- Culture, ceremony, and the making of who we are – meta-culture, cross-cultural exchange, and the social responsibility of authenticity
It was the morning of the Sinhala and Tamil New Year – Avurudu – and I was standing in the narrow lane beside my grandmother’s house in a Colombo neighbourhood that no longer quite resembles itself.
In the compound of this house stood a large jackfruit tree under which, in earlier times, giant fruits would fall into the yards of three neighbouring houses. That tree had long since disappeared, but even this house had been made into an office.
At quarter past six, however, and without any prior notice, a lady whom I had never met before appeared behind the garden wall, and passed me a plate of fresh kokis and konda kevum in a sheet of newsprint. She said nothing else except for sharing a smile. And I bowed my head in silence. It was all there was to be said.
This unpremeditated and unplanned activity, for which no organisation was involved at all, is culture. Culture is not locked away in some museum, nor is it contained in a policy document. No, culture cannot even be put into a tour brochure.
Culture is the framework that holds together a social system’s meaning-making process. It furnishes, according to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “the webs of significance man has spun”. What we must understand is that culture functions on several different levels at once. We have the living culture of day-to-day existence, the gift over the garden wall, and then we have what anthropologists are now calling, ‘meta-culture’ – the talk about culture, the conscious portrayal of culture, the point where a community stops to reflect and tell a story.
Indeed, in concrete terms, this would mean that culture is not an afterthought, something that is added to the structure of our social lives as a decorative flourish, and rather something which creates that structure to begin with.
Thus, when a community comes together to participate in a ceremony, to light a lamp on an auspicious date, or to make a special dish for a special reason, it is doing much more than simply observing tradition for the sake of doing so. Instead, it is reaffirming the agreements, implicit, ancient, and perpetually negotiated, which affirm their membership in one another’s lives.
Collective effervescence
The Sinhala and Tamil New Year festival, observed each year in April during the passage of the sun from Pisces into Aries in Sri Lanka, is among the most architecturally elaborate of these rituals. Rather than one ritual, it is a series of interlocking rituals conducted in a careful progression according to a precise cosmic schedule: the suspension of labour, the lighting of the new fire, the preparation of the first meal on an auspicious date, the oil massage, and the initiation of new business.
The ‘nekath,’ or the favourable times calculated through astrological calculation, governs all of the change. What is remarkable about the people on the island, from the apartments in Colombo to villages in the dry zone, aligning themselves according to the same time frame, is how easily we have come to normalise such a collective synchronisation.
What the New Year celebration is doing at its most profound level is what the sociologist Émile Durkheim refers to as collective effervescence – that is to say, the feeling of solidarity that arises from the common participation in ritualistic activities.
The reason why the ceremony seeks to repair relations should be no surprise either. The practice of paying respects to one’s elders and exchanging gifts is by no means a courtesy alone. Rather, it is a means of reconciliation and recognition of one’s place within the family structure. The kitchen becomes, for those days, a site of cultural transmission, where the eldest woman in the household passes not only a recipe but a worldview to the youngest hands helping beside her.
This is not, however, an unusual feature specific only to Sri Lanka. On a global comparative level, what stands out as most interesting about these types of celebrations is just how similar they are in logic, despite the enormous cultural differences between them. Nowruz in Persia, Songkran in Thailand, Avurudu among the Sinhalese and Tamil populations, and Pohela Boishakh in Bengal are all celebrated around the same time, all use either water or fire as cleansing tools, and all revolve around food and family celebrations.
This is no accident. These parallels indicate something fundamental about human consciousness, which requires the marking of time as a social event, breaking up the linear process of existence through shared ceremony, and defining the individual within a community that extends back to ancestral time and forward to responsibilities yet to be carried out.
While the exact nature of the ceremonies varies greatly in form, from the konda kevum of Sri Lanka to the haft-sin table of Iran to the water splashes of Songkran, the underlying human mechanics are quite consistent.
The inherent dynamism of culture
This would make it very convenient for us to conclude this discussion by saying that culture is something static and preserved. But this is a lie. Culture cannot be static. It evolves if it lives or decays if it stagnates.
The New Year of my youth was different from the one that my parents enjoyed during their teenage years in the 1960s, and that again was vastly different from what my grandparents experienced in the 1940s. While the ‘nekath’ timings remained constant in terms of being declared via either the radio or later through television, the geographical parameters kept shrinking. The process of urbanisation had ensured that the lady who lived next door no longer knew our names and the jackfruit tree had fallen down, but that plate of kokis was always passed over the fence.
It is the inherent dynamism of culture: it is neither stagnant nor infinitely flexible. It has structure, which turns out to be exceptionally resilient – the ritual, the food, the orientation towards family, and surfaces which adapt to circumstances and incorporate new technologies, new landscapes, and new demography.
Nowadays, Avurudu greetings can be exchanged instantly via WhatsApp. Families living in London, Melbourne, or Zurich broadcast the lighting of the fire for those left behind. The second generation of Sri Lankans living abroad perform the rituals in the absence of gardens, jackfruit trees, and a neighbourhood which holds common memories – but they perform the rituals because the necessity answered by the ritual is not geographical; it is human.
The dark side
However, at this point, we have to take a look at the darker side of modern cultural processes: the fusion of culture and marketing.
Over the past few decades, cultural rituals have often been utilised for purely economic gain. Cultural festivals become an opportunity for corporate branding and promotion. The hotel industry promotes ‘authentic cultural experiences’ for tourists, who are looking for “staged authenticity,” according to Dean MacCannell.
The supermarket sells traditional sweets in boxed versions that break the connection between the food item and the work and social bonds involved in its production. It need not be negative, as trade and culture have been linked forever, but there is an underlying problem here. When culture becomes the means of marketing, then the rationale of the market, which includes novelty and consumption for personal pleasure, takes precedence over that of the ritual.
Even more disturbing is the phenomenon of what one might call ‘phony cultural performances,’ artificial creations that adopt the visual language of tradition but divest it of any real meaning. Such creations include Avurudu celebrations organised solely for camera shots, the ‘authentic village experience’ packages erected out of thin air next to highways, and the cultural shows put together by planning boards that themselves have no prior experience with the customs they are supposed to portray.
The social consequences of such imitations are serious indeed. They accustom people to viewing their culture from an external perspective, treating it more as performance than practice. They emphasise showmanship over involvement. Moreover, they generate a perilous circle in which the false gradually supplants the genuine.
Children raised on television Avurudu celebrations may come to view the polished, scripted version as the genuine article, whereas the raw, unpolished, neighbourhood festival becomes somehow inferior.
Preserving culture
The point is, as I see it, that there is a responsibility attached to the organisers, supporters, representatives, and presenters of cultural spectacles in our society. In addition to being accurate, this involves a kind of ecological responsibility in that it requires that cultural representation must help to strengthen, rather than weaken, the life practices from which it stems.
There is a responsibility here for heritage institutions, media companies, sponsoring corporations, and governments alike. The question has to go beyond the purely spectacular, in asking whether this or that spectacle strengthens or weakens the ability of the community to sustain its culture. The answer is bound to be an unsettling one, since real cultural practices can be humble and untranslatable.
This is what many academic debates on the topic of cultural preservation fail to understand. The issue is not whether cultures need to change; cultures do change and will continue to do so. The issue here is whether such change would preserve the functional heart of culture – the ability to form belongingness, the ability to convey certain values, and finally, a common language of meaning that makes the lives of individuals mutually comprehensible.
Seen from this angle, cultural events do not represent a welcome break from the routine but instead, in a term that I coined in my work on colonial collecting, ‘dependency archives,’ a record of the many ways in which people depended on each other, and thus, what made societies rather than just groups of individuals.
By deciding what cultural expressions and traditions to preserve, by teaching particular lessons in school, by funding certain cultural institutions while allowing others to perish, we choose to maintain the structure of belongingness.
As a nation that has been fully subjected to the experience of cultural disruption brought about by colonisation, including the appropriation of cultural artefacts, the suppression of cultural practices, and the revision of cultural history, Sri Lanka is particularly justified to consider these issues very seriously.
The debates on the repatriation of cultural artefacts being conducted at present in Europe in the context of museum ethics are far from being an academic issue concerning international law. These are concerns about the wholeness of a society, which becomes impossible to achieve when the physical and symbolic representation of its very cultural essence is dispersed in other societies’ museums. The repatriation of cultural artefacts is essentially a repatriation of history.
I thus return to the lane, the wall, and the tray of warm sweets. Without any need for ceremonial formality, official endorsement, or any cultural literacy programme, two strangers demonstrated the very first rule of culture: that the distinction between oneself and the other may be flexible and fluid, and that such distinction is best addressed and negotiated through the means of food, ritual, and reaching out beyond whatever wall may be separating us.
That, in the end, is why culture matters. Not because it is old. Not because it is ours. But because it is the most sophisticated technology human beings have ever developed for the simple, necessary, and endlessly complicated work of living together.
In an age when meta-cultural discourse threatens to replace lived experience, when marketing logic infiltrates every ceremonial space, and when fabricated spectacles compete with authentic practice, we have a collective responsibility to protect the conditions under which culture can remain alive.
The plate of konda kevum over the garden wall was not a performance. It was not staged for cameras or funded by sponsors. It was culture doing what culture does best: creating connection where there was none, reminding strangers that they are, in fact, neighbours, and affirming that the most profound human technologies require no electricity, no budget, and no audience, only the willingness to share.
(The writer is an ethnographer and art historian specialising in material culture, critical museum studies, and participatory research methodologies. As a member of Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era [PPROCE], the Netherlands and Dutch Research Council [NWO] committees, she engages with repatriation and decolonisation debates. She currently holds a NIAS-NIOD-KITLV Research Fellowship in the Netherlands)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)