PĂSTRAREA IDENTITĂŢII CULTURALE – O ŞANSĂ ÎN FAŢA OMOGENIZĂRII CULTURALE PROVOCATE DE FENOMENUL GLOBALIZĂRII
GUARDING CULTURAL IDENTITY – A CHANCE AGAINST CULTURAL HOMOGENIZING DUE TO THE PHENOMENON OF GLOBALIZATION
Camelia BURGHELE
Universitatea de Vest „Vasile Goldiş” – Filiala Zalău
email: cameliaburghele@yahoo.com
Abstract
The third millennium has generated through social, economical, financial and political mechanisms a massive change in society, imposing a consumer society to replace in some cases modern society and traditional society in others. This transformation on a social level has displayed effects also on a cultural level, leading to massive phenomena of global homogenizing and synchronizing within general culture.
In turn, this process of cultural homogenizing has generated prefabricated artificial culture processes, copied after models with a great response from the public and yet totally estranged from the traditional model of society. Beyond multiple kitsch phenomena, contamination has been recorded which sometimes led to extreme or bad taste displays, to a visible downfall in culture standards.
Sometimes, the adaptive processes have flown normally, but in some cases examples of individuals alienated from a society where traditional models were no longer valid and older patterns were severely modified, have emerged. Loneliness and isolation became obvious and the individual felt the irresistible urge of cultural acknowledgement. In other words, after toiling hundreds or thousands kilometers away from his country, after eating everywhere the same American burger or after wearing the same Turkish blue jeans and the same Chinese t-shirts, global society Man wants to have the assurance that he or she belongs to a certain history and to a social cultural group which to acknowledge within social memory.
In fact, the premises to putting in motion the mechanisms of construction or reconstruction of cultural identity are created, by activating the identity mechanisms: that’s how I am, that’s how everybody else is, we have common traits, but also traits apart, shared segments in our life are given by social and economical proximity, by the fact that we all live together in a community where interstate geographical borders are dimmer and dimmer (the European Union model is the most relevant in this respect) and the differences are given by the formulas of cultural identity.
The effect of this globalizing social model rebound to the collective mentality, to which trade marks have become more and more important. One makes an appeal to cultural memory, as a common background, to generate social, ethnical and cultural identity to the cultural heritage as sum of behavioral patterns. Cultural identity, based on the inclusion in a common material and immaterial cultural heritage manifests itself as a sum of cultural singularities, of individual traits of a certain culture or subculture related to another. One can only reach this goal by recovering the group’s cultural memory, by bringing it to the present and rebuilding the feeling of belonging to a common cultural tree for each individual or for each ethnical or social group.
Key words: modern society, traditional society, social memory, cultural identity, globalization;
Cuvinte cheie: societatea modernă, societatea tradiţională, memoria socială, identitate culturală, globalizare