Short communication, Note
NEW PERCEPTIONS OF REGION AND CULTURE
Konrad Köstlin
; University of Vienna, Austria
Abstract
Region and culture are both constructions, which today result in a new reality of its own.
The region is today filled up with a set of cultural images which have been selected in a
more or less public discourse, created by the media and supported with material from the
folklore and ethnological archives. While the pre-modern region was defined and shaped by
legal norms, the legal regularities of pre-modern jurisdiction, concerning for instance
dress, wedding ceremonies, access to musical instruments, food and rituals in general, have
been transformed and interpreted anew as "cultural" and described as a regional colouring.
This regional colouring functions as an opposition to the interpretation of the big cities
and the world as "uniformed", "grey" and "too complex", as dangerous and as a place of
crime and the mafia.
Ethnology becomes a part of that game by a practising exotism at home, by
describing the self-evident which has not been discussed before in its new function as
being something very special and distinctive. So the self-evident which, by the way, was
produced in a historically formed process, now has to be regarded as very special, as clearly
different from others, and subsequently can be investigated like the exotics from abroad. It
can be talked about as "history" or as story. We refer to the differences mainly as to
"culture".
So the connection between the region and its culture is a man made one — and also,
for example, the idea of "belonging" (Jonas Frykman) to a localisable community as a
counter-strategy towards Europeanisation, globalisation or whatever. Europeanisation
again argues mainly with a history which has been declared as the cultural capital of
Europe. It functions as counteridea against the fear of the Americanisation of Europe and
the world. In France, for example, this is done by laws which very seriously forbid the new
language called the "Franglais", that mixture of English and French, and govermental
authorities have created French words for those items which came from across the ocean in
connection with new words as, for example, the word computer, mouse-click, e-mail,
internet or the language of the New Economy.
Keywords
regionalism; globalisation; popular culture; regional culture
Hrčak ID:
33251
URI
Publication date:
3.12.2001.
Visits: 1.606 *