While I traveled through Eastern Europe, the first question people asked me was, “Where are you from?” I say New York…choosing to claim a popular region rather then my less than popular nation. Then they want to know my ethnicity. “I’m a mutt”, I tell them. The next question might be what religion I am. “I’m not religious, but I grew up Unitarian”. “Is that Christian?” “Sort of… the U.S. version is a mixture of beliefs but you aren’t require to believe in any of them” (this is a very foreign concept). “Well, what do you DO? What’s your job?” This is an uncomfortable question for me since ‘what I do’ is the part of my identity that I have most identified with and it’s in limbo too! But I have an answer that I sometimes wonder if I didn’t just make up to hang onto some semblance of identity. “I don’t have a job right now, I’m traveling for the year but I’m working on a project. I’m making a film about cultural and personal identity as expressed in textiles.” The only answer I have that identifies ‘Who am I?’ is that I am working on a self-motivated project about other people’s answers to the same question!
Culture is a universal element of humanity. We co-create language, costumes, cuisine music, art, and beliefs. Living within the roles of our culture’s framework, we have a place in that world and a sense of “who we are”. Culture is also inherently changeable. For instance, developments in technology give us new tools, new materials, new ways of communicating and meanwhile our roles change. And unlike our genetic code, cultural elements of our identity can change within one generation; even one single person could cross a cultural divide or inspire a change in her culture’s perspective.
I’ve been looking for an answer to my question of “who are we?” by visiting with and interviewing people who make things (specifically fabric) because I believe that in the act of creating we express ourselves and our culture. Textiles carry a lot of weight in the world of identity. Think of Gandhi awakening India’s national identity with homespun cotton, women burning their bras in the sixties symbolically destroying the idea that women are born harnessed to a narrow cultural role, and remember you can’t enter the corporate world, or religious sects without the right costumes on your back.
Europe is a cultural tomb of beautifully made and treasured artifacts of what was once vast cultural diversity. There were thousands of different styles of dress that are now only found in antique stores and museums. Nowadays, everyone looks alike in t- shirts and jeans with a cell phone for accessory. In Turkey, trucks make the rounds of the villages loaded with machine-made carpets that are traded for older carpets made by hand. Most women prefer the China-made synthetics to their dusty Turkish heirlooms.
We may one day have a universal culture but for the time being what we have is the replacement of enormous cultural diversity with nationalized cultures and “consumer culture”. The places where you do find traditional cultures still intact are the places where you’ll also find stateless tribes and people too poor to participate in consumerism. As soon I as landed in South America, I began to see this…vivid colorful cultures thousands of years old and people living with little else than the food they grew, the clothes they made and few choices for anything else. It seems to me that the people who have their cultural identity most intact are the poorest and that it's very hard to maintain a distinct style of dress or language without suffering from prejudice and lack of opportunity. Will we one day have a global family and if so, will diversity still exist?
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