Cultural Hybridity

Hybridization as a Process

Anthropologists studying the travel of customs and foodstuffs show that our foundations are profoundly mixed, and it could not be otherwise. Mixing is intrinsic to the evolution of the species. History is a collage. Superimposed on the deep strata of mixing in evolutionary time are historical episodes of long-distance, cross-cultural trade, conquest and empire, and episodes such as transatlantic slavery and the triangular trade. Within and across these episodes, additional hybrid configurations can be distinguished. So, hybridity can be thought of as layered in history, including pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial layers. To each period belong distinct sets of hybridity because different boundaries were prominent, each with its pathos of difference.

Hybridization as a process is as old as history, but the pace of mixing accelerates and its scope widens in the wake of major structural changes, such as new technologies that enable new forms of intercultural contact. Contemporary accelerated globalization is such a new phase.

Hybridity as a Theme

If practices of mixing are as old as the hills, then the thematization of mixing as a perspective is fairly new and largely dates from the 1980s. In a wider sense, it includes the idea of bricolage in culture and art, which inspired the collage. Dada, the cultural movement involving visual arts, art theory, and graphic design, made mixing objects and perspectives its hallmark. Surrealism moved further along these lines, and so do conceptual and installation art. Psychoanalysis brought together widely diverse phenomena—such as dreams, jokes, Freudian slips, and symbols—under new headings relevant to psychological diagnosis.

Although hybridity may be ordinary and unremarkable in itself, the critical contribution of hybridity as a theme is that it questions boundaries that are taken for granted. Thus, hybridity is noteworthy from the point of view of boundaries that are considered essential or insurmountable.

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