Last Saturday, the Italo-American TV presenter Mike Bongiorno was awarded the honour of a state funeral. It was official recognition of his role in the cultural process that saw the people of Italy's post-war regions transformed into "Italians". In different circumstances, however, one could easily imagine him being criticised for "Americanising" Italians.

In fact, he was. Early in Mr Bongiorno's career, the scholar Umberto Eco wrote a satirical essay called The Phenomenology Of Mike Bongiorno, later widely translated as a portrait that captured the general character of quiz-masters all over the world; especially their adulation of knowledge understood as memorised information, no matter how trivial, and their solemn respect for knowledge that can be, literally, cashed.

Mr Eco was not criticising "Americanisation" per se, nor was he doing it in the name of some regional folk culture that needed special conservation. He criticised what he considered a crass attitude to culture, which was being spread by a commercialised TV (even if public in name) imitating American formats.

The criticism rankled. Mr Bongiorno thought of himself as assimilating American quizzes within an Italian model. So what was he really doing?

In this 50-year-old question we can see a familiar concern. In our globalisation-obsessed age, we speak of the "McDonaldisation" of society, meaning the homogenisation of culture. But the McDonalds "experience" in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China (or, for that matter, Malta) is not the same as that in the US. And McDonalds sells McHuevo in Uruguay, McBurrito in Mexico and the Maharajah Mac (lamb, not beef) in India.

Are these signs that McDonalds (or any other global brand) really is taking over? Or that a global brand is being "creolised" or assimilated in creative local ways?

These questions are considered by Peter Burke, professor Emeritus of cultural history at Cambridge in his recent work, Cultural Hybridity (Polity). He shows how they raise issues that are older, broader and closer to our lives than we might think.

How much older? In terms of world history, it has been some time since any culture was truly isolated or independent. Intellectuals in far-flung empires, with their large urban centres of exchange and their frontiers, were, to different degrees, concerned about the cultural outcomes.

The idea of cultural "accommodation" was deployed by Cicero and by the Jesuit missionary (mandarin among the mandarins) Matteo Ricci (1552-1610). Joseph Ratzinger frowns on religious "syncretism", but a Dominican friar got in first in 16th-century Mexico.

Cultural "fusion" is how the history of Brazil was described by a 19th-century German botanist and explorer, Karl von Martius. "Assimilation" and "appropriation"? The notions go back to Church fathers like Augustine, Jerome and Origen (thinking of how Deuteronomy discusses the appropriation of a slave or beautiful captive).

The concerns are so old because the objects, processes and situations involved are very broad - going beyond the issues of food and vocabulary most often discussed.

Those ministers of glistening rude health, the dizzying dancing women of Brazil's carnivals, took their place in the streets with the Africanisation of the Mediterranean carnival - where women's traditional place was the balcony.

The sprawling inter-generational family novel is incarnated in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, John Galsworthy's Forsythe Saga and Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy - one sometimes influencing the other, but all rooted in local soil. Sometimes the influence is circular: Akira Kurasawa's Western-inspired films, The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, were respectively "translated" as The Magnificent Seven and For A Fistful Af Dollars.

The process touches Malta, too. The "cultural purists" of the 19th-century provided one reaction to an earlier phase of extensive cultural exchange - with their counterparts present in every continent. However, some of the prized "pure Maltese" exhibits, like għana (folk-singing), on closer scrutiny exhibit a variety of influences.

The late composer Charles Camilleri demonstrated, with learning and musical panache, the European and Arab "synthesis" that għana's music represents. But that leaves out the influence - clearly discernible during some lead guitarists' improvisations and openly acknowledged - of Country and Western music.

These issues are close to Maltese cultural life in another sense. As Mr Burke shows, concern about cultural hybridity tends to become more intense on frontiers and in centres of commercial exchange. With EU membership, the sense of Malta being a geographic frontier has increased - not least but not only because of irregular immigration.

National economic policy is seeking to position Malta as a virtual "frontier" of governance, not just in ICT; even by special provisions concerning financial services and online gaming, and the other possibilities for patents and open-source product development have been canvassed. All of these bring (legal) immigrant workers to the country and new possibilities for cultural exchange.

Not all outcomes of cultural hybridity are equal. Some are ingenious, some mediocre; some inspired, others dismaying. We need the full range of voices - from the purists and counter-globalisers to those championing some new "synthesis" and "creolisation" - to evaluate the various outcomes.

So it is a pity that, as the country begins to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Independence, the championing of "cultural identity" seems to be almost monopolised by those urging resistance to hybridity.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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