Transculturation and the porosity of cultures: Fernando Ortiz

Abstract

Fernando Ortiz introduced his account of transculturation to replace Melville Herskovits’s notion of acculturation as a way of describing the historical contact between cultures. Ortiz understood the idea of acculturation to be promoting a kind of assimilationist model very different from what he witnessed in his native Cuba. Transculturation conforms neither to the model of cosmopolitanism promoted by Kant’s universal history, nor to the kind of multiculturalism that is rooted in Herder’s rival approach to history. Instead, it presents a concept of cultural contact and cultural transformation that highlights the way the material and economic conditions of social existence shape the institutions in which cultures more narrowly conceived are embedded and relate to each other. By bringing transculturation into dialogue with the idea of the porosity of cultures initially promoted in 1925 by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Naples, we find a way to free transculturation from Ortiz’s tendency to lapse into biological metaphors with the danger of retaining a reference to cultural purity that he would not endorse. Transculturation, thus revised, recommends itself as a term helpful for thinking about a world shaped by mass migration and the new technological forms of ever more rapid cultural exchange. Properly understood, it promotes a future where openness and sharing are valued over ownership and preservation.