The basic question is how do you maintain a functional sense of self-rooted in your culture, when that culture is undergoing dramatic change?
One approach is to try and freeze the culture and restrict outside forces that might increase the level of change in the culture. In general, this is the approach taken in Yap, at least until the late 90’s. There were deliberate efforts to limit the level of cultural change in that Micronesian culture.
The problem is that it is difficult to isolate an entire culture from outside influences. Any culture is the product of a community of living people who are influenced by their experiences. When young people go off to college they are exposed to many different ideas, values, practices and technology. They can’t help but pick up some of these foreign artifacts and when they return home these are shared. Over time ideas, values, practices and technology begin to shift at home. In today’s world, it is just too easy to be in contact with influences from the outside. For good or ill, change is inevitable. This approach only slows the process a bit.
Another approach is to embrace the change. As a teenager, I loved to read Science Fiction and watch TV shows like Star Trek. I imagined what it would be like living in that futuristic world and I wanted it. For the most part, all those futuristic gizmos I read about or saw on TV are part of everyday life now. We are all so used to the Internet, cell phones that allow us to Skype or Facetime, ipads/tablets that are the functional equivalent of the supercomputers of only a decade or two ago, that we don’t realized how fantastically futuristic all this technology is compared to only a few years ago. We are even at the point where self-driving cars will be common in a few years and flying cars are in development to the point of prototypes. Many young people have been raised in a world of Facebook and smartphones. It is the only world they know and they are comfortable with it. It is a significant factor in shaping the culture in which they find themselves.
The demographics show that many those who react against this development aren’t young people; rather, it is the baby boomers, the generation over fifty, who were raised in an age that was less connected and less dependent upon electronic technology. Trump’s mantra of “Make America Great—Again” is an obvious appeal to this older generation and their idealization of a pre-smartphone and pre-Internet era. It is an appeal that worked in the past presidential election but will be short lived in the long run because it is dependent upon a generation that is aging and dying.
A third approach is built upon serious self-reflection by a community to identify what is integral to their culture and what is not. This approach acknowledges that change is inevitable for any community and culture. This approach attempts to identify what values and practices in their culture are at the core of their self-identity and then attempts to pass those values and practices to the new generation as living parts of their cultural experience.
Based on my observations from visiting different cultural communities in the Pacific, what gets passed on may vary from culture to culture. In French Polynesia, it seemed that traditional practices such as fire walking held a special value for the people, even when they embraced many aspects of French culture. Among Fijians and several other cultures, sakau drinking rituals were particularly meaningful. An emphasis on the value of the extended family is common in most of the Pacific cultures. Related to this is stress on the value of respect for elders, sacred places and sacred practices. I suggest that in the CNMI the rosary novena and other practices related to death and funerals are an important part of the Chamorro and Carolinian cultures, as these practices have endured, even as other practices have disappeared. It must be admitted that by stressing one set of practices over others as being more important, more change is being introduced into the culture, though at least the change is internal to the culture.
Further, over time the practices that get passed on to the next generation may no longer be rooted in a specific culture but reflect synergistic practices, values or concepts of a regional nature. Several years ago, several anthropologists were promoting a pan-shamanism that borrowed practices, concepts, values and rituals from many different indigenous cultures and tried to combine them into a hybrid that they offered in workshops to people who wanted to have a religious experience more rooted in nature and traditional practices than they got when they went to church on Sunday. The problem was that this hybrid experience wasn’t rooted in any one culture. It was just a hodgepodge of practices and values from many indigenous cultures that appealed to these anthropologists. When I compared this hodgepodge to the cultures I had experienced and studied over the years, it seemed too artificial and arbitrary.
