Cultural diversity and the arts, part 1-enriching our heritages

There are almost always more than one side to every question.  In this and the subsequent blog, we'll look at some of the roles that cultural diversity and the arts can enrich our own cultural heritage(s).

I am going to assume that people from different cultures are reading this blog...but that all of us have a cultural heritage or in some cases, such as if our parents come from different backgrounds or we live in a country that is not the land of our ancestors, we may have two or more cultural backgrounds.

In California, there are a wealth of festivals celebrating different ethnic groups and their culture.

In California and frankly, in an awful lot of the world, we encounter people on a daily basis whose cultural background(s) is different from ours.  In some parts of the world, different cultural groups isolate themselves from each other, but in other areas, there is more curiosity and communication between cultural groups.

In California and much of the United States, as well as in Jerez de la Frontera and much of Spain, the past 30 years or so have seen a great deal of mixing and combining of traditional art forms as one reaction to this cultural diversity.  The process is often pretty selective, however.  For example, few people of either Anglo or Latino descent combine Asian classical dance forms with their own dances, and few castillano Spaniards mix Russian or central African music with their music.

In southern Spain, you find Castillianos, Gitanos, people from North Africa plus Senegalese and others.

But one of the key words of the day in the arts world is "fusion."  We see flamenco fusion, jazz fusion, opera borrowing extensively from all over, and we see people of Asian heritages in California mixing their traditions with hip hop, etc.  (even though this seems to be a one-way street).

My assumption is that this move towards fusion is not only a result of the greater ease of international travel and the movement of peoples--as refugees, ex-patriots, tourists, for business reasons, and so forth--but also due to television which has given the world an extremely distorted but deliberately attractive view of "American" culture.

Video games and movies have also played a role, of course.

OUR NEXT BLOG will consider "purity" vs. "fusion" within the topic of cultural diversity and the arts.