When people want to amusingly describe my interests, they fall back to a format of [human activity] + [‘bizzare’ country], and say: “Yotam must be reading about Pakistani carpentry while listening to Czech jazz” . This style of humor is also present in various sitcoms.
It works because we begin from some strange activity, and exaggerate the weirdness by moving it to an unreasonable area. Metal music is weird, Egyptian metal is niche, absurd. The implicit assumption here is that there exists a clean, simple version: there is simply “Metal”, and the adjective “Egyptian” adds to it some peculiar features. Philosophers may be tempted to call the “clean, neutral” version a “platonic ideal”.
But where does this “clean version” come from? Sometimes the answer is historical: the Renaissance began as a phenomenon in northern Italy, so if we consider the painter Stanislaw Smosterzelnik it makes sense to call him an example of the Polish Renaissance. After all, even the people in that period referred to these painting and architectural styles as “Italian” — meaning they were aware that they poles were making a derivative of an “original” renaissance.
And the pursuit of this “source” is important: if we consider Futurism and Fascism only as general, “European,” philosophical, political-cultural phenomena, we may miss the great overlap in their time and place. For scholars of literature and architecture the definitions of “French literature”, “modernisme (Catalan modernism) architecture”, etc. are of great importance. But how important is this local particularity? Sometimes, let’s say in Impressionism, we discover artists from very different regions contributing together to a common style with mutual influences. Dadaism had a number of foci, which are difficult to separate. But of course a geographical area is just one way to segment phenomena. Why not divide by politics or economic situation? The simplest answer is that language often creates the sharpest boundaries between tactical cultural phenomena. But to delve deeper into this question we will need other articles.
The dash in “Marxism-Leninism” indicates the adaptation of Marxist theory to the conditions of Tsarist Russia, which was enormous in size, full of ethnic minorities, more agricultural and less industrialized than the countries for which Marx had predicted a revolution. Later came Mao’s famous quote: “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” But if we think about it, in fact no industrialized country sustained a socialist economy before 1945, and even then, not as a result of a revolution. So “Marxism for the poor” is, in a sense, the source. And because ideas react to each other and evolve over time, is it plausible to assume that the meaning of “socialism”, when installed in Eastern Europe, was substantially influenced by Stalin’s darkness? And yet, we do not call Marx a “German Marxist.”
In our age, any “neutral” cultural/technological object that simply ‘pops up’ one day is assumed to be American. One reason is that the USA has the undisputed cultural hegemony in the West. The second is the most beautiful thing about America: they take everything good and adopt for themselves. The iPhone is not a Syrian phenomenon, although Steve Jobs himself was born of Syrian descent. Blues is not an African style, but an African-American style. Even the new wave of French cinema (La Nouvelle Vague) would have remained a marginal phenomenon, a curiosity, had it not been for its tremendous impact it had on Hollywood.
It always fascinates me to find the unexpected sources of things: say, how the esoteric demoscene of Central and Northern Europe created the generation of pioneers of the current computer game graphics, or the connection between the Russian aliyah and the Israeli high-tech industry. Or let’s say the huge impact that a fairly small group of people without military or political power can have, like the Bauhaus in the Weimar Republic.
So when I study Russian Buddhism, I’m not looking to take [a familiar object] and throw it in [a random place]. I am looking to find the furnaces in which phenomena present in our lives were forged. I believe a lot can be learned from the way things are made, whether it be the development of aircraft carriers, the birth of the office chair, or the release of the DSM-1 in psychology.
