Hybridization

Hybridization is the act, process, and outcome of multiple elements from diverse backgrounds combining and interacting to create something new. Religions, identities, peoples, social practices, cuisines, music, the arts, and styles of dress and speech can all be hybridized through the meeting and intermingling of various cultural practices and social products. Through hybridization, elements identifying a culture, practice, or people become fused, combined, or melded with other social elements and peoples. On a macrolevel, communities may embrace or deny impeding cultural influences based on social expectations, historical factors, and contemporary power relations; on a microlevel, individuals may face hybridization and expected assimilation of familial practices through processes of intermarriage, migration, intercultural adoption, living and traveling abroad, education, linguistic and social studies, or religious conversion. Colonization, transmigration, and globalization have all greatly influenced the ways in which individuals and cultures interrelate and transform.

Hybridization can occur by coercion or cooperation; it can serve as a vehicle of social collusion or integration—sometimes, it is both. For example, the demands of the transatlantic slave trade forced displaced west and central Africans to interact with Spanish, French, English, and Dutch colonizers of the Caribbean, who, following the ban on slavery, often shipped indentured servants from China and India to work the land. Because of this history, a person can find Chinese-Latin fusion cuisines in Dominican-neighborhood NYC (New York City) restaurants just as easily as passing by community botanicas catering to Caribbean practitioners of Vodou and Lukumí, hybrid religions intermingling African and Amerindian traditions with the pantheon of Catholic saints. When cultures meet, the interaction forces a re-identification of both communities; whether choosing to separate self-identity from the other culture or people or, instead, embracing newfound practices, self-definitions within a community are refashioned based on the intercultural relationship. As communities unite, exchange, or cross-pollinate ideas and materials, groups can become syncretized or, [Page 539]in clashed response, cleave to tradition in the face of perceived threats to cultural stability.

Discussions of societal hybridization spawn questions regarding the assimilation, appropriation, and acculturation of practices and peoples within and through the process of interrelationship. In cases where the empowered and disempowered, or the colonizing and colonized, are pitted against one another, some scholars view interactions from a top-down approach: Colonizers primarily influence the colonized because of their position of power. Other scholars recognize that cultural interactions are a two-way street, and despite disenfranchisement or minority status, the music, art, food, lingo, ideology, and ontology of the colonized can diffuse and engage the masses within both colony and metropolis. Either way, the impacts of cultural hybridity become ever present within a globalizing market that promotes the multinational exchange of goods and ideas through mass-market consumption. Hybrid uses of global products, locally interpreted and culturally integrated, become reflections of community struggles between cultural fluidity, commercial accessibility, and social stability.