Mi cultura

I come from South America, from a small country called Uruguay. It is located between Brazil and Argentina, we have three million people living within the territory and, approximately, half a million abroad. The notion of culture is a very tricky one. I prefer to talk about cultures, not culture, or even better about narratives on cultures. In this sense, those narratives about cultures are seen as language articulations that establish as truthful certain aspects and condition about a particular group of people or a particular territory. As every discourse, these ones are arbitrary, contradictory, but at the same time, determinant about ways of seeing and portraying. We expect that the other would portray as "expected" in guides. To make things worse, those cultures have unclear boundaries, and they are not only made from features, but from practices, meanings and discourse. In this sense, a narrative will be the particular meanings certain ways of doing and seeing things have for a certain group of people.

Also, we have to consider that those narratives are constructed by internal struggles between several positions (gender, class, ethnics, etc), struggles that are experienced in terms of power distribution. This is a way to introduce the idea that what I am going to develop in the next paragraph it is not really a culture, it is not really Uruguay or myself as a Uruguayan representing Canada in Jamaica, but a possible narrative based on my experiences, sensations, knowledge and bias.

I have incorporated some photographs taken last year in the place that we consider the main and most beautiful part of my city, Montevideo. This is an area beside the Rio de la Plata. One of them I like it particularly because shows a group of children playing soccer. This game has shaped, or in fact acted as a metaphor that involves values and attitude about the way we see reality and the community. First, equality, in a soccer game the two teams are equal, hence even if your team comes from a very poor country and the other not, in the field you are the same. Secondly, clear rules but also the possibility to question them in front of a judge that should consider your position and arguments and that should treat you with fair respect according to those same rules. Thirdly, the capacity to be creative in the field both as a group and as an individual, being generours, cooperative, belonging to something. Usually in South America the public does not only celebrate the winner, but especially the good player, the best athlete, the best mate in the field, the generosity and the sense of group created by sharing a goal.

I have selected one feature to describe my culture, as I want to see it, but really how it is remained a mystery, or really a work in progress to discover it as I am exploring also my own identity.

Finally, I was thinking these days when I found myself in a different culture, in a particular culture that do not really care about all of this details, if being inter-culturally effective is really possible and if it is really necessary? I was listening the other day to Slavoj Zizek who said, more or less, that the identity of a persona is really attached to one community, that we are not meant to belong to more than one place, and expecting really another thing is just globalization rhetoric. Maybe we have to think if we are not forcing ourselves to be part of a global citizenship that does not really exist. We all have roots, identities that we care too much, and usually (at least for me) trips have served to strengthen that identity, more than challenge it. Because, maybe, all journeys are just another way of exploring ourselves, more than anything else.