It is possible that the translocal community will soon disappear as a cultural form. If the migrants settle permanently abroad, the structure might have a generational half-life, the attachments to the homeland dissolving with each city-born or foreign-born generation. However, in parts of Indonesia, Africa and elsewhere, circular migration has been going on for many generations. Reports from Nairobi in the 1980s echo observations in Java from 1916: the migrants were not being proletarianised. From a large review of anthropological literature on culture and development, Michael Kearney recently came to precisely that conclusion: ‘migrants have not been proletarianised in any deeply ideological sense’ (1986:352). However, here I am not concerned with the longevity of the form. What is of more interest is the on-going creation of new forms in the modern world Culture of cultures. No-one can deny that the world has seen an overall decrease of cultural diversity in the past five centuries. Indeed, anthropology was born out of the consciousness of the decrease as much as the appreciation of the diversity. There is no special reason now to panic about the death of culture.
Suppose for argument’s sake we agree that Branislow Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific was the beginning of modern professional ethnography. If so, it is sobering to reflect that it opens with these words
[e]thnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic, position, that at the very moment when it begins to put the workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity. Just now, when the methods and aims of scientific field ethnology have taken shape, when men [n.b.] fully trained for the work have begun to travel into savage countries and study their inhabitants—these die away under our very eyes (1922:xv).
History studies past objects, but how many academic disciplines other than high-energy physics originated as the study of disappearing objects? Yet anthropologists can take heart. Another set of cultural forms has developed since the fifteenth century: hybrid forms, some of them space-defying or using the latest technology in creative projects of indigenising modernity. The discipline seems as well off as it ever was, with cultures disappearing just as we were learning how to perceive them, and then reappearing in ways we had never imagined.
The best modern heirs of the Enlightenment philosophers know this. I mean for example the West African intellectuals who argue, with Paul Hountondji (1994), that ‘culture is not only a heritage, it is a project’. It is, as Abdou Touré insists, an African project, or set of projects, and not the universal march of reason proclaimed by the eighteenth century and still worshipped in the development religions of the twentieth.
That which the minority of [élite] leaders has voluntarily forgotten is Culture as a philosophy of life, and as an inexhaustible reservoir of responses to the world’s challenges and it is because they brush aside this culture that they’re able to reason lightly in terms of development while implying a scale of values, norms of conduct or models of behaviour transmissible from one society to another! (Touré 1994).
Touré’s conclusion is that ‘Africa is no longer subjected to the Western model of development for the simple reason that there is no longer a model of any worth.’ Finally—enlightenment.