Before all else is our native soil; it has formed from it's elements our very being; our life is no more nor less than the inheritance of our poor country; there you will find the witnesses to our birth, the creators of our existence, and those who have raised us and given us a soul; the tombs of our parents lie there and demand from us security and repose; everything reminds us of a duty, everything recalls tender sentiments and delicious memories; this is the theater of our innocence, of our first loves, of our first sensations, and from these we have been formed. - Simon Bolívar

I. A New Definition of Cultural Diversity

There are terms which have occupied so much space, engendered so many debates, used up so much paper, that they seem destined to remain forever in the air. Love, justice, freedom, identity and culture are terms of this kind. In regards to love, we haven't exhausted the topic as poets or as protagonists. Justice and liberty continue to ignite rebellions, confront existing powers, and create their own armies of dreamers. As for identity, we continue to associate it with the land, with a form of thinking, a form of being, with language, religion, superstition, violence, art - in short, with all the elements that fit within the concept which everyone more or less defines as culture.

What is certain is that every day we feel less free; hangmen abound, we love less, and we are, as one Asian author has stated, a bunch of civilized barbarians. Still, it is necessary to follow some route to establish an end point for this reflection about the human condition as it relates to the multiplicity of its manifestations and as it is faced with a more immediate problem - a problem that all the textbooks refer to as globalisation. Most authors agree in their association of the word culture with the word diversity, since this allows for an ample range of considerations that are non-exclusive, relative, and therefore organic. These are, more or less, the ideas of Ignacio Abello, Sergio de Zubiría and Silvio Sánchez in their text Culture: Theories and Management (Cultura: Teorías y gestión), published in July 1998, which unites the insightful concepts of these three contemporary Colombian thinkers who have refined their material while working with a diverse public in various seminars throughout the country.

There is much debate whether terms such as culture and identity can be applied in certain contexts. For example, is it permissible to speak of "the culture of violence"? Can we define anthropologically the identity of gangs, assassins for hire, self defense groups, or any of the other nonofficial factions which exist? This issue highlights a very important part of the study of culture: its reference to language itself. Ignacio Abello, in a chapter of the above cited book entitled Culture as Language," includes a quote from Neitzsche's Untimely Meditations: "Culture is before anything else the unity of artistic style present in all the essential expressions of a people. To know many things and to have learned many more, is not a requirement of culture nor a sign of culture, and can, in fact, be perfectly compatible with the antithesis of culture, with barbarism - which is to say, with a lack of style or with a chaotic jumble of all styles"[2]. The age of classical definitions has passed. We now find ourselves faced with a confusing panorama, intentionally and deliberately entangled by the treatise writers themselves in a net of the same topics that have occupied us since the beginning of time: love, justice, freedom, identity and culture.

II. Identity and Culture

There are many points of view regarding the origin of a sense of identity, by which we mean a sense of belonging or a general way of identify oneself as an inhabitant of a region or as a member of a culture. One Spanish radio programme attempts, with a certain sense of humor, to describe the characteristics traits of the inhabitants of different countries. For example, they describe the Spanish man as one who needs to lean on a post or a wall in order to have a conversation; the Mexican as one who needs a tequila for any and all sorts of business; and the Colombian as one who is always listening to the radio or arguing. Apart from humorous and playful descriptions such as these, the identity of a man is not easy to establish. More serious writers, with a psychological bent, want to define a man by other types of traits. Schopenhauer, in his time, said of the Germans that they were meatball eaters and beer drinkers. Albert Camus ironically defined the French as fornicators and newspaper readers. And ourselves, how would we describe ourselves? Always in a variety of ways, since there is not a single definition for a person, especially not if we are being respectful. Some of the identities we have accepted, sifted from parlor jokes and from the common jokes told to a crowd, are those of thieves and criminals. Yet these are not our full identity either.

Ignacio Abello in his text Identity and Difference (Identidad y diferencia) writes: The classification of "Latin America" is relatively new. Never during the Conquest, the Colonial Period or the first years of the Republic did anyone speak of anything particular to a Spanish America or an independent America, and the effort, for example of Bolívar, to politically unite the nations of America, was always carried out under the banner of a common destiny, due to having been dominated by Spain or due to political and economic weakness in the face of the European mother countries and the United States of North America"[3]. In speaking of identity, therefore, we have to clarify that we cannot fuse this concept with its political use, nor confuse it with its ethnographic connotations and even less with its false use by the "entreguista" ideologues, who support neoliberalism and unfettered capitalism. Because in this moment in time, we do have blocks of economic development for which certain common points are recognised, like the "Bolivarian countries" or "The Rio Group of Eight." The same thing occurs with the Central American identity, which has only mattered as a strategic issue for the Panama Canal or as a revolutionary focal point: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Our cultural identity is of the people; we have never aspired to something universal, because we are not conquering countries - we are not colonisers, nor imperialists; our heroes are anonymous, they are the presidents of the people's councils, the peasants, the citizens, the men whom we follow, inventing a life and a tomorrow which do not yet exist. The reclaiming of identity on the part of our peoples becomes as inevitable as destiny and acquires a deeply political connotation when we recognise our multiculturalism as the only hope for defending minorities who are barely acknowledged in economic policies and in the anthropological divisions of classes and groups. Sergio de Zubiría Samper, in his essay on Multiculturality and Interculturality (Multiculturalidad y interculturalidad), says that these concepts are new even at the end of the twentieth century, since many groups of people have remained outside of the official chronology. In his opinion, one of the results of this acknowledgement of cultural plurality will be the reclaiming of recognition by these small ethnic groups: "Identifying multiculturality with the defense of minority groups and their rights might at first glance seem like an expression of multiculturalism. But in general, multiculturality is opposed to any type of autistic fragmentation and to any hostility toward the coexistence of diverse cultures. The simple defense of minority or subjugated cultures does not constitute a multicultural expression or behavior"[4]. What is happening in these cases is the mere recognition of the existence of small communities - a recognition which comes from outside these cultures and from the very governments which have been guilty of intentionally disowning or forgetting them in the first place. It's as if we begin to realise the richness of the tiger's stripes once he is already dead or in a cage.

We do not say that our culture is of the people in order to contrast it with what we call the culture of the European motherlands, nor do we make any claims regarding the scope of its class and group origins, which economically do not matter. We say that our culture is of the people because it is rooted in customs of feeling, thinking, and desire that are very old and reliable - although many times these customs themselves are the result of the dismembering and loss of even more ample cultural roots. For example, the majority of the food uses in the Colombian antiplanos, both by the peasants and by the popular classes, constitute an authentic folk culture with very old roots, derived from fragments of the customs of the aboriginal peoples.

Ignacio Abello emphasises the importance of not viewing folk culture as something opposed to other types of culture, so that we won't designate customs as "popular" or "folk" (in the pejorative sense of the term), which both he and we consider to have a legitimate origin: "From the theoretical understanding that we have developed, it doesn't make sense to speak of popular or folk culture, since that would be a classification of a universal nature - a type of classification which, we have attempted to demonstrate, may not lack validity, but which does limit the type of knowledge we can obtain. Furthermore, in the modern world, the notion of 'folk culture' carries with it an implicit sense of purity - the idea that the people who practice this culture and the area where they practice it are free from contamination by other values and other understandings. And the truth is that although situations of this type do exist, they are very, very rare"[5].

III. Freedom of Expression and Globalisation

Indoamerica has its own internal adherents to this worldwide programme of homogenising human activities. "Entreguismo" is the belief that we should concede the exploitation of our mineral wealth and the operation of our essential services to foreign companies. It is a behavior resulting from the economic dependence that occurs in all countries that are subsidiaries of the North American police regime and subject to the worldwide economic regulations of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Another cause is the co-opting of the younger generations to all sorts of imported behaviors, behaviors that are learned through the education system, through the news and through the culture in general. In his 1998 book What is Globalisation? (a book whose subtitle is "Fallacies of Globalism, Responses to Globalisation"), Ulrich Beck describes the situation in these terms: "Globalisation means the perceptible loss of national borders for daily tasks, in realms as distinct as the economy, information, ecology, technology, cross-cultural conflicts and civil society. Closely related to this breadth of scope, is the fact that the process is both familiar and inaccessible - difficult to grasp - that from every point of view and with obvious violence, it changes daily life and forces everyone to adapt and respond. Money, technology, business, information, and poisonous substances all pass through national borders, as if they didn't exist. Even things, people or ideas that the government would prefer to keep out of the country (drugs, illegal immigrants, critics of its human rights violations) manage to enter. Understood in this way, globalisation represents the death of separation. It means seeing ourselves as immersed in ways of life, which are trans-national (and often not wanted or understood). Or, to borrow the definition of Anthony Gideens, it means acting and living in such a way as to overcome all types of separation (in the apparently separate worlds of nation states, religions, regions and continents)"[6]. Through this word "globalisation" we are becoming familiar with the investiture of the new world order, the order which will succeed the final death of the state, the worldwide economic empire whose visible head is money. In reality, this will mean the death of the individual, of the soul and of human dreams. For this new empire subverts all past efforts to achieve freedom from suffering and ignorance and replaces them with programmes in which only output, efficiency and numbers matter.

Why are there strong manifestations of protest against this phenomenon in all parts of the world? Very simply, because all attempts to make human nature uniform deny that its very essence is varied, uncertain and risky. It is the old fight between freedom and order, between law and instinct, between desire and thought. If the world is transformed into a rigid unity by the calculations and operations of banks, it will certainly know the death of creativity, of the creative instinct and of the ultimate hope for freedom. All this, at the very moment in which humanity has intensified all of it's conflicts in the quest for a final maturity that can recognise the true value of the human soul in the face of both science and the future. Love, justice, freedom, identity, and culture are all at stake. The idle tendency of human beings to digress, to speculate, and to invent is about to be submitted to rules and regulations. It is not a myth that once credit cards exist, the arrival of cards which allow you to think about certain things at certain times is not far behind. All the richness of human experience is already being assessed for its monetary value. And the failures and successes of civilisation are being weighed on a virtual scale, because globalisation is anticipating the final judgment of humanity, to whom it has already stated, in the voice of God, that neither heaven nor hell exist. Globalisation is the fulfillment of a world without dreams, in which the human brain is replaced by a genuine machine that knows the world only by its dimensions, not by its meaning.

Many economic models, like the one of today, have been "plunderers" of the wealth of nations, to use a term coined by Adam Smith more than two centuries ago. Otto Morales Benitez, one of the Colombian thinkers most closely associated with Indoamerican issues, has warned of this clearly and with great statesman-like vision in the 1991 letter he sent to Professor Rodolfo Ricardo Cabrera, of the University of La Plata, Argentina entitled, "Neoliberalism: The New Right. Opening, privatisation, state intervention and unfettered capitalism" ("El neoliberalismo: la nueva derecha. Apertura, privatisación, intervención del estado, capitalismo salvaje"). He states: "The eagerness for profit - licit and illicit - has taken over our countries. For this reason, we go from surprise to surprise: we discover that the transnational companies, whose greed has no limits, have taken over our public services - that these services were in fact given to them, with little investment of money - or that these same transnationals have taken over our national industries, which were built up slowly and with difficulty, through gradual national effort. Everyone is so content. And our governments are so complacent. Which leads us to an even more serious issue: the disappearance of social equity and of clean democracy, in the face of a democracy that is constricted and manipulated. Privatisation and the opening of markets have multiple damaging consequence."[7]

What is curious about this worldwide denunciation of globalisation, is that the media favored and spread these programmes, since they were run by the government and had ostentatious names like "opening," a word which destroyed the Soviet Empire, brought down the Berlin wall, and which today causes Pope John Paul the Second to publicly ask the world's economic power groups to design his evangelical itinerary for the Twenty-first Century. Now, however, we have no choice but to grow up, as we face the late-arriving evidence of flagrant dehumanisation. We are becoming historians of the end: after all, everyone knows now why the Titanic sank! We have become the opposite of astrologers; we have too much truth, and the ethics of it all are asphyxiating us. It would be wise to ask ourselves in these moments if globalisation will hesitate to penetrate even to our pacific shore, where communities live in complete poverty, and where even the slavers of old ceased to advance - thanks to which, even today, there are smiling faces and happy families who know nothing about macroeconomy and for whom the State that now surrenders itself to the hierarchs of the world economy never existed. The fact is that globalisation is the issue which has replaced the Cold War - and that it has also managed to neutralise all the fears and anxiety about the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe, an event of which we have not spoken again, since at a high level there is no conflict between those who run the arms business, the stock market, the Jet Set, the drug business and the business of world glamour.

We continue to debate amongst ourselves, in conflicts between officials and unions and in big arguments over soccer - all of which are part of the centralising of our collective alienation. Nowhere are the proposals for spiritual, human and social change visible, because in Indoamerica, as elsewhere, the conflict is becoming global. The media are ready to televise the battle only according to the instructions of the owners of the great chains, who will not hesitate to unite at this level, just as other big companies have already done on a worldwide level. It is through this kind of union on the part of the big media companies that Europe has found a very effective way to drown the xenophobia that was strangling it from all sides: it is called "unification," and consists of declaring the right of all cultures to coexist, albeit in the dictionaries of history. Here in Indoamerica, we are still managing to resist the voices which occasionally strike the ears of the nationalists and urge us to instigate a conflict with Nicaragua or with Venezuela (similar to the recent conflicts between Peru and Ecuador or between Britain and Argentina). We can see that these conflicts only end by turning us into another Vietnam. All this is part of globalisation, and in our particular case, it announces the clear death of our history, despite the extraordinary richness of human beings that shout their individuality as rebels, as artists, as dreamers, as laborers, and as common citizens, abandoned by a State that will endure only long enough to make the final exchanges. In Colombia there exists a powerful class that declares itself bankrupt, because, as our brother Andrés Hurtado says, they are no longer making the same millions as before and are therefore forced to leave Colombia, denying their own identity and culture, "victims of their own greed."[8]

It is difficult for young people like those of today, so well informed about all aspects of this conflicted world, to think for themselves and in the midst of all this conflict to opt for proposals which favor development, when even those who are promoting these life and education programmes do not believe in them. But we as a nation and as a race have survived other acts of violence and barbarism. We continue to demonstrate our humanity through our art and through our thought, and above all, through the acts of those who are committed to the exercise of ideas and to the proclamation of freedom - those who have managed to become, in the midst of war, true promoters of action and thought. For is there ever a chaos from which creation does not occur? Humanity itself has survived the loss of paradise, a universal flood, pestilence, and wars, and only by overcoming ignorance and violence have we been able to perpetuate up to this point the fruits of civilization that continue to feed us in the midst of anarchy. Knowledge of human frailty, of our defenselessness, has awoken tyrants and exploiters of other men, but it has also revealed benefactors and demonstrated that the true strength of humankind, its undeniable grandeur, is only expressed and wielded in the face of true evil. Harsh prospects are not necessarily the final judgment on a situation; they are a call to the immemorial resistance of humankind, to our nature, to our divine source, to our primordial power. Therefore, in the name of culture and identity we continue to appeal, just as we have always done, to the powers of love, justice, freedom, and above all, truth.

[2] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Consideraciones intempestivas, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1988, pp.330-331. Cited by Ignacio Abello in "La Cultura como lenguaje." In Cultura: teorías y gestión, San Juan de Pasto, Ediciones Unariño, 1998, p.25 - "La cultura es ante todo la unidad de estilo artístico en todas las manifestaciones vitales de un pueblo. Saber muchas cosas y haber aprendido muchas otras, no son, sin embargo, ni un medio necesario de la cultura ni tampoco una señal de cultura y resultan perfectamente compatibles, si es preciso, con la antítesis de la cultura, con la barbarie, es decir, con la carencia de estilo y con la mezcolanza caótica de todos los estilos"

[3] Abello, Ignacio. "Identidad y diferencia." In Cultura: Teorías y Gestión. Op. Cit. p. 125 - "De hecho la calificación de latina para América es relativamente reciente y nunca durante la Conquista, la Colonia o los primeros años de la República se habló de algo distinto de una América española, o de una América independiente y los intentos, por ejemplo de Bolívar, para unir políticamente a los pueblos de América, siempre se realizaron en nombre de un destino común por haber sido dominados por España, y por ser débiles política y económicamente frente a las metrópolis europeas y a los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica"

[4] Subiría Samper, Sergio de. "Multiculturalidad e interculturalidad." In Cultura: Teorías y Gestión. Op. Cit. 203-204 - "Al identificar la multiculturalidad con la defensa de las minorías y sus derechos, puede parecer a primera vista una manifestación de multiculturalismo, pero en general lleva en sentido contrario a una especie de fragmentación autista y a la hostilidad ante la coexistencia de culturas diversas. La simple defensa de culturas minoritarias o sojuzgadas no constituye una manifestación o una conducta multicultural"

[5] Abello, Ignacio. "Culturas populares." In Cultura: Teorías y Gestión. Op. Cit. P. 242 - "Desde la comprensión teórica que hemos desarrollado, no cabe entonces hablar de cultura popular, pues ella correspondería a una marco de clasificación de carácter universal del cual hemos tratado de mostrar, no su falta de validez, sino el tipo de conocimiento que es posible obtener a partir de ella. Además, porque como ya vimos, la noción de cultura popular conlleva implícitamente una noción de pureza, en el sentido en que el espacio donde se presenta y el grupo de personas que la practican no se encuentran contaminadas por otros valores y otras comprensiones. Y la verdad es que aunque existen, son pocos, poquísimos, los grupos con estas características en el mundo entero"

[6] Beck, Ulrich. Qué es la globalización? Falacias del globalismo, respuestas a la globalización. Barcelona, Editorial Piados, 1998, p. 42 - "Globalización significa la perceptible pérdida de fronteras del quehacer cotidiano en las distintas dimensiones de la economía, la información, la ecología, la técnica, los conflictos transculturales y la sociedad civil y relacionada básicamente con todo esto, una cosa es que es al mismo tiempo familiar e inasible - difícilmente captable-, que modifica a todas luces con perceptible violencia la vida cotidiana y que fuerza a todos a adaptarse y a responder. El dinero, las tecnologías, las mercancías, las informaciones, y las intoxicaciones, "traspasan" las fronteras, como si éstas no existieran. Inclusive cosas, personas e ideas que los gobiernos mantendrían, si pudieran, fuera del país, (droga, inmigrantes ilegales, críticas a sus violaciones de los derechos humanos), consiguen introducirse. Así entendida la globalización significa la muerte del apartamiento, el vernos inmersos en formas de vida transnacionales, a menudo no queridas e incomprendidas, o -tomando prestado la definición de Anthony Gideens- actuar y (con)vivir superando todo tipo de separaciones (en los mundos aparentemente separados de los estados nacionales, las religiones, las regiones y los continentes)"

[7] Morales Benítez, Otto. "El neoliberalismo: la nueva derecha. Apertura, privatización, intervención del estado, capitalismo salvaje." Letter sent to Professor Rodolfo Ricardo Carrera, Universidad de La Plata, Argentina, July 8, 1991 - "El afán de lucro -lícito e ilícito- se ha apoderado de nuestros países. Por ello andamos de sorpresa en sorpresa: descubriendo cómo se toman nuestros servicios públicos -regalados, con mínima inversión- o cómo se apoderan de las industrias nacionales - del lento y difícil ahorro nacional, acumulado en varios años - las trasnacionales, sin límites en su apremio de codicia. Todos tan contentos. Y nuestros gobiernos tan complacientes . Lo que nos conduce a un tema aún más profundo como lo es la desaparición de la equidad social y la democracia limpia, frente a una limitada y manipulada. Es que lo de la privatización y apertura, tiene múltiples y dañinas radiaciones"

[8] Hurtado García, Andrés. Op. Cit. P. 4Original Source:Ciudad Virtual de Antropologia y Arqueología (The Virtual City of Anthropology and Archeology) which is an undertaking of the NAyA team.

Translated from La Iniciativa de Comunicación - click here for the specific page.