Book review: Rachel Thompson, Unfolding Lives: Youth, Gender and Change (original) (raw)

Sociology, 2012

Abstract

aims to make explicit the evaluative assumptions behind each of them. The third chapter, ‘Varieties of situations’, explores how the magnitude of cultural hybridity and speed of the process is not uniform and linear but, rather, discontinuous and fragmented. There are particular historical moments in which cultural encounters somehow ‘intensify’. Waves of aggressive religious, economic and political colonialism have inevitably generated forms of unwanted, violent and painful mixing. But this does not mean that the contact of culture cannot happen in different forms, at different speeds and articulated by more ‘neutral’ power dynamics. Cultural pluralism and religious tolerance in Spain under Islamic domination, or the capacity of Hinduism to peacefully absorb deities from other religious traditions are examples of other ways to articulate cultural encounters. The following chapter, ‘Varieties of responses’, investigates in more detail the different ways in which people have reacted to hybridization and mixing; for example, the voracious love for everything Chinese or Oriental in European art and design history. Other decades have seen Italian or French culture as the epitome of fashionability. Nevertheless, as the chapter explains, not all encounters were enthusiastically welcomed. Hybridity, seen as a form of corruption and contamination, has sometimes led to the ruthless cultural and physical obliteration of tradition and people. The total repudiation of everything Jewish during the Nazi regime is surely one of the most systematic forms of symbolic and material annihilation of difference. The last chapter, ‘Varieties of outcomes’, imagines future scenarios of cultural hybridity. The author firmly believes that over centuries the process of cultural mixing and the frequency of encounters have rapidly increased. Therefore Burke unequivocally rejects a future whereby self-contained cultures develop and flourish totally independent from each other. Burke does not, however, embrace any easy hypothesis about our near future and neither is the idea of cultural homogenization fully embraced. The ‘Coca-Cola effect’ or ‘Americanization’ of world culture is surely one aspect of our present. But it must be understood in conjunction with, or counterbalanced by, forms of resistance, appropriation and heterogenization of world culture. The book’s easy and discursive style makes it accessible to the widest readership without losing out on complexity and intellectual rigour. It is a pity though that it feels only sketched out in parts. It often titillates the reader’s curiosity rather than fully quenching their thirst. Yet, in its brevity it is a refreshing summary of different and complex issues that deserve scrutiny in their own right and it outlines plenty of possible avenues for further research. Somebody should buy it as Christmas present for Nick Griffin (the leader of the British National Party) even if I doubt he would enjoy it as I did!

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