(...)The second aim of this book is to challenge the assumption on which much contemporary discussion of religion, culture and civilisation is based, namely that in looking at religions or cultures we are looking at separate, discrete and monolithic entities.
There are obviously distinct cultures in this world, as there are distinct languages and ethnic types, but they are far from being closed and have, over time, interacted creatively as well as antagonistically with each other.
Much of what is supposedly "European" comes from other places, and is nonetheless European for that: the dominant - but never sole - religion in Europe derives from events in Palestine two millenia ago; the scripts and mathematics of Europe have a similar Middle Eastern provenance; the languages of Europe, including in regard to domestic matters such as food and sex, bear a Middle Eastern imprint.
How much of European food comes from Europe is another matter too - without tea, coffee, the potato, rice, the tomato and sundry fruits, herbs and spices, we would be left with a pretty miserable gruel indeed.
The same is true of literature: the great writers of all nations, like Shakespeare and Cervantes, drew on other cultures, stories, motifs. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2004, dedicated to Arab literature, the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfuz argued that Arab literature drew on three great sources of inspiration: pre-Islamic poetry and told tales, Islamic culture and modern Western literature.
So it has always been. The history of peoples is not national but cosmopolitan; not one, as nationalist myth would have us believe, of seperate blocs gradually and belligerently getting to know each other, but of a constant process of cultural and commercial interaction, redefinition of boundaries and mutual enrichment. This is true today, in an age of globalisation, hybridity and "world music", but was true centuries and millenia ago.(...)
Fra forordet til Fred Halliday: 100 Myths About the Middle East, s.13-14
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Uh, ja godt at huske på midt i al den snak om etnicitet. Liiige det med maden er nok især sjovt, og et godt eksempel. Før menneskerne i Nordeuropa fik mange af de krydderier og grøntsager som udgør størstedelen af madkulturen i dag, levede vi jo ikke af grød, men havde en ret varieret og især helt, helt anderledes madkultur, baseret på planter og urter, kornsorter og tilberedelsesmetoder som for størstedelen er gået i glemmebogen. Det var et andet folk, en anden kultur (i kontakt med andre, hele tiden, naturligvis). Især i dk er det vist gået hurtigt.. har en kogebog fra 1880 (dansk), den er stærkt påvirket af andre områder, men al maden er HELT anderledes, selv den "etniske", fra hvad man spiser i dag, selv frøken jensens er bare en helt anden, og glemt verden, som ville få min kræsne svigerfamilie til at rynke på næsen og erklære det mærkeligt.
just my two cents..
Ja, mad er bare et super eksempel, bl.a. fordi der knytter sig så mange forestillinger (konstruktioner) af national art til fødeindtaget og dets ritualer. Og så er det nyttigt lige at læse om frikadeller her: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meatball
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