把过去有化.docVIP

Nationalizing the Past: Globalism, Nation, and the Fate of Traditional Culture 把過去國有化: 全球主義，國家，和傳統文化的命運 by Stephen Owen James Bryant Conant University Professor Harvard University U.S.A. 14 May, 1999 The topic I would like to address today is the fate of traditional cultures in the global culture of the present day, the forces shaping the way it is understood and its possibilities for the future. In this century we often think of a traditional culture as something that can be “preserved”; but in being “preserved,” traditional culture is profoundly changed. Traditional culture has often become the object of nostalgia; and, it is now by and large, the possession of school systems. It is, I believe, particularly important to understand how the very fact of “preservation” itself changes a body of cultural texts, objects, and practices. Before the modern era each of the great non-Western cultures, China’s included, was a diverse and changing medium through which activities were carried out and through which ideas were conceived; through preservation, however, what was an active medium becomes ossified, a fixed object of reflection. Even if we take such cultures seriously—as we can through an effort of imagination—to do so is now a free choice, one possibility among many, and a negative, quixotic enterprise. Never again can these cultures make the kind of exclusive claim on the imagination that they once did. Perhaps the most profound change in the conception of traditional culture in the modern era is the way in which it has become the imagined heritage of the nation-state. To study traditional literature or culture is to study “one’s own” or “someone else’s,” in which the sense of “one’s own” or “someone else’s” is conceived nationally. This nationalization of traditional literature and culture was true in the formation of the non-Western nation states, where cultural education played a particularly important role in developing national school systems. In a different w