinctive cultures and creates a single world which resembles a tawdry mall. This paper discuses the effect of globalization on a world culture.

Culture is the identity of people that any member adheres to. It has some defined attributes, some of them are written and others are not. The set way of operation that is governed by some cultural, communal, and societal goals assists in holding people together and creates a norm in the community.

When people trade, socialize or interact with each other in a way it has been enabled by globalization, there is the tendency that they will lose their identity and inherit a system of operation or a certain mode of conduct that is generally accepted by the community (in this instance, the word community has been used to refer to the larger global community created by globalization).

According to Tyler Cowen, modernization and cultural globalization have resulted into the growth of creativity, innovation, and invention among communities. When people interact, they tend to learn the other parties’ way of operation and the difference is likely to trigger some creative mind for the benefit of the two parties.

The above observation by Tyler Cowen can be interpolated either negatively or positively; from a positive angle, modernization has created a room for invention and innovation. On a negative note, the world is utilizing the differences it has as failing to create more differences that future generation is likely to run out of creative mind, as there will be lack of motivation in the form of current culture differences.

For example, in the 1950s, Cuban Music and Reggae was produced in Cuba with the target consumers as American Tourists who visited the country. In Cuba, the style of music was part of their tradition that the Americans loved to sing along. With diffusion of culture and more exposure, the style of music has been adopted by the Americans, and today it is played in modern clubs and bars.

Today, if a Cuban was to visit the United States, he or she was likely to feel accommodated by the structures as there are some similar attributes that he/she gets. In either French or German restaurants, a shopper is able to buy Sushi (Japanese foods consisting of cooked vinegared rice (shari) combined with other ingredients (neta)). Such a move shows how Japanese have been accommodated in both European countries (Sheila 256).

With cultural globalization, people of different cultures, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, and values find themselves in the same atmosphere where no one has the freedom to fully adhere or practice his culture. With such kind of setting, the most probable thing that can happen is people to develop a set of culture that will assist them transact business despite their differences.

The net result is a global culture; the effect and extent that global culture has gone in the world varied among nations and continents; developed countries have their culture more diffused and uniformity can be seen from their way of operation. In developing countries, there is a tendency of resistance to change the culture, but the force therein is strong. Efforts to change the culture of people are not deliberate, but they are necessitated by the prevailing condition in the world.

In contemporary business environments, organizations hire employees of different nationalities, ethnic backgrounds, cultural believes, intellectual capacity, and age. The nature and mix of employees calls for management to develop policies and management mechanisms that will gain from the differences in their human capital; to manage the diverse personnel, business leaders need to adopt international human resources management strategy (IHRM).

The policies that organizations embark on should entail policies that address diverse human resource issues; organization stands to benefit from diversity if the right management policies are set in place, but there is the risk that the differences create uniform business practice. With diffusion of cultures, management can enact some common human resource policies that cut across its diverse human capital. However, care should be exercised since chances of repellence in the event policies seem to be confronting with culture of people.

When managing human capital of different nationalities, businesses leaders should make policies that can assist in tapping their organization’s personnel’s intellectual capacity, as it grows their talents and skills. Culture is likely to affect people in different spheres, thus when companies have diverse human resources, they have to ensure that their programs are sensitive to the differences in culture and beliefs.

When working in different countries, management should never assume that the human management style adopted in the country is fully-effective and applicable to another country; they should take their time, understand what the other country’s employee value and consider best. Management gurus continue to offer insights of how culture and ethnicity of a people affect their performance in their works; they have suggested culture intelligence to assist organization handle their employees effectively regardless of their nationality.

When making business decisions, the culture and exposure that someone has is likely to affect the kind of decision that he is going to make; people who are exposed to the right materials through televisions, the internet, and print media are likely to make more informed decisions. With culture globalization, there has been exposure to different settings and information is available through the assistance of communication channels; the resultant community is an informed community that can make quality decisions for the exploitation of available resources effectively.

Differences in norms and culture among different ethnicity, nationalities, and communities has been a hindrance to effective trade, to some extent, the differences have acted as non tariff barriers that has hindered the development of trade.

When people interact and change their cultural beliefs to adopt a uniform set of beliefs, they are breaking the unseen barriers of trade and create a room for more business, ideas, equality, and economic development. For example, among the Muslims, Women had been regarded as inferior to men and they could hardly be allowed to take leadership positions.

With the interaction with Christians and getting their take on the same, there has been a wave in the community that has enabled them to seek leadership positions like men have. The above case has shown how culture globalization has created opportunities to different people and enabled women to get more opportunities. In the developed worlds, the state and position of the woman had been respected long before the same was done in developing worlds.

As the developed and developing countries trade among each other, the developing countries are getting into the system and women have started to have their positions in the communities. Gender differences has been minimized by globalization, there has been the reduction on gender differences among communities were human beings can now relate more as people not on gender grounds as the case had been when culture globalization was not adhered to.

The rights of girl child campaigns have gained roots in different countries as culture diffuses to reinforce and create awareness to the need to protect women and reduce gender differences that have prevailed among communities for a lengthy duration.

When people of different cultures interact, they develop the sense of togetherness and there are shared common interests that are developed; globalization has enabled the interaction, as well as sharing of ideas, opinions, view points and ways of doing things in a way that facilitates trade. Trade prevails better when the trading partners have some common values, attributes, and beliefs.

Culture globalization has enabled people to have the same perception and attitude towards similar products; with the similarity, peace and harmony in doing and handling issues have been developed. When there is peace and harmony, business and trade prevail effectively.

When people share culture, it means that when someone is in a geographical location different from his or hers, coping will be easy as there will be likelihood that the person will get something that is the same with what he or she beliefs.

For example, although the Chinese food is different from American food, a Chinese visiting the United States only need to establish the restaurant selling Chinese food as the nature and the diversity has been accepted by both the communities. Sales and marketers have much to benefit from globalized world, they can easily develop new formats and marketing strategies developed can be similar and message passed remains the same.

According to Benjamin Barber, one of the main challenges that have been brought about by globalization is culture borrowing and culture mimicry; with the borrowing and mimicry people have lost their sense of identity that someone can manage to treat his brother wrongly and hide under the new system of global culture.

Although culture globalization has not been fully attained, there are moves that indicate that its full operation cannot happen. In areas like religion (religion is an aspect of culture), changing people’s religious believes have been a challenge. The existence of some elements that can hardly change results to the notion of global culture being a mere statement by advocators of the integration, the situation cannot be attained.

Some industries in the globe exist because of differences in culture of people, for example, the tourism industry is much dependent on the cultural differences of people in different places. With culture diffusion, the industry is likely to suffer a huge blow.

In Kenya, the East African country whose tourism is the second earner of the foreign exchange has multicultural where the tourisms from different countries visit to enjoy and learn the diversity of the country’s population.

The move to global culture is thus likely to injure some industries while supporting others. Culture within communities is supported by generally agreed attributes that passes from one generation to another. The “nature of passing” of modern global culture is challenging as people or the global community has not set mechanisms to pass the culture, reinforce, or even punish offender.

To pass the global culture, the materials that young generation become exposed to modern methods of passing information like television, radio, the internet, peers, and written materials. When such materials have been used to pass culture, there are high chances that young generation will get reinforcement of culture which is not good. Global culture is more likely to be for the larger global community benefit, but rarely does it address issue of an individual.

With the structures and development of global culture, there cannot be said to have an effective method of culture reinforcement or a system to punish offender. This means that the culture is vulnerable to changes and hicks ups. Any small attribute or change in the global world is likely to shake the culture of the people since it’s not based on a strong foundation.

With globalization, companies can work in different parts of the world as multinationals; however they have to be sensitive to the nature of products, services, and structure of employees they deploy. Multinationals generally have three main methods to get their employees on board, they use a localization approach, expatriates approach, and a third country approach.

To maintain quality and quantity workforce, the management should ensure that they are aware of the culture of people and manage them effectively. The challenge that multinationals have is putting the notion that with culture globalization, there is uniformity, thus there is no need to have culture intelligence and culture awareness programs.

For example, Pepsi has been a major competitor in the American industry as its style is more American, however the brand has not maintained strong competitiveness in African countries since its style of marketing and sales fails to meet the needs of the continents culture. The above example shows how the notion of global culture has been mis-interpolated (Sheila 256).

Other than human resources, department maintaining qualified and efficient human capital at the most affordable cost possible, they have the role of ensuring they combine their human capital in a manner that will benefit the entire organization.

Diversity and difference in culture by itself offers an organization rich knowledge, opinions, values, and experience, with culture globalization such important attributes to business competitiveness are lost; before an organization decides to fill a certain vacancy in its system, the human resources should liaise with the departmental heads to know exactly the kind of qualification that are sort for, in some instances, the management may advice for some age gap, nationality, gender, and experience.

It is through effective recruitment that an organization can build an effective team that meets its personnel requirement needs. When enacting empowerment and motivational policies or schemes, the management should ensure that the diversity of its employees has been considered.

There are people who are generally team-players, others prefer individualism, and others are charismatic leaders. When making decision, it is important to consider the diversity. Management gurus has continually advised companies to have culture coaches when operating in a country they are not very sure of the nature and the culture of the people; with the coaches, they can develop orchestrate teams and make products that meet the requirement of customers in the country.

Diverse human resource can be biennial to an organization is managed effectively; failure to manage diversity effectively means exposure to risks. Management gurus have continued to support the use of culture intelligence and culture awareness programs to support the culture awareness within organizations; those companies that have undertaken the advice are doing better than those who have not.

Although cultural globalization has build strong operating base through which trade can prevail, it has brought some challenges to the world and the people in general. The lack of identity has resulted into sharing of values likely to dilute societal values and norms.

When the community lacks strong values that are maintained with a certain mechanism, the result is a disintegrated society were social evils are the order of the day. For example, in developed countries, one of the vises that the countries are dealing with is use of drugs and substance abuse by young people.

Although this is taken as a normal condition or social evil, psychologists have suggested that lack of strong values and low behavior standards by young people can be to blame. When the blame is further analyzed, it is seen that parents are not able to raise morally upright children as they have less regard to their cultural beliefs and practices which they consider to have been eroded by globalization.

With diffusion of cultures, there is less emphasis on family and societal values, parents and the community in general seem to ignore the need to maintain, pass and transfer culture to younger generations. When culture is not transferred, children are exposed to new global culture that might be different from the norm.

The results are the families that have low moral standards and which values are questionable. Generally, organizations require physical, human, and informational resources for their operation; business-leaders should realize that human capital is the most crucial capital their organizations have.

In a modern globalized world, organizations have diverse human capital; to manage the capital effectively, companies need to adopt international human resources management strategy. The strategy assists an organization benefit from its personnel diversity as it mitigates risks associated with a diverse workforce. With culture globalization the workforce seems to have the same ideologies an attributes that hinder creativity, innovation, and invention (Sheila 56-78).

Globalization has resulted into culture diffusion, culture sharing, and multiculturalism; the uniformity in culture facilitates trade among nations and promotes international relations and understanding.

However, multiculturalism has been blamed of dilution of people’s cultural values, norms, and virtues. Multiculturalism has also been challenged as a mere statement by business philosophers that will not be attained in the near future as family structures vary among different parts of the globe.

Sheila, Lucy. Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World . London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

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National Minority Health Month: Understanding Culture, Community, and Connections to Advance Health Equity

April marks National Minority Health Month! This year’s theme (“Be the Source for Better Health”) focuses on improving health outcomes through our culture, community, and connections. These elements that make us each unique are also critical to reducing health disparities. Recognizing and honoring the strengths and traditions within diverse communities can help improve health outcomes and advance health equity. Together, we can collectively advance health equity by valuing cultural diversity, supporting communities that have been marginalized, and fostering inclusive environments. We must all work together to #BetheSourceforBetterHealth .

The Need for Community Engagement to Advance Health Equity

The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed existing longstanding inequities that systematically undermined the physical, social, economic, and mental health of racial and ethnic minority and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) populations. It also revealed the limitations of available data to monitor public health issues on factors that impact community health. To address these inequities, we in public health continue working to address and understand the social determinants of health (SDOH) that shape individual and community health, especially the structural and systemic drivers of inequities. Understanding SDOH local to communities as well as the fundamental conditions communities need to thrive (or “vital conditions” – Figure 1) is key to successful public health work. However, we also need to approach public health differently to collect the necessary data to drive evidence-informed action. We cannot understand a community’s issues and solutions without talking to the community.

Figure 1: The Vital Conditions for Health and Well-Being framework, indicating the seven necessary conditions for community resilience.  See https://www.communitycommons.org for more info.

Improving Health Outcomes Through Community Data Collection 

CDC’s Office of Health Equity (OHE) is engaging communities through collaborative efforts to power local action and advance health equity. In partnership with CDC Foundation, OHE is supporting several initiatives to improve community data collection for evidence-based action to reduce health inequities.  Two examples include:

• Project REFOCUS (Racial Ethnic Framing of Community-Informed and Unifying Surveillance): Project REFOCUS works to shift traditional public health emergency response so that communities – as experts in culturally responsive efforts – are continuously involved in public health, not just during disease outbreaks. Project REFOCUS funds community partners to establish data collection systems and social listening protocols that effectively monitor, in real time, the impacts of social stigma and racism on racial and ethnic minority populations as they affect public health crises mitigation and prevention practices. Recommendations for action are not only informed by community voices but further amplified by citizen journalists and ethnic media. Collectively, these efforts bring the framework of social movements to public health to ensure that emergency response efforts remain locally informed, responsive to cultural needs, and that public health institutions remain accountable to the communities they serve.

The Project REFOCUS team is working closely with six communities to operationalize the Crisis Stigma Monitoring and Response System (CMRS) framework: Wake County, NC; Lincoln, AR; San Antonio, TX; Detroit, MI; Albany, GA; and New York, NY.

• Communities in Context (CiC) is a community-engaged approach to gathering local data that is useful to communities’ health improvement goals. CiC centers community members’ voices, experiences, and perspectives as key data. CiC considers the broader factors that influence health – from the social determinants like housing and education to the underlying structures and systems, like economic policies and racism. The goals of Communities in Context are to:
• Collect and combine local information with guidance from community, including information on how power and influence operate in the community, existing and needed resources, stories of people’s experiences, state and local health data, and key policies at the state and local levels;
• Work with community members to use local information to define shared priorities for action that can be used by state and local public health and community leaders to improve public health decision-making;
• Create publicly-available and user-friendly resources that communities can use to support informed action.

OHE, Wayne State University, University of Michigan, and the Institute for People, Place, and Possibility (IP3) are partnering to lead CiC in Greater Detroit, Michigan. Other community partners include state and local public health departments, health systems, and community organizations.

OHE’s Communities in Context Conceptual Model.  The eight gears listed below indicate key components of the project, working together to power evidence-based action using ongoing community input.

• Identifying key data and policies
• Engaging local communities
• Convening multisectoral partners
• Building trust
• Connecting local issues to larger systems
• Mapping power and assets
• Building local capacity
• Creating public data and resources

Being the Source for Better Health

OHE collects and shares important information on how unique communities, cultures, and connections support local capacity to promote change among racial and ethnic minority and AI/AN populations. OHE is committed to working with communities and partners from various sectors to improve health outcomes and #BetheSourceforBetterHealth .

How are you focusing on culture, community, and connections to improve health outcomes and #BetheSourceforBetterHealth ?

Learn more about health equity and how you can play a role in reducing health disparities and developing policies that can help address public health problems in your community.

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Top-ten LB Adam Balogoun-Ali likes the culture at Miami

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Sophia Bush comes out as queer, confirms relationship with Ashlyn Harris

Actor Sophia Bush came out as queer in an emotional essay in Glamour and confirmed she’s in a relationship with retired U.S. Women’s National Team soccer player Ashlyn Harris. 

“I sort of hate the notion of having to come out in 2024,” Bush wrote in a cover story for the fashion magazine published Thursday. “But I’m deeply aware that we are having this conversation in a year when we’re seeing the most aggressive attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community in modern history.” 

Bush noted that there were more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed in state legislatures last year and said this motivated her to “give the act of coming out the respect and honor it deserves.” 

“I’ve experienced so much safety, respect, and love in the queer community, as an ally all of my life, that, as I came into myself, I already felt it was my home,” she wrote. “I think I’ve always known that my sexuality exists on a spectrum. Right now I think the word that best defines it is queer . I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great.”

The “One Tree Hill” star filed for divorce from entrepreneur Grant Hughes in August. People magazine first reported in October that Bush and Harris were dating, but neither confirmed nor commented on the report. The pair later attended an Oscar’s viewing party together in March . 

In the essay, Bush addressed online rumors that her relationship with Harris began before Harris had officially divorced from fellow soccer star Ali Krieger, in September. 

“Everyone that matters to me knows what’s true and what isn’t,” Bush wrote. “But even still there’s a part of me that’s a ferocious defender, who wants to correct the record piece by piece. But my better self, with her earned patience, has to sit back and ask, What’s the f------- point? For who? For internet trolls? No, thank you. I’ll spend my precious time doing things I love instead.”

Bush said that after news about her and Harris became public, her mom told her that a friend called and said, “Well, this can’t be true. I mean, your daughter isn’t gay .” 

“My mom felt that it was obvious, from the way her friend emphasized the word, that she meant it judgmentally,” Bush wrote. “And you know what my mom said? ‘Oh honey, I think she’s pretty gay. And she’s happy .’”

Bush wrote that she felt like she was wearing a weighted vest that she could finally put down. 

“I finally feel like I can breathe,” Bush wrote. “I turned 41 last summer, amid all of this, and I heard the words I was saying to my best friend as they came out of my mouth. ‘I feel like this is my first birthday,’ I told her. This year was my very first birthday.”

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Jo Yurcaba is a reporter for NBC Out.

Arts and culture celebration ‘Queens Rising’ launches calendar of events for June

The arts and culture community came together at Queens Museum in Corona Thursday morning to launch the third annual Queens Rising celebration. 

The month-long celebration of local artists and venues will kick off on June 1 with a packed calendar of events that highlight the diversity of the borough. Last year, Queens Rising partnered with 100 local organizations and promoted over 300 events throughout the month. 

This year’s new initiative is “Queens Scene,” which will bring a series of performances by artists who live and work in Queens to four partner venues: Flushing Town Hall, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, the Queens Botanical Garden and Terraza 7 in Elmhurst . 

“It’s not our first time talking about Queens Rising. Maybe two years ago, it was aspirational. Today, it’s real,” said Leonard Jacobs, Executive Director of the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning . 

In attendance, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards lauded the initiative, which was contrived during the pandemic to sustain the creative sector during the economic downturn. He specifically hailed the increase in job opportunities and spike in tourism that the arts industry brings in. 

“We’ve come a long way since the pandemic, and now we’re eager to get out here and enjoy a performance, a gallery and much more. But it’s not always easy to find where to go for some culture. It’s so important that we have Queens Rising,” said Richards, noting that he invested $27 million to cultural institutions across the borough since taking office in 2020.

“Arts are often the first budget cuts. But that is a real economic mistake, not only a cultural mistake, because the arts bring about tenfold in economic activity to Queens, to the city,” said Weprin. 

Several organizations have sponsored Queens Rising with financial support and marketing help. The initiative’s title sponsor is Northwell Health , which is currently expanding into the borough from its Long Island stronghold. 

“To do something like this, and really culminate and bring this culture to a broader audience by celebrating those artists that may have not gotten highlighted… is really powerful,” said Lorraine Chambers Lewis, CEO of LIJ Forest Hills Hospital. 

Other major sponsors include Resorts World NYC , the Howard Gilman Foundation , and the Kupferberg Center for the Arts . 

“We, too, are an entertainment resource,” pointed out Michelle Stoddard, Vice President of Community Affairs at Resorts World. “It was only natural that we partnered with Queens Rising to be able to explore not only different artists out there, but venues that we can partner with as well to really make a longer lifespan for an artist.” 

Directors at Culture Lab LIC , a non-profit art center with galleries, a performing arts venue and a community center with regular programming, expressed the need to collaborate with organizations like Queens Rising. 

“We want to represent what’s happening in the arts in western Queens, but we need help and Queens Rising is that kind of organization,” said Executive Director Edjo Wheeler. “We are hoping to create synergy. We’re hoping to create some momentum.”

As part of Queens Rising, Culture Lab is exhibiting “Say it Loud: Unsung Heroes” a show that aims to celebrate the unique LGBTQ voices that have made contributions to their community and society. Currently, they are calling for submissions, but the exhibit’s opening event is scheduled for June 6. 

Attendees of the launch got a taste of what’s to come with a performance from JRose, a spoken word artist born and raised in Queens. She delivered a poem titled Homesick, about her love of the borough, followed by another poem about her connection to her ancestors.

“It’s really important that we continue this initiative to fund art because art literally saves people’s lives,” said JRose, who is also a host and curator. “Being able to not only get paid opportunities, but to also provide paid opportunities for artists is really important. It helps our community.”

 “We all know that culture is king,”  said Borough President Richards. “June promises to be an exciting month for the world’s borough.”

About the Author

Iryna Shkurhan

Iryna is a staff reporter primarily covering eastern Queens.

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No Jerry Seinfeld, the ‘extreme left’ hasn’t killed comedy

The comedian’s claim that wokeness is the reason why comedy is no longer as funny is lazy – and inaccurate

J erry Seinfeld is currently at saturation point, promoting his new Pop Tarts movie Unfrosted . Still a canny operator, however, Seinfeld understands that the last thing anyone in the world wants to hear about is his new Pop Tarts movie. After all, there is realistically only so much available media interest in a streaming period comedy film about a breakfast product. And so Unfrosted has taken something of a backseat to a much more newsworthy proposition: Jerry Seinfeld mouthing off for clicks.

Until now, Seinfeld’s targets have included the film industry (the people he worked with “don’t have any idea that the movie business is over”) and his disdain for dabblers (“There’s nothing I revile quite as much as a dilettante”), despite being a man who has just directed his first film at the age of 70. True, he has also tried talking about things he actually enjoys, like his love of watching surfing videos on YouTube, but that isn’t really what gets the clicks these days. And so, with some inevitability, Jerry Seinfeld has pulled out the big guns and declared that the left is destroying comedy.

Speaking on the New Yorker’s Radio Hour , Seinfeld said: “Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it. It used to be that you’d go home at the end of the day, most people would go ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M*A*S*H is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’ You just expected [there will] be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well guess what? Where is it? Where is it?”

Which isn’t entirely true – Curb Your Enthusiasm just wrapped up its 25-year-run with a universally beloved episode that Jerry Seinfeld was actually in – but it’s broadly valid. Despite the glut of streaming services that now run in addition to the major networks, a smaller and smaller percentage of their output is comedic in nature. One answer might be that people are turning online for faster, funnier, cheaper comedy that appeals directly to their tastes. But Jerry Seinfeld has other ideas.

“This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people,” he explained, going on to state: “When you write a script, and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups – ‘Here’s our thought about this joke’ – well, that’s the end of your comedy.”

The problem seems to be that too many people delight in performative outrage these days, and a well-intentioned joke might end up being taken out of context and being escalated to a cancelation-level event. Luckily, the extreme left wasn’t a thing back in Seinfeld’s day, which is why something as famously edgy as – let’s see – Cheers was able to stay on air for as long as it did.

On the surface, this is an incredibly dreary thing to say, not least because it doesn’t fit Seinfeld as a performer at all. It’s hard to complain that you’re not allowed to offend anybody any more when your stock in trade is deliberately inoffensive comedy. Jerry Seinfeld is a man who has just made a film about some pastry. Unless all the clips and trailers have done a particularly good job of hiding a scene in which one character looks straight to camera and declares that all trans people are an affront to God, Unfrosted probably isn’t going to appall the delicate sensibilities of very many people at all.

This is a man, remember, who is proud of his family friendly image. The 2011 HBO special Talking Funny has aged incredibly badly – it’s a roundtable discussion of comedy that features both Louis CK and Ricky Gervais – but Seinfeld’s contributions hold up. During his discussion, he defends his decision never to swear onstage, insinuating that it’s an easy way to get laughs. It’s a subject he followed up on a few years later, telling the Guardian: “A person who can defend themselves with a gun is just not very interesting. But a person who defends themselves through aikido or tai chi? Very interesting.”

And let’s not forget that, when Seinfeld’s co-star Michael Richards ended his career with a racist rant onstage, Jerry Seinfeld not only brought him on Letterman to explain himself, but treated the incident with such grave intent that at one point he sincerely ordered the studio audience to stop laughing, telling them: “It’s not funny.”

So there have always been gatekeepers to what is and isn’t funny. Indeed, in his own work Jerry Seinfeld has been one of the staunchest gatekeepers of all. Perhaps the problem here isn’t that the extreme left has a stranglehold on comedy. Perhaps it’s just that Jerry Seinfeld is getting old.

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The Impact Of Internet Culture On The Toy Industry

Illustration shows a toy store. DIRK WAEM/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Illustration shows a toy store.

For children across the country and the world, they're the centerpieces of weekend mornings, family holidays, and prized collections.

We're talking about toys.

The global toy industry is at a crossroads. How dolls, action figures, puzzles, skibidi toilets, and more find their way into the hands of kids is changing. The role that the internet and influencers play in getting kids excited about a franchise or specific toy is growing rapidly.

But is the toy industry keeping up? Amid an uncertain economic climate worldwide, buyers for brick-and-mortar stores that sell toys are playing it safe and sticking with traditional offerings.

What's the toy industry doing to keep up with the times?

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