Cultures in Process: Encounter and Experience is a wide-ranging collection of essays from the more traditional areas of literary, cultural, and linguistic scholarship, but also from the performance arts, ethnography, gender studies, musicology, sociology, and psychology. The first section deals with the central question of process, and provides examples of how it may be seen as evolving. The second set looks at forms and experiences of cultural encounter that shape social practices and modes of cultural expression, be they those of expatriates in India and Spain, musical traditions in China and performance art in Brazil, or the clash of tradition and modernity in sexual practices in the Arabian Gulf region. This followed by cultural encounter from the vantage point of linguistics: language and culture in intercultural encounters, code-switching among first and second generation bilinguals, and the connections between identity, language, and culture in translation. The analysis of literature is at the center of the fourth selection of contributions: encounter and identity formation in the Indian diaspora, conflicting memories of home and cultural heritage with the new cultural memory, and identity formation in the context of socially dictated racial prejudices. The final papers provide case studies of cultural processes at multifarious levels – including the ways in which South African concepts and practices of “indigenous” culture have been subject to (re-)definition in a changing political context, but also the meaning of personhood and identity when normative concepts are called into question by illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, and, finally, two possible concepts of dynamic process in culture as we read Carlyle against the foil of Warburg.
