What we all share about material culture

After listening to a research student presentation about how the smells of freshly baked confectionary in a shop on Britain help her make sense of children in a school in China making and talking about festive food items, I think again about what I witnessed in a café in Canterbury. 

The barista was making a matcha drink. I was taken by the precision with which they stirred the liquid in the bottom of a glass. How they held and moved the glass and the bamboo brush, the fine dexterity that travelled through their whole posture and demeanour. One could possibly imagine that this was the result of generations of passing down a cultural art or of at least considerable training. But no. When asked, they told me that they’d learnt it on YouTube. 

It would have been easy to be cynical. ‘A Western person pretending an ancient Eastern art.’ ‘Cheap cultural appropriation to serve a new high-street fad.’ Well their appearance might give the impression that they felt themself related to a nowadays very old ‘hippy’ heritage which engaged with what they might describe as aspects of Eastern culture.

But I think there was something far deeper going on. This was more than commercial imitation. Something in the movement of the barista’s fingers resonated with my memory of my grandmother sewing and baking – working so precisely with fabrics and pastry. I remember being mesmerised by how she moved her fingers and pushed her lips in concentration. These movements would themselves have been informed by generations.

This is to do with the deep nature of the varicultural flow. All of us have in our cultural history the ability to appreciate and make material artefacts. This material culture flows in all directions. While artefacts and practices will vary hugely in near and distant places, there will always be elements that we can recognise and appreciate. We may not be familiar with the particular histories and values associated with them. However, we do know the nature of how histories and values are associated.

Therefore, when the Western barista sees the YouTube video of how to make a matcha drink, there will be something in their personal history that connects with it. 

Of course there will also sometimes be a difficult politics that drive some people and communities to defend against ‘cultural appropriation’. The particular histories in such cases will need to be respected. Understanding the nature of this situation is part and parcel of how we make sense of the Other. And we should all be able to recognise that because we have also experienced, somewhere in our own histories, the need to protect and assert.

On the other hand, everything that we do will at some time in the near or distant past have been influenced by practices and values travelling from near or distant places. The bigger point here is that we do not live in separated cultures within which there are exclusive practices and values that travellers from ‘other cultures’ will by their nature find  essentialistically problematic. We only need to look, and to be reminded to look around us to see astonishing and unexpected threads that connect us.