Deterritorialization of Culture

This newer term corresponds to a newer cultural space [chiefly under western and also in developing countries’ industrialization strategies] that has been created because of deterritorialization of traditional cultural spaces. It even appears to be mandatory along with the natural institutional growth toward modernization. According to Garcia Canclini, this notion refers to ‘the loss of the natural relation between culture with geographic and social territory [including] relocalizations of new and old forms of symbolic production’. Basically with the industrial [technological] modernization, random inflow of popular cultural elements and forms are deterritorializing traditional cultural spaces and releasing cultural signs from any fixed time and space. Noted analyst James Lull has stated that ‘deterritorialization is the [partial] disintegration of human and symbolic constellations and patterns... it is a consequence of the cultural disjuncture... it is one indication of the cultural change that the disjunctures stimulate’.

But theorists interestingly while further deriving the term ‘deterritorialization’ have time and again exemplified the migration of third world people into ‘more developed’ specially western territories. Naturally this migration causes severe uprooting of the traditional cultural base and major disruption of its valuation that compulsively drives individuals to adapt desirably [or undesirably] new cultural base elements for leading a better cultural life. Prof. Lull exemplified this kind of deterritorialization that the African and Asian slave trade in colonial North America, Brazil, and the Carribbean countries ago...and illegal immigrant Mexican farm workers in United States’. In India also such migrations [though within the national territory but in such a vast location, migration often results in the transportation of individual belongings more than 2000 kilometers from one part to another corner of the country] had been a major occurrence always, both in its colonial and post colonial times, from less developed areas to the bit more affluent places. But theorists like Canclini, Lull in this context do not usually accept any definition of newer cultural codification as they desire to identify this phenomenon as quite natural and inevitable as well. They leave it as purely a ‘human matter’.

But the deterritorialization of culture howsoever occurs in human mind, under any circumstance, through only physical migration from any kind of ‘less to affluent’, this theoretical proposition has been reduced to an idealized end that ‘culture never dies, even in conditions of orchestrated repression’. But this is also an open ended conclusion that people from most of the developing countries, while migrating to a better place for enhanced living, invariably opt out the root cultural praxis to make room for adopting better cultural elements and newer praxis. Only thing may be left alive that people would perform some codes of their root cultural practices superficially that would never percolate to the next generations, e.g., organizing Durga Puja festival by the non resident Bengalee people. This global festival is performed quite differently across regions and settlements outside Bengal keeping the rituals almost unchanged. Here this festival can’t make a course of life along with other popular codifications of that region. Baudrillard once very interestingly quoted that ‘we don’t want nature, we want parks; we similarly don’t want exact course of religion but the Durga Puja as festival only. So it is quite naturally discursive and so deterritorialized. We can also argue that a person migrating more than thousand miles for, say, knitting cut piece cloths from far east of India to the farthest west, say, Gujarat, this migration definitely would cause a severe damage to the cultural practices as the person would have to adopt newer cultural praxis as common or essential cultural interfaces and of course along with some superficial ethno-religious practices, what Lull has nucleated as complete root ‘culture’. In terms of social mediation this phenomenon, across traditional class limitations, in the long term would definitely affect individual’s ideology toward his own life pattern. Therefore he has become completely deterritorialized.

Arjun Appadurai argues in this context, ‘...deterritorialization...sometimes...creates exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state. Deterritorialization, whether of Hindus, Sikhs, Palestinians, or Ukranians, is now at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism...’. But this example does not ensure common people’s disorientation toward such, if we at all say fundamentalism in general, because apart from fanatic religious outbreaks, or counter political outbreaks, fundamentalist principles, even after killing innocent mass, still comfortably exist both peripheries in common psyche of general people who do not at all participate in any such practices.

Thus deterritorialization analysis must accept the theoretical process of discourse analysis so that the signification of ‘deterritorialization’, ‘fundamentalism’, ‘symbolic power’ and many other terms can be perpetrated and understood appropriately. However deterritorialization of culture should not claim any importance in a determinate cultural space because ‘class’ analysis even can perform here better than deterritorialization. But on the other hand such deterritorialization motion can well initiate an important debate on globalization of culture. It is not really the postmodernism in the alternative or any such related elitist theories what can rescue popular culture from being either dominated by the nationalist force or transcorporate ‘global’ force. The prime question here to be raised is the people’s struggle and the resultant cultural practice which is completely independent of any given format. If it is political or cultural it would then initiate ideology, as Hall argues, ‘ideology can no longer be seen as a dependent variable, a mere reflection of a pre-given reality in the mind. Nor are its outcomes predictable by derivation from some simple determinist logic. They depend on the balance of forces in a historical conjuncture: on the politics of signification...’.