How to keep cultural heritage alive
... without strangling its capacity for change
Hi from Laos! Since I last wrote, we’ve also been through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. We’re about seven months into our year of travel through Asia.
As we’ve traveled, I’ve taken a special interest in what I’ve come to see as two important and related cultural forces. One, immediately familiar, is the tendency towards cultural preservation. French food is a fantastic example. The French prerogative to protect the production, sale and presentation of their foodways is well-known globally. Complete this sentence: To be called “champagne,” a sparkling wine must _____1.
Communities, as well as outside institutions like UNESCO (which we’ve seen a lot of on this trip), prioritize the preservation of unique foods, musical styles, historic districts, languages, and more. And obviously, they should. I’ve written previously about how important legacy restaurants can be.
The one and only
Unique cultural heritage is often economically, even politically, advantageous. But culture should be preserved for its own sake, because it is special and irreplaceable, and if it isn’t protected, it can become extinct.
Recently we’ve come face to face with the grim reality of what cultural extinction actually looks like. In the mid 1970s in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge sought to prove the ideological purity of their Communism by resetting the national culture back to “Year Zero.” Music, art, dance, literature, medicine, family — it was all intentionally wiped out. It has taken Cambodia decades to begin to recover some of the heritage that was destroyed in just over three years2.
Even when culture is not maliciously targeted, war and other extreme conditions can threaten it. The Imperial Citadel in Huế, Vietnam, made it to the mid-twentieth century with over 100 structures intact, but after decades of conflict with France and the US, only ten original sites stand today.
And sometimes culture changes in a far more subtle way. Technological progress and globalization can also shift traditions that have remained rooted for thousands of years. Here’s a sign from the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre in Laos, where almost half the population belongs to one of many indigenous ethnic groups:
Music remains a meaningful part of everyday life in Laos. Students from remote villages play DVDs of traditional songs in their dorm rooms to ward off homesickness, karaoke is sung at weekend parties, (H)mong qeej musicians perform at funerals, and bands are booked for baby blessing ceremonies, housewarmings, and birthdays.
However, like with handicraft skills or knowledge of the forest, experienced traditional singing and instrument playing is in decline. Nowadays, many people might know snippets of folk songs or the most popular khap, but few have the full repertoire or mastery over the art.
You gotta keep ‘em separated
So, preservation is obviously important. Bring on the baguette’s status as Intangible Cultural Heritage. But something else can happen when you prioritize preservation. You can get stuck.
There is a great episode of David Chang’s 2018 Netflix show, Ugly Delicious, about culinary differences between New Orleans and Houston. Both cities have Cajun food, are situated on the Gulf, and have large populations of Vietnamese immigrants. So why does Houston have a thriving culture of Viet-Cajun food when New Orleans, a famous food city, doesn’t?
The answer that Chang comes up with is a possible side effect of preservation: calcification. New Orleans is enraptured with preserving a specific version of its food, music, architecture, etc. (Which is, itself, a product of vibrant cultural fusion and evolution.)
Chang finds that in New Orleans, the old recipes are written in stone. Despite how cooking techniques have evolved, in New Orleans, crayfish can only be boiled, never steamed. And even the Vietnamese restauranteurs in the episode dare not cook crawdads with Asian seasoning and spices. But that sort of experimentation is welcomed in Houston, where they don’t have as much Cajun calcification as New Orleans.3
But calcification is not bound by geography, or even limited to physical pieces of culture like food and buildings.
A sign of the times
This fascinating piece, from Amanda Morris in The New York Times over the summer, chronicles some of the changes happening in the common usage of American Sign Language. Over a short period, many signs have been getting smaller (to better fit on screens) and more modern. Predictably, there is significant resistance from older signers who want to preserve the way that they learned and continue to use their language.
It’s not completely straightforward — should Black signers keep using a traditional Black Sign Language sign for ice cream, which resembles eating out of a bowl, or switch to the ASL sign, which looks more like licking a cone? Is culture being lost by switching? Or is it important to preserve an anachronistic sign, even if it might not reflect your own experiences?
Evolve and preserve, but don’t calcify
There are no easy answers, and yet … I would encourage any community at this crossroads to choose both evolution and preservation, but not calcification. We must retain what’s special, but we cannot be afraid of replacement, or make the mistake in thinking that the culture of the past is necessarily better just because it is older. As Judge John Hodgman often says, “nostalgia is a toxic impulse.”
Even the French, stalwart protectors of their culture, can take preservation too far. The French Consulate has sent letters of protest to New York’s City Council, which has banned foie gras in the city on animal welfare grounds. The French protest, even as “an increasing number of mayors across France have decided to pull the delicacy off their buffets at official functions,” writes Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura in The NYT. Foie gras may be French, but New York can and should pass whatever laws they want.
By all means, preserve aspects of culture that are important to you, and make the case that they are important, but don’t preserve them in amber. Things change. There must be room for creativity, ingenuity, and reinvention. I don’t just want to live in a world where I can eat Cajun and Vietnamese in separate restaurants. I want to eat Viet-Cajun too, and whatever comes next.
–Josh
Champagne must “be from the Champagne region of France.”
Think “The Last of Us” is dark? This is truly some of the bleakest shit I’ve ever encountered. The paranoid and genocidal communists ended up killing a quarter of the population of their own nation.
I’ve only been to New Orleans a couple times, and I’ve never been to Houston, so feel free to tell me if you think I'm wrong on any of the details here, but I think the larger point is right.