essay on cultural hybridity

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Cultural Hybridity: Homi Bhabha's 'The Location of Culture' (1994)

This paper considers Homi Bhabha's notion of hybridity and a cultural third space in his seminal 1994 work 'The Location of Culture'. It argues that Bhabha's concept of hybridisation is predicated upon the ever-changing location of culture and, most importantly, offers the possibility of repositioning and empowering the marginal voice within mainstream discourse.

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Within the context of globalization, cultural transformations are increasingly analyzed as hybridization processes. Hybridity itself, however, is often treated as a specifically post-colonial phenomenon. The contributors in this volume assume the historicity of transcultural flows and entanglements; they consider the resulting transformative powers to be a basic feature of cultural change. By juxtaposing different notions of hybridization and specific methodologies, as they appear in the various disciplines, this volume’s design is transdisciplinary. Each author presents a disciplinary concept of hybridization and shows how it operates in specific case studies. The aim is to generate a transdisciplinary perception of hybridity that paves the way for a wider application of this crucial concept.

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10.3: Early Global Movements and Cultural Hybridity

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• Jennifer Hasty, David G. Lewis, & Marjorie M. Snipes

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the ways that globalization connects local populations through the phenomena of flows.
• Describe the roles that colonialism played in shifting populations between colonizing and colonized nations.
• Distinguish between diaspora, transnationalism, and cultural hybridity.
• Explain the contemporary forces of postcolonialism and forced migration.

Colonialism and Migration as Global Forces

The global movement that characterizes our current period in history is not preordained. The volatile and powerful nature of multinational cultural change and economic exploitation associated with this global movement is connected with specific historical forces. One of the most consequential early global forces was colonialism , an exploitative relationship between state societies in which one has political dominance over the other, primarily for economic advantage. Colonialism did not only affect the countries enmeshed in colonial relationships; it also established world alliances and enduring social, political, and economic changes.

Some scholars date the earliest emergence of colonialism to the city-states of Mesopotamia in western Asia, an area occupied today by parts of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Kuwait, and Syria. Evidence indicates that by around 3500 BCE, the northern and southern regions were connected by exploitative trade relationships and intense and prolonged warfare. US archaeologists Guillermo Algaze and Clemens Reichel (Algaze 2013; Wilford 2007), in excavations at Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia, have unearthed trade goods that indicate a vast exchange network involving items such as pottery, jewelry, metalwork, and even wine. There is also a pattern of destruction and warfare at Uruk and, more recently, at Tell Hamoukar in modern-day Syria, which indicates the movement of populations as well as trade goods. Tell Hamoukar was a major site of obsidian tool and blade manufacture as early as 4500 BCE, with raw materials coming from as far away as modern-day Turkey, some 100 miles to the north. At Tell Hamoukar, collapsed walls and a large number of penetrating clay bullets, likely delivered by slingshots, are some of the oldest known artifacts of organized warfare. The archaeological sites indicate that there was armed conflict and that groups of people were moving between locations. The patterns of destruction across these various sites suggest that populations were most likely vying for control over resources and production sites, similar to conflicts associated with more modern colonialism, which also were primarily characterized by a drive for political control based on access to raw materials and resources.

After these early beginnings, colonialism spread, including the development of European and Mediterranean settlements in northern Africa. The Phoenicians, from what is now modern-day Lebanon, established the city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia to facilitate and control trade throughout the Mediterranean area. Carthage remained an important hub for trade from its founding in the 9th century BCE until it was destroyed by the Roman Empire in 146 BCE. In what is now modern-day Egypt, the Macedonian king Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria in 331 BCE. Alexandria rapidly grew in economic and political influence because of its control over Mediterranean trade routes; in the Greek confederation of city-states, only Rome was more powerful. As colonizing nations consolidated their political and economic influence, they increasingly sought to expand their access to the natural resources and human labor of other societies. Colonial occupations were repeatedly marked by violence.

By the end of the 15th century, when Christopher Columbus began the first of what would be four voyages (1492–1504) to the New World, many of the nations of Europe were aggressively seeking new territories, establishing what is now called the Age of Discovery (1500s–1700s). During this period, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Great Britain all funded sea and land voyages to seek out new territories in order to expand their global influence. The modern-day European world order of developed and developing nations emerged from the colonialism begun during of the Age of Discovery.

Across the globe, generations of Indigenous peoples contested European colonizers. Often fighting with less effective weaponry; having little or no immunity to Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles, typhus, and cholera, which decimated their populations; and balancing efforts to defend their homelands and families with the desperate need to maintain agricultural production to fend off famines, Indigenous people frequently migrated from one area to another, leaving behind land and crops. In the Andean area, forasteros , a group of Indigenous peoples, became nomadic to flee oppression. Declaring ownership and control over lands and people who had few effective means to challenge them, European nations quickly established colonies throughout North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Politically, most colonies were beset with conflict and periodic uprisings, such as the Great Rebellion of Tupac Amaru II from 1780 to 1783 in Cuzco, Peru, during which Andean peoples came very close to toppling the Spanish government after almost 250 years of oppression. During this period, there also emerged new sociocultural institutions and rituals blending colonizing and Indigenous cultures as aspects such as food and religious beliefs became entangled (Carballo 2020). This blending is referred to as creolization . Culturally, the dismantling of Indigenous languages, religions, and other institutions continues to be devastating.

Late European colonialism of the 18th to the 20th century, sometimes called classic colonialism , was a period in which the institutions of control and extraction were standardized, especially in Africa. This period of colonialism is characterized by very specific goals, policies, and attitudes. The colonial relationship was symbolically depicted as one of benevolence between the “mother country” and the colony, with people such as missionaries, colonial advisors, settlers, businesspeople, and teachers all working together to promote economic development and Europeanization in the colony. The official justification for these practices was that European Christians had a “White man’s burden” to spread their civilization worldwide. Beneath this rhetoric, however, the goals were power and control. Colonialism was an extractive and exploitative economic venture with a social structure designed to dehumanize Indigenous peoples. Raw materials were extracted from the colonies using low-paid Indigenous labor and sent to European nations, where they were transformed into goods that were then sold back to the colony and its Indigenous peoples at an enormous profit for the Europeans. Indigenous cultures were severely damaged or destroyed. Frequently, Indigenous peoples were removed from their homelands and settled on reservations or within territories that were of less use to the Europeans, freeing up large swaths of land for European immigrants. Many young Indigenous people, handpicked for their skills and aptitude, were sent to European countries to be educated and acculturated as future leaders in the colonies. The intention of this preparatory system was to disrupt the influence of Indigenous cultures and create enduring pro-European institutions within the colonies. It also served to divide the Indigenous populations, further weakening them. In other cases, Indigenous peoples were bought, sold, and traded as commodities, moving them away from their languages, cultures, and families. From the 16th to the 19th century, it is estimated that between 10 and 12 million Africans were enslaved and transported from Africa to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade. The massive scale of this forced migration changed the world ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and economically. Untold millions of Africans died in the enslavement process, fracturing families, communities, and societies. While the movement and mixing of so many different peoples resulted in expansive cultural innovation in areas such as languages, foods, religions, and rituals, the cost of this massive displacement in human lives and human potential was incalculably high, leaving scars and challenges that continue today.

These policies, of removing peoples from their homelands and of sending young people far from home for schooling and enculturation, are just two examples of the ways in which colonialism forced people onto new lands and into new cultures. As colonies grew into empires, with many different nations under the control of a single European nation—such as Great Britain, which had colonies in places as far apart as Kenya, Australia, and Canada—there was a global movement of people and cultures across continents.

Colonization also affected those living in European countries, influencing contemporary identities in many ways. The area of modern-day Poland was partitioned several times by neighboring nation-states and was colonized by both Germany and Russia during World War II and its aftermath. In this eastern European nation, the impacts of migration and change continue to affect the way Poland sees itself today. The various movements of peoples and cultures have left Poland uneasy with its own history and national identity. In her research on culture-focused museums in Poland, sociocultural anthropologist and curator Erica Lehrer (2020) studies the contested narratives within the legacies of collecting, categorizing, and displaying objects in postcolonial countries where prior migrations have changed the nature of national identity.

In its history, Poland has been both the colonizing nation (in regard to neighboring states in eastern Europe) and the colonized (in regard to its long history as a colony of Russia and its later occupation during World War II). Depleted by wars, out-migration, territorial shifts, and genocide, Poland’s contemporary population is far more homogeneous by race, class, and religion than it was prior to World War II. Museum depictions of Poland’s culture and national identity have created a host of what Lehrer calls “awkward objects” (2020, 290) that hark back to earlier, and sometimes darker, historical periods. These include museums objects made by non-Jewish Poles representing their memory and imagination of Jews in the pre–World War II era, some depicting ambiguous racial stereotypes, as well as hybrid objects that could have been artifacts of either Jewish or Catholic communities but are depicted by object origin and associated with only one of those communities. One example is a collection of children’s noisemakers, which were depicted in the museum as artifacts from a Catholic Polish community without noting that Jewish Polish children would have played with similar toys at that time. And how should a Polish cultural museum handle darker awkward artifacts, such as carvings of a gas chamber at Auschwitz? The roles and responsibilities that contemporary societies have in telling these parts of their history are relevant to museums and cultural institutions around the globe. Museums often house artifacts of colonialism. Think about cultural and historical museums that you have visited. How did they tell the story of the darker parts of history? Are certain historical periods overlooked or underdeveloped?

Lehrer calls for pluralist contextualization , meaning that museums should not just include the cultural origins of the object but also indicate how they were obtained and how they connect with other cultural communities. Citing a need for ethical curatorial principles, she says:

Strategic curatorial approaches can frame objects to function as a source of ethical inspiration and empathy, spurring people to acknowledge and address those histories that are un chosen by national or communal authorities. . . . Decolonising the museum here is not about restitution. These “awkward objects” are most valuable to us curated in ongoing, caring conversation wherever historical injuries still resonate, reminding us that we are tied together by our wounds. (307, 311)

Postcolonialism, Indigenous Identities, and Forced Migration

Although colonialism as a direct politico-economic policy is usually associated with earlier historical periods, it continues to have effects on the world today. The enduring politico-economic relationships established by colonialism have left behind concentrations of capital and technology, wealth and privilege in the former colonizing countries, mainly in Europe, as well as inequality, racism, and violence in the relationships between these nations and their colonies. These aftereffects of colonial relationships are referred to as postcolonialism . As independence movements began to take hold in the early 20th century, former colonies found themselves depleted of resources and competing against European countries whose growth came from their own demise. Today, postcolonialism is a significant topic for anthropologists whose research focuses on the effects of colonialism, marginalization, and intersectionality, where race, gender, and class identities come together.

One of the most prominent consequences of colonialism is the inequality between the so-called developed countries and the developing or underdeveloped ones. Following World War II and the rise of a new world order, many political and economic theories began to distinguish between “first world” countries, which had the highest GDPs (gross domestic products) based on the total value of all goods and services produced in a country, and those with the lowest GDPs, referred to as “third world” countries. The “second world” tier was typically reserved for those countries with a socialist or communist government. In this tiered and hierarchical system, the former colonizers were always within the top tier and their former colonies in the lowest ranks. Much of this inequality was due to the exploitation of resources and the brain drain migration of Indigenous peoples, in which the wealthiest and most educated members of Indigenous societies relocated to the former colonizing nation for education and employment, many leaving their homelands permanently. This out-migration devastated many Indigenous families and enhanced the productive capacities of richer nations. Many former colonizing countries thus continued to exert influence over their former dependencies even after independence. This relationship of unequal influence is referred to as neocolonialism .

Many Indigenous societies are involved in neocolonial relationships (meaning relationships that are structured to make one country dependent on another) with the nation-states in which they live, a situation sometimes referred to as second colonialism (Gandhi 2001). Indigenous groups continue to be uprooted, and sometimes forcibly removed, from their homelands and moved onto reservations, into “model villages,” or simply into urban areas. This type of forced migration , an involuntary or coerced removal from a people’s homeland, can result in poverty, alienation, and loss of cultural identity. Native peoples in the United States have been subjected to repeated waves of forced migration since the arrival of Europeans. Many societies were forced to move multiple times as White settlers pushed them onto more western and less fertile lands. All of this forced dislocation has had significant cultural and economic consequences. As Native Americans Richard Meyers (Oglala Lakota) and Ernest Weston Jr. (Oglala Sioux) write:

Tragedies of many kinds are often all too common for many people who reside on our reservation. Endemic poverty creates endless problems for community members, from violent dog packs to pervasive alcoholism and diabetes. Dismal statistics paint our reservation as the “Third World” right here in the United States. The numbers are hard to pin down but always dreary: Unemployment is sometimes listed as being as high as 85–95 percent, and more than 90 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line. (Meyers and Weston 2020)

While many Indigenous peoples in Western nations face unique problems of Western historical paralysis, in which the nation-state extols the virtues of Indigenous people at a specific time in its history with little or no regard for contemporary Indigenous identities, some Indigenous peoples are adapting their cultural traditions to urban areas where they have been forced to migrate. In her study of Indigenous Manchineri youth in the Brazilian state of Acre, Finnish anthropologist Pirjo Virtanen (2006) found a cultural revival of traditional puberty rituals for young Manchineri adults. The Manchineri are a lowland Amazonian people who traditionally practiced slash-and-burn cultivation. Over the past century, their access to farmland has become increasingly limited, leaving them unable to make a living in the forest. Many young Manchineri have migrated from their traditional homelands to live in urban areas among other lowland Amazonian Indigenous peoples. These Manchineri sought to strengthen their cultural identity by reviving and adapting certain traditional rituals, such as the ayahuasca ceremony, in which pubescent boys ingest a hallucinogenic substance as a spiritual experience, and a menstruation ceremony in which girls are instructed by their elders on their new status as adults. Few Manchineri remain on their ancestral homelands, and many of these cultural traditions were in danger of dying out.

In Acre, the urban Manchineri found that being an “Indigenous person” had social value with Westerners who appreciated traditional Indigenous cultures. Much of this growth in appreciation came as a result of the rapid decline of Indigenous cultures and populations and the increasing urbanization and alienation of people from rural environments. The younger generation of Manchineri began to appreciate their traditional cultural roots and see the value of maintaining their specific cultural identity, rather than being “lumped” into a broad category of Indigenous persons, while living in an urban environment. By marking themselves as Manchineri, they were able to leverage a higher social standing. This process of using identity as a way to gain status is an example of symbolic capital, or the use of nonmonetary resources to gain social prestige.

Maintaining a specific Indigenous identity within Western nation-states is challenging, as the numbers of Indigenous peoples continue to decline and migration into urban areas creates a mixture of cultures that frequently results in the loss of traditional identities. Indigenous identity is complex and not monolithic, as specific cultural groups have distinct identities; no single spokesperson can realistically represent all Indigenous people. Recently, pan-Indigenous activist movements have developed worldwide to increase the visibility and strengthen the voices of Indigenous peoples. These global movements of people and ideas make it possible for Indigenous people to form alliances for change.

Globalization in Motion

As the connections and interactions between communities, states, countries, and continents have intensified, a global network of linked forces and institutions known as globalization has emerged. Unlike earlier worldwide movements, globalization tends to be decentered, meaning it is not controlled by any particular nation-state or cultural group. Emerging from earlier worldwide historical movements pertaining to exploration, colonialism, and capitalism, globalization has exceeded them with its reach and has created a worldwide interdependence far more intense and transformative on a global scale than anything ever before seen in human history. It involves all aspects of our lives (e.g., political, economic, social, and religious), and it has no center or origin point. Changes and interactions occur within a dynamic and seemingly arbitrary field of connections among people, ideas, countries, and technologies.

Globalization causes the movement of people, resources, and ideas in various ways. Not only do people migrate for work and travel, but they also share ideas and technology, resulting in cultures and populations that are no longer restricted and contained by geographical boundaries. These globalized cultures and networks have changed the way that anthropologists think about culture. Culture is no longer solely attached to a local place and community; rather, it is diffuse and possibly widespread, due to the complicating forces of globalization.

One of the early scholars of globalization is Indian American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. His research is grounded in the idea of a new global cultural economy that traffics in multiple simultaneous flows of material goods, ideas, images, and people, reminding us that global movements and transformations affect every one, whether or not we actually change the nation or community in which we live. Within globalization, local and global communities are deeply intertwined in fluid and dynamic relationships of mutual influence. These interconnections sometimes lead to unpredictable outcomes. Appadurai (1990) identifies five different global cultural flows, tagging each with the suffix - scapes to call attention to the fluidity and multiple ways of viewing these flows:

• Ethnoscapes : the flow of new ideas and new ways of living created by the ongoing migration of people—whether tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, or other groups—across cultures and borders. As just one example, the descendants of the Zainichi Koreans who immigrated to Japan following World War II have established Korean schools and a Korean university in Japan.
• Technoscapes : the worldwide movement of technology, both equipment and information, as well as the multinational origins and manufacturing process of technology along a global assembly line. One example is an iPhone, which has component parts and a manufacturing process that involves many different places.
• Financescapes : the movement of money and capital through currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations. The funds of even the most local investors are intermingled and invested on the global market.
• Mediascapes : the various types of media representations that influence the way we experience our world. These are “image-centered, narrative-based . . . strips of reality” (Appadurai 1990, 299) diffused through digital media, magazines, television, and film, introducing characters and plots across cultural settings and meanings.
• Ideoscapes : the flow and interaction of ideas and ideologies. Appadurai describes ideoscapes as “terminological kaleidoscopes” (1990, 301) in which words and ideas carrying political and ideological meanings are trafficked across cultures. In this process, their meanings become increasingly amorphous and obscured. One example is the political change that resulted from a reawakening of democratic movements in the Middle East in the 2010s, inspiring the Arab Spring, a series of anti-government protests and rebellions. Anti-government protests in Tunisia spilled over into Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, toppling government leaders and triggering social violence.

Appadurai speaks of these -scapes as primary agencies and intersections within the global cultural economy; in other words, each of these -scapes creates change through interactions with others. In this fluid exchange of ideas, material goods, and persons, the -scapes interact, overlap, and contradict one another as cultures themselves come to be commodities produced and consumed by the global community.

There are multiple perspectives for understanding globalization. It can be interpreted as an imperial force in which certain countries and cultures have dominance over others, with their images, capital, and ideas predominating in the global marketplace. Indian anthropologist Sekh Mondal aptly says, “The people earlier had been the creators and creatures of culture, but today the corporate bodies and media have emerged as the creators and carriers of cultural attributes” (2007, 94). Globalization can also be viewed as an open-access community in which governments and corporations have lost the ability to control and isolate populations, ultimately allowing for more cultural diversity and equality. Globalization today transforms virtually everything about anthropology—its subject matter, the locales for research, its understanding of the concept of culture, and the goals that anthropologists bring to their work. Within this context of great change, anthropology is uniquely capable of making sense of this new global community and its rapidly shifting beliefs and behaviors.

Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Cultural Hybridity

Migration impacts individuals and cultures in diverse ways. It prompts the dissemination and diffusion of cultural ideas and artifacts from one cultural context to another, the development of new cultural forms and practices, and hybridity, in which cultures intermingle in unpredictable ways. Cultural hybridity refers to the exchange and innovation of ideas and artifacts between cultures as a product of migration and globalization. It is a commingling of different cultural elements resulting from the interactions of people and their ideas. While individuals and small groups convey their cultures as they migrate, the movement and dispersal of large ethnic groups can bring about far more rapid structural changes. This large-scale movement, which might be caused by warfare, institutionalized violence, or opportunities (most commonly education and employment), is called diaspora . Related to diaspora is transnationalism , the construction of social, economic, and political networks that originate in one country and then cross or transcend nation-state boundaries. While diaspora and transnationalism can both be related to large-scale migration, transnationalism also refers to the cultural and political projects of a nation-state as it spreads globally (Kearney 1995). One example of this is transnational corporations, which are anchored in one country with satellites and subsidiaries in others.

Diasporic communities typically have a sense of identity that has been shaped or transformed by the migration experience. They are characterized by cultural hybridity and often take these new cultural forms with them into their new homelands, generating cultural revival. The African diaspora resulting from the transatlantic slave trade brought a wide array of cultural elements to the United States, including new foods (such as okra and yams), new instruments and musical forms (such as the drums, the banjo, and the development of African slave spirituals), and new language (words such as jazz , gumbo , and tilapia ). Besides the common experience of being formed through migration, diasporic communities share other characteristics. These include a collective memory about the ancestral homeland; a social connection to the country of origin, typically through family still living there; a strong identity as a distinct group; and fictive kinship with diasporic members in other countries (“Migration Data Relevant” 2021). Diasporic communities are inherently political (Werbner 2001), as their movements connect nation-states in a variety of ways—economically, socially, religiously, and politically. Some of the best-known diasporas are the African diaspora that was driven by the transatlantic slave trade from the 15th to the 19th century, the Irish diaspora during Ireland’s Great Famine of the mid-1800s, and the Jewish diaspora, which began under the Roman Empire and continued through the establishment of Israel as a Jewish homeland in 1948. Today, India is the source of the largest diaspora in history, with some 18 million Indians living outside of their country of origin. These mass movements, which are becoming more common as a result of globalization, affect cultures worldwide.

American anthropologist and South Asian scholar Ritty Lukose has done fieldwork in India and in U.S. immigrant communities exploring diaspora and postcolonial identities. In her research with Indian diasporic communities in the United States (2007), she focused on ways in which education could better connect with immigrant families, thus strengthening both. The percentage of children in the United States population who are immigrant children, defined as those who have at least one foreign-born parent, increased by 51 percent between 1994 and 2017 (Child Trends 2018). Immigrant families constitute a significant portion of the population within American schools today. Based on her research, Lukose argues that there needs to be a realignment in American education that better acknowledges immigrant identities. As an example of the urgency of this need, she cites the 2005–2006 California textbook controversy, in which the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) sued the California State Board of Education for using sixth-grade social studies textbooks that contained what the HAF and many Indian parents deemed to be biased and discriminatory views of Hinduism. Lukose advises that instead of presenting the migrant experience as fractured between voluntary and involuntary immigrants or focusing on conflict between immigrants and other minorities (such as racial minorities), American educational pedagogy, curricula, and practices should present identity formation itself as one of the richest experiences of being a citizen. An educational approach that emphasizes immigrant identity, not as a hybrid of pieces and parts, but as a legitimate and practical way of functioning within a globalized world could better prepare all students in the United States for a future in which we focus on what links us together rather than what divides us.

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6 (page 77) p. 77 Hybridity

• Published: October 2020
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‘Hybridity’ explains that cultural hybridity can be seen as an expansion of W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’: a painful incompatibility between how people see themselves and how society sees them only in terms of their race. Nevertheless, this has also formed the basis of the extraordinary cultural creativity of African-Americans. Drawing on cultural memory of their African roots, African-Americans have adapted and transformed aspects of European culture encountered in the US, particularly noticeable in the realm of African-American music. A comparable development of a hybridized culture is considered by tracing the emergence of raï music in 1970s Algeria, following the traumatic experiences of the Algerian War of Independence.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Homi Bhabha’s Concept of Hybridity

Homi Bhabha’s Concept of Hybridity

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 8, 2016 • ( 13 )

One of the most widely employed and most disputed terms in postcolonial theory , hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. As used in horticulture, the term refers to the cross-breeding of two species by grafting or cross-pollination to form a third, ‘hybrid’ species. Hybridization takes many forms:linguistic, cultural,political, racial, etc. Linguistic examples include pidgin and creole languages, and these echo the foundational use of the term by the linguist and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin ,who used it to suggest the disruptive and transfiguring power of multivocal language situations and, by extension, of multivocal narratives. The idea of a polyphony of voices in society is implied also in Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque , which emerged in the Middle Ages when ‘a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture’ (Holquist 1984: 4).

The term ‘hybridity’ has been most recently associated with the work of Homi K. Bhabha , whose analysis of colonizer/colonized relations stresses their interdependence and the mutual construction of their subjectivities (see mimicry and ambivalence). Bhabha contends that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in a space that he calls the ‘Third Space of enunciation’ (1994:37). Cultural identity always emerges in this contradictory and ambivalent space,which for Bhabha makes the claim to a hierarchical ‘purity’of cultures untenable. For him, the recognition of this ambivalent space of cultural identity may help us to overcome the exoticism of cultural diversity in favour of the recognition of an empowering hybridity within which cultural difference may operate:

It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory . . . may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures,but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. (Bhabha 1994: 38)

It is the ‘in-between’ space that carries the burden and meaning of culture, and this is what makes the notion of hybridity so important. Hybridity has frequently been used in post-colonial discourse to mean simply cross-cultural ‘exchange’. This use of the term has been widely criticized, since it usually implies negating and neglecting the imbalance and inequality of the power relations it references. By stressing the transformative cultural, linguistic and political impacts on both the colonized and the colonizer, it has been regarded as replicating assimilationist policies by masking or ‘whitewashing’ cultural differences.

The idea of hybridity also underlies other attempts to stress the mutuality of cultures in the colonial and post-colonial process in expressions of syncreticity, cultural synergy and transculturation. The criticism of the term referred to above stems from the perception that theories that stress mutuality necessarily downplay oppositionality, and increase continuing post-colonial dependence.There is,however,nothing in the idea of hybridity as such that suggests that mutuality negates the hierarchical nature of the imperial process or that it involves the idea of an equal exchange. This is,however,the way in which some proponents of decolonization and anti-colonialism have interpreted its current usage in colonial discourse theory. It has also been subject to critique as part of a general dissatisfaction with colonial discourse theory on the part of critics such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Benita Parry and Aijaz Ahmad . These critiques stress the textualist and idealist basis of such analysis and point to the fact that they neglect specific local differences.

The assertion of a shared post-colonial condition such as hybridity has been seen as part of the tendency of discourse analysis to de-historicize and de-locate cultures from their temporal, spatial, geographical and linguistic contexts, and to lead to an abstract, globalized concept of the textual that obscures the specificities of particular cultural situations. Pointing out that the investigation of the discursive construction of colonialism does not seek to replace or exclude other forms such as historical, geographical, economic, military or political, Robert Young suggests that the contribution of colonial discourse analysis, in which concepts such as hybridity are couched,

provides a significant framework for that other work by emphasising that all perspectives on colonialism share and have to deal with a common discursive medium which was also that of colonialism itself: . . . Colonial discourse analysis can therefore look at the wide variety of texts of colonialism as something more than mere documentation or ‘evidence’. (Young 1995: 163)

However, Young himself offers a number of objections to the indiscriminate use of the term.He notes how influential the term ‘hybridity’ was in imperial and colonial discourse in negative accounts of the union of disparate races – accounts that implied that unless actively and persistently cultivated, such hybrids would inevitably revert to their ‘primitive’ stock. Hybridity thus became, particularly at the turn of the century, part of a colonialist discourse of racism. Young draws our attention to the dangers of employing a term so rooted in a previous set of racist assumptions, but he also notes that there is a difference between unconscious processes of hybrid mixture, or creolization, and a conscious and politically motivated concern with the deliberate disruption of homogeneity. He notes that for Bakhtin , for example, hybridity is politicized, made contestatory, so that it embraces the subversion and challenge of division and separation. Bakhtin ’s hybridity ‘sets different points of view against each other in a conflictual structure, which retains “a certain elemental, organic energy and openendedness”’ (Young 1995: 21–22). It is this potential of hybridity to reverse ‘the structures of domination in the colonial situation’ (23), which Young recognizes, that Bhabha also articulates. ‘ Bakhtin ’s intentional hybrid has been transformed by Bhabha into an active moment of challenge and resistance against a dominant colonial power . . . depriving the imposed imperialist culture,not only of the authority that it has for so long imposed politically, often through violence, but even of its own claims to authenticity’ (23).

Young does, however,warn of the unconscious process of repetition involved in the contemporary use of the term. According to him, when talking about hybridity, contemporary cultural discourse cannot escape the connection with the racial categories of the past in which hybridity had such a clear racial meaning. Therefore ‘deconstructing such essentialist notions of race today we may rather be repeating the [fixation on race in the] past than distancing ourselves from it, or providing a critique of it (27). This is a subtle and persuasive objection to the concept. However, more positively, Young also notes that the term indicates a broader insistence in many twentieth-century disciplines, fromphysics to genetics,upon ‘a double logic,which goes against the convention of rational either/or choices, but which is repeated in science in the split between the incompatible coexisting logics of classical and quantum physics’ (26). In this sense, as in much else in the structuralist and poststructuralist legacy, the concept of hybridity emphasizes a typically twentieth-century concern with relations within a field rather than with an analysis of discrete objects, seeing meaning as the produce of such relations rather than as intrinsic to specific events or objects.

Whilst assertions of national culture and of pre-colonial traditions have played an important role in creating anti-colonial discourse and in arguing for an active decolonizing project, theories of the hybrid nature of post-colonial culture assert a different model for resistance, locating this in the subversive counter-discursive practices implicit in the colonial ambivalence itself and so undermining the very basis on which imperialist and colonialist discourse raises its claims of superiority.

Further reading : Bakhtin 1981, 1994; Bhabha 1994; Kraniauskas 2004; Puri 2004; Radhakrishnan 2000; Ramazani 2001; Smith 2004; Stoneham 2000; Young 1995; for opposing views see Ahmad 1992; S. Mishra 1996; Parry 1987; Smyth 2000.

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Tags: Aijaz Ahmad , Benita Parry , carnivalesque , Chandra Talpade Mohanty , Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers , Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination , Hanif Kureishi , Homi K Bhabha , Hybridity , In Theory , Jhumpa Lahiri , Lyotard , Michael Ondaatje , Mikhail Bakhtin , Nation and Narration , Photography , polyphony , Postcolonial Studies : A Materialist Critique , Postcolonialism , Robert Young , Salman Rushdie

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Open Education Sociology Dictionary

cultural hybridization

Table of Contents

Definition of Cultural Hybridization

( noun ) The process by which a cultural element blends into another culture by modifying the element to fit cultural norms .

Examples of Cultural Hybridization

• Creole languages , a new language developed from simplifying and blending different languages that come into contact within particular population , at a specific point in time. For example, Louisiana Creole which is a combination of African , French , and English languages .
• Global restaurant chains like Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald’s (KFC), modifying their menus to suit the tastes or mores of different cultures . For example, in India , due to religious restrictions on eating beef, the Maharaja Mac is a McDonald’s Big Mac made with a chicken or veggie patty.
• Martial arts films in the United States that adapt traditional Asian cultural elements to fit the tastes of the viewing public.
• Techno , a type of electronic dance music , began in Detroit in the 1980s and made its way around the world, from German Techno to Melbourne Bounce.

Cultural Hybridization Pronunciation

Pronunciation Usage Guide

Syllabification : cul·tur·al hy·brid·i·za·tion

Audio Pronunciation

Phonetic Spelling

• American English – /kUHl-chuhr-ruhl hie-bruh-duh-zAY-shuhn/
• British English – /kUHl-chuh-ruhl hie-bri-die-zAY-shuhn/

International Phonetic Alphabet

• American English – /ˈkʌlʧərəl ˌhaɪbrədəˈzeɪʃən/
• British English – /ˈkʌlʧərəl ˌhaɪbrɪdaɪˈzeɪʃən/

Usage Notes

• Plural: cultural hybridizations
• Variant spelling:  cultural hybridisation

Related Videos

Additional Information

• Word origin of “cultural” and “hybridization” – Online Etymology Dictionary: etymonline.com
• Kendall, Gavin, Ian Woodward, and Zlatko Skrbiš. 2009. The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government . New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Martell, Luke. 2010. The Sociology of Globalization . Malden, MA: Polity Press.
• Nash, Kate. 2010. Contemporary Political Sociology: Globalization, Politics, and Power . 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Robertson, Roland, and Kathleen E. White, eds. 2003. Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology . London: Routledge.
• Sassen, Saskia. 2007. A Sociology of Globalization . New York: Norton.
• Savage, Michael, Gaynor Bagnall, and Brian Longhurst. 2005. Globalization and Belonging . London: SAGE.

Related Terms

• cultural diffusion
• global perspective
• globalization
• material culture
• nonmaterial culture
• world-systems

Works Consulted

Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill, and Bryan Turner. 2006. The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology . 5th ed. London: Penguin.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language . 5th ed. 2011. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bruce, Steve, and Steven Yearley. 2006. The SAGE Dictionary of Sociology . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Collins English Dictionary: Complete and Unabridged . 6th ed. 2003. Glasgow, Scotland: Collins.

Jary, David, and Julia Jary. 2000. Collins Dictionary of Sociology . 3rd ed. Glasgow, Scotland: HarperCollins.

Oxford University Press. (N.d.) Oxford Dictionaries . ( https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ ).

Princeton University. 2010. WordNet . ( https://wordnet.princeton.edu/ ).

Random House Webster’s College Dictionary . 1997. New York: Random House.

Scott, John, and Gordon Marshall. 2005.  A Dictionary of Sociology . New York: Oxford University Press.

Turner, Bryan S., ed. 2006. The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wikipedia contributors. (N.d.) Wiktionary, The Free Dictionary . Wikimedia Foundation. ( http://en.wiktionary.org ).

Cite the Definition of Cultural Hybridization

ASA – American Sociological Association (5th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2014. “cultural hybridization.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Retrieved May 20, 2024 ( https://sociologydictionary.org/cultural-hybridization/ ).

APA – American Psychological Association (6th edition)

cultural hybridization. (2014). In K. Bell (Ed.), Open education sociology dictionary . Retrieved from https://sociologydictionary.org/cultural-hybridization/

Chicago/Turabian: Author-Date – Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2014. “cultural hybridization.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Accessed May 20, 2024. https://sociologydictionary.org/cultural-hybridization/ .

MLA – Modern Language Association (7th edition)

“cultural hybridization.” Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Ed. Kenton Bell. 2014. Web. 20 May. 2024. < https://sociologydictionary.org/cultural-hybridization/ >.

Homi Bhabha’s Cultural Hybridity essay

“No man can live alone”, this basic aspect of human beings resulted in the birth of what is known as Cultural Hybridity. The interaction of various cultures since centuries in the form of colonization and trade relations brought together various human races in conjunction with each other and under the one main purpose- for generating maximum revenue by leveraging their trade and economic relations. People traveled far and wide, away from their societies, cultural roots, intermingled with the cultures of the other societies across various seas and oceans and produced what our various theorists termed as Cultural Hybridity.

Cultural hybridity got its birth when the two races intermingled with each other for any specific purpose and from it arose the new race. How this cultural hybridity came into being, should be visualized by delving deep into the social lives of our ancestors and look at the development of their relationships within the paradigm of material culture which became as an evolutionary channel as said by Gamble, “Its primary role was to provide a metaphorical understanding of those relationships.

” (Gamble 2007:88) And slowly and slowly from the material culture in the form of small tools and body language gave birth to technological advances that emerged as high lightening tone for many of the cultures to merge. Along with materialistic tools, languages brought landscapes and mute objects in a communion harmony with each other that slowly and slowly resulted in the intermingling of various races. (Gamble 2007:88) In today’s world, this cultural hybridity implies emergence of explorers and those of explored.

These two cultures intermingled and evolved into what Roland Barthes said, “third language, that is neither the one nor the other. ” (Raetzsch: Online Edition). Though we are embedded in the local culture and local environment still we have evolved ourselves and taken ourselves into the virtuosities of various cultures and languages. Whole globe seems to appear under the vicinity of one umbrella whereby we all coming from different languages, cultures find ourselves co-joined with each other and within it we have developed the meaning of our existence.

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Marshal McLuhan described this as a Global village. We owe theory of cultural hybridity to Homi Bhabha who emphasized that the cultural hybridity arose from the interdependence between the colonizer and colonized. All the cultural systems and statements have been constructed in what is known as “The Third Space of Enunciation. ” When European powers occupied different nations, they did not carry with them just their economic ambitions but also brought with them their culture and their language. They thought that their interests lie only by mixing with the local natives and local cultures.

When people between the two languages and two natures intermixed with each other and incorporate each other cultures then what emerges is the third language, or third culture that has the essence of both the cultures. But it is most of the colonized people who adopt the culture of the colonizers. For example, a Parsi living in Bombay must have inherited the tradition of typical Parsi culture from his ancestors but while living in India, they must have also incorporated all the traits of culture so imbibed of Muslim and an Indian- a suppressed member of Indian society.

Thus Bhabha claims, “These hyphenated, hybridized cultural conditions are also forms of a vernacular cosmopolitanism that emerges in multicultural societies and explicitly exceeds a particular national location. ” (Di Pirro: Online Edition) Homi Bhabha is a post colonist theorists, born in India and now teaching at Harvard University. His vision lies in his perspective to seek the world as it is moving within the cultural shifts but within own parameters.

Bhabha says culture lies between different spaces, or some narrow space or interval part allowing the movements and processes of human endeavours to bring about articulations in their cultural differences opening the space for interchanging and intermixing within the realm of differences. In his own words, “Cultural hybridity are those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences’ and which permit the overlap and displacement of domains of difference”.

(Grenfell 1998: Online Edition) The best example can be given of Seokkyo congregation members who made modifications of their own religious practices by keeping their traditional socio-cultural values and incorporating the features of Christian values and represented the cultural hybridity of Korean Protestantism. In this way, according to Chudosik, Protestantism has been transfused in the culture that Korean population so cherishes. (Jang 2007: 403)

Culture identity that we all owe ourselves to and take pride of is only a result of mixing of the different traits of two cultures. What a best example can be given then that of the food culture. During the British rule in India during the period 1800 – 1947 AD, there could be seen British’s cravings for the Indian food. British’s love for the food resulted in the adoption of the different food choices according to their taste and formed what in Indian language known as “Curry”.

It is a simple spice that has helped them to cook Indian spices. This period saw the emergence of Anglo-Indian cuisine so cherished by both British’s and Indians and also certain “Raj” traditions known as “high tea”, simply meaning late afternoon meal served with tea. Bhabhas whole concept of cultural hybridity and his perception can be seen in literature and media. When the first English Newspaper, named Hickey’s Bengal Gazette was published in India in 1779, it was a breakthrough in the way people perceived cultural hybridity.

Sake Dean Mahomet’s non-fiction travelogue published in 1779, “Travels of Dean Mahomet”, was the first literary piece written by an Indian in English, an emblem of cultural hybridity that saw the behavior and the living style of colonized Indians under the British rule. It was the credit of Dean Mahmoot to leave a legacy of trans-culturation of “shampoo”(Hair Soap) which came into wide spread use in the West through him. (History of Indian English Literature: Online Edition).

In 1945, “I Know where I am Going”, an exclusive movie of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, did a commendable job by generating a love story in the backdrop of cultural hybridity. The story shot in black and white in Scotland revolves around the lives of Scottish people in America. Joan Webster, a young Englishwoman from an English middle-class family with an independent and ambitious bent of mind goes to the Scottish isles to marry Sir Robert Bellinger, who is very old, and rich industrialist on the on the Isle of Kiloran.

The story revolves around a girl who was forced to wait on the Isle of Mull, among people whose language and culture was alien to her. Latin America has beckoned the role of transcultural interactions in their film industry. Since the Spanish conquest, we can see several dimensions preponderant in the Latin American cinema. They have created an imperialistic approach marking the superiority complex of the conquerors towards the conquered. They visualized how the interaction between the cultures led to entirely new face in the society.

“Though often dismissed simplistically as merely the mixing of local and foreign elements, characters, styles, and speech in particular films, hybrid culture, as theorized by Nestor Garcia Canclini, Involves a deeper interrogation of modes of cultural production. ” (Guneratne & Dissanayake 2003:104) The way Americanization and Japanization have intermingled into the Asia to create what is known as regionalization that goes beyond the dimensions of what Bhabha perceives as the cultural hybridity.

This intermingling of culture made Japan to adopt a central role as a mediator to develop cultural connections between the East Asia and United States. The cultural industry of Japan often recreates western cultural habits and enters into the market of East Asia- an absolute embodiment of cultural hybridity. For e. g. in fashion world, “Japan translates the American and European Ideas to form into a sense of pitch, color, taste and emotion” that it shares in common with East Asia. ” (Katzenstein & Shiraishi 2006:11)

Bhabha draws his theory from the light of psychoanalysis and deconstruction theories of Kuhn and like-minded theorists and his interpretative thought process culminates into the arena of politics. He states that there is no difference between theory and politics and there is an essence of ideological perspective in theory. His theoretical thoughts culminated into what Bhabha perceives as saying that we can always find a “liminal” or “interstitial” space between various disciplines. This liminal space for Bhabha is not only an idea but he saw it practically happening between the various cultures of nations or disciplines.

About the oppressed culture, he says that they are not merely mute spectators but takes part in the process of formation of a new identity, which is not just of conquerors or rulers or of the colonized people but entirely a “Third Space”. He emphasized to the point that neither colonists nor colonizers superimposed their culture on one another but there is a kind of struggle to create a new space among themselves in their social or economical cycle and opens the way for adoptions with adjustments.

As said by Edward and Gayatri Spivak, “Homi Bhabha has helped create the field of Post-Colonial theory. His seminal works, “Nation and Narration” (1990) and “The Location of Culture” (1994), bring Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis into a politically and culturally charged arena. The result is a discipline that addresses the nature of hybrids and that is itself a hybrid”. (ArtandCulture. com: Online Edition)

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Cultural Hybridity Globalization is a concept with many offsprings and cultural hybridity is one of the offsprings of globalization. It is the development of a new culture by blending different cultures over time through interaction and contact. The term is a universal concept that came into existence due to continuous interaction of people from different part of the world. For instance, an African studying in the United State tends to learn the US culture and unconsciously blend it into his own culture. This is how cultural hybridity came into being. Cultural hybridity basically refers to blending elements from different cultures. Any society where people from different cultures and traditions come together tend to have some elements of cultural hybridity. It may interest you to know that the concept of hybridity is everywhere. It is seen in everyday food we eat, the country we live as well as the language we speak. This is why experts are of the opinion that cultural hybridity blends cultural elements like food, language or music into another culture by modifying such elements to fit in cultural norms. In the nutshell, cultural hybridity has to do with cultures coming together to form something different and this is evident in food, countries, and languages. Types of Cultural Hybridity There are different types of cultural hybridity, some of them are; #1. Language Language is one of the areas where cultural hybridity is found. Most languages around the world have some parts borrowed from other cultures. For instance, the English language comprised of over 146 languages. Over time, different languages adapt from one another, thus bringing about a jumbo of different hybrid language. #2. Foods Food is another area where cultural hybridity is very obvious. In fact, fast food companies promote cultural hybridity in the area of food. They take foreign meals and localize it to their customers. Over time, these meals may unconsciously be part of their culture especially if they enjoy taking it. #3.Dressing Dressing is another area where cultural hybridity is very obvious. For instance, there are several Africa countries whose women cover their faces from men. Their faces can only be seen by their husbands, this is a dressing pattern peculiar to the Arabian, however, globalization has made some Africans to learn their religion and start dressing like them. Due to globalization, several countries have become a hybrid society where we have people from different cultures living there. In other words, the culture of these countries is a blend of cultures from different countries. A good example of this Canada. Canada always accepts immigrants from different countries, these combination of different cultures are what make Canada. Examples of Cultural Hybridity I experienced In Everyday Life #1. Music One of the examples of cultural hybridity I experience every day in Life in Music. Over time, I realized that most musicians sometimes blend different languages to come up with mindblowing songs. For instance, popular Artists like Shakira and J.LO have a way of bringing Spanish into their American songs. This will make the song more interesting and bring about more diversity to America. You see that incorporating Spanish or any other language into an America song, will bring about more diversity and makes people listening to the song to readily accept those incorporated cultures without challenges. Whenever I listen to Shakira’s songs, cultural hybridity is the next thing that comes to my mind. Over the years, she has perfected the art of incorporating Spanish into her song, thus making it breathtakingly interesting while deepening the diversity of America. Source:  https://awanthropology.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/cultural-hybridization/ #2. Food Another example of cultural hybridity I will be presenting is on food. And I will be sitting Kentucky Fried Chicken and Chinese Cuisine as an example. Fast foods are always on the vanguard in promoting cultural hybridity with different food. Kentucky fried chicken, for instance, is an American Fast food restaurant chains with headquarter in Louisville, Kentucky. The restaurant specializes in fried chicken with a presence in several countries around the world. Despite the fact that they still sell their fried chicken which is part of America food culture in different countries, they adjust the menus based on the country they operate while maintaining their brand. Over time, they have incorporated different culture into their menus. Also, some restaurants will blend a Yummy half north American and half foreign meals to come up with different cuisine like the Chinese meal. This is another great example of cultural hybridity we face in our daily life. Source: https://sociologydictionary.org/cultural-hybridization/

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• Lars Allolio-Näcke 2  

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Introduction

Hybridity is one of the most popular concepts in ( post ) colonial theory and grew up together with the cultural turn . In this context the “term” is taken for thinking along different cultural and social borders: between the center and periphery, black and white, oppressor and suppressed, rich north and poor south, and self and the other and between races, genders, bodies, and the resulting identities.

There is no predominant definition of hybridity found. The discourse on hybridity is manifold and is not to be forced into one single term or theory. Hybridity rather includes all terms and theories that deal with processes of identity and construction of otherness as a result of cultural contacts. The concepts of border(line) and boundary as marker of difference play a very prominent role; they are called into question, transgressed, relocated, displaced, suspended to be wildered, and call into question essentialist categories like race, gender, nation (state), and...

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Bhabha, H. K. (1990). The third space. Interview with homi bhabha. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 207–221). London: Lawrence & Wishart.

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Allolio-Näcke, L. (2014). Hybridity. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_144

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Ethical Lapses in the Medical Profession

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To the Editor:

Re “ Moral Dilemmas in Medical Care ” (Opinion guest essay, May 8):

It is unsettling, and dismaying, to read Dr. Carl Elliott’s account of moral lapses continuing to exist, if not thrive, in medical education. As a neurology resident in the early 1970s, I was assigned a patient who was scheduled to have psychosurgery.

He was a prisoner who had murdered a nurse in a hospital basement, and the surgery to remove part of his brain was considered by the department to be a therapeutic and even forward-looking procedure. This was despite its being widely discredited, and involving a prisoner who could not provide truly informed consent.

A fellow resident and I knew that refusing would almost certainly result in suspension or dismissal from the residency, so we anonymously contacted our local newspapers, whose reporting resulted in an overflow protest meeting, cancellation of the psychosurgery and legislative action placing conditions on the acceptance of informed consent by prisoners.

It is lamentable that even though bioethics programs are widely incorporated into medical education, moral and ethical transgressions remain a stubborn problem as part of medical structures’ groupthink.

As Richard Feynman has emphasized , doubt, uncertainty and continued questioning are the hallmarks of scientific endeavor. They need to be an integral element of medical education to better prepare young doctors for the inevitable moral challenges that lie ahead.

Robert Hausner Mill Valley, Calif.

I would like to thank Carl Elliott for exposing the “Moral Dilemmas in Medical Care.” There is a medical school culture that favors doctors as privileged persons over patients.

I can remember multiple patient interactions in medical school in which I thanked a patient for allowing me to examine them and apologized for hurting them during my exam of their painful conditions.

I was then criticized by attending physicians for apologizing to the patients. I was told, on multiple occasions, that the patient should be thanking me for the privilege of assisting in my education.

Medical training, in a medical school culture that favors the privilege of the medical staff over the rights and feelings of patients, needs to be exposed and changed.

Doug Pasto-Crosby Nashville The writer is a retired emergency room physician.

As a psychiatrist and medical ethicist, I commend Dr. Carl Elliott for calling attention to several egregious violations of medical ethics, including failure to obtain the patient’s informed consent. Dr. Elliott could have included a discussion of physician-assisted suicide and the slippery slope of eligibility for this procedure, as my colleagues and I recently discussed in Psychiatric Times .

For example, as reported in The Journal of Eating Disorders , three patients with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa were prescribed lethal medication under Colorado’s End-of-Life Options Act. Because of the near-delusional cognitive distortions present in severe anorexia nervosa, it is extremely doubtful that afflicted patients can give truly informed consent to physician-assisted suicide. Worse still, under Colorado law, such patients are not required to avail themselves of accepted treatments for anorexia nervosa before prescription of the lethal drugs.

Tragically, what Dr. Elliott calls “the culture of medicine” has become increasingly desensitized to physician-assisted suicide, nowadays touted as just another form of medical care. In the anorexia cases cited, informed consent may have been one casualty of this cultural shift.

Ronald W. Pies Lexington, Mass. The writer is on the faculty of SUNY Upstate Medical University and Tufts University School of Medicine, but the views expressed are his own.

Carl Elliot’s article on medical ethics was excellent. But it is not just in the medical profession that there exists the “subtle danger” that assimilation into an organization will teach you to no longer recognize what is horrible.

Businesses too have a culture that can “transform your sensibility.” In many industries executives check their consciences at the office door each morning. For example, they promote cigarettes; they forget they too breathe the air as they lobby against clean-air policies; they forget they too have children or grandchildren as they fight climate-friendly policies or resist gun-control measures. The list could go on.

In every organization, we need individuals to say no to policies and actions that may benefit the organization but are harmful, even destructive, to broader society.

Colin Day Ann Arbor, Mich.

Re “ Columbia’s Protests Also Bring Pressure From a Private Donor ” (front page, May 11):

Universities are meant to be institutions of higher learning, research and service to the community. They are not items on an auction block to be sold to the highest bidder.

Universities that sell off their policy platform to spoiled one-issue donors who threaten to throw a tantrum no longer deserve our respect. Grant-making foundations should not be grandstanding online. Give money, or don’t, but don’t call a news conference about it.

If Columbia caves, why should prospective students trust it as a place where they can go to become freethinkers and explore their own political conscience as they begin to contemplate the wider world and issues of social justice?

This is a real test of Columbia and its leadership. I do not envy its president, Nemat Shafik, who has few good choices and no way to make everyone happy. What she should not sell is her integrity, or the university’s. She should stand up to these selfish donors. Learn to say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Carl Henn Marathon, Texas

Re “ Book Bans? So Open a Bookstore ” (Arts, May 13):

Deep respect for the American novelist Lauren Groff and her husband, Clay Kallman, for opening the Lynx, their new bookstore in Gainesville, Fla. The store focuses on offering titles among the more than 5,100 books that were banned in Florida schools from July 2021 through December 2023.

To all the book clubbers and haters of bans: Order straight from the Lynx.

Fight evil. Read books.

Ted Gallagher New York

Re “ Keep a Firm Grip on Those Mickey Mouse Balloons. It’s the Law ” (front page, May 9):

Balloons are some of the deadliest ocean trash for wildlife, as mentioned in your article about Florida’s expected balloon release ban.

Plastic balloon debris poses a significant threat to marine life, often mistaken for food or becoming entangled in marine habitats, leading to devastating consequences for our fragile ocean ecosystems.

As the founder of Clean Miami Beach, an environmental conservation organization, I’m concerned about the impact of plastic pollution on Florida’s wildlife and coastal areas. Florida’s stunning beaches and diverse marine life are not only treasures to us locals but also draw millions of tourists each year.

Because of the dangers, intentional balloon releases have been banned in many cities and counties across the state. A poll released by Oceana showed that 87 percent of Florida voters support local, state and national policies that reduce single-use plastic. Gov. Ron DeSantis must waste no time in signing this important piece of legislation into law.

Our elected officials should continue to work together to address environmental issues so Floridians and tourists can enjoy our beautiful state without its being marred by plastic pollution.

Sophie Ringel Miami Beach