Transculturation describes the notion of merging and converging cultures. Where transculturation affects ethnicity and issues, the term ethnic-convergence is sometimes used. Originally, it was used as a term to articulate contact between empires ie. colonialism.
The term allows for the application of different perspectives to explain itself… because it is an ensemble of of heterogeneous elements, transculturation requires an interdisciplinary approach to understand its full richness. It urges a historical approach as it takes place over time - often long stretches of time - and in specific contexts of border experience (that is, where two cultures or more meet either peacefully or violently. This definition assumes that transcultured identities are something constantly evolving, continuously negotiated and nonessentialist. It does not abolish difference; it is syncretic. The different components do not lose their individuality; they maintain their particular identity and flavour. The elements exist in a dynamic, evolving and sometimes uneasy tension.
Transculturation relates to and opposes to these terms
Using interdisciplinarity and convergences between different artistic traditions as a metaphor for transculturation.
With my choreographic development, I wanted to focus on how ‘scratching’, or in other words, sampling and transculturation collide. As an artist who works from a diasporic perspective having grown up across Asia and South-East Asia, I’m interested in where transculturation also relates to ethnic-convergence and creative discipline convergence. Merging and converging cultures to reveal, to lose and to create new cultural phenomena.
Related terms:
postcolonialism
multiculturalism
diaspora
hybridity
Transculturation across practices and cultural constellations
Transculturation names a process of cultural contact in which elements are destroyed and reconstructed in a process of transfer which aims at renewing the promises modernity.
Kept traditions and identities radically in flux.