The culture wars: ethnographic insights from around the world

Join the HUM:Global semester lecture.

In this lecture Senior Lecture from RMIT, Australia, and Nordic Humanities Center (NHC) fellow John Postill discusses contemporary culture wars as a global phenomenon. Despite huge variety, Postill argues that by engaging deeply with ethnographic monographs it is possible to pinpoint several shared features concerning struggles for local cultural.

Abstract

While much has been written about the culture wars in the Anglosphere – often to blithely dismiss them as right-wing moral panics – transregional and global accounts of this complex phenomenon are rare. In this talk I draw from the anthropological literature on North America, Latin America, East Africa and Southeast Asia to advance a comparative theory of the culture wars. Through rich ethnographic vignettes, I argue that despite their huge variety, all contemporary culture wars have several features in common.

First, they are all struggles to attain local cultural hegemony (Gramsci 1971) at a time when the global liberal order is in deep crisis. Second, rather than right-wing ploys, culture wars are socioeconomic conflicts over public morality and social identity involving two or more camps located along the ideological (left-centre-right) spectrum, with cultural liberalism/centrism (Burnyeat 2024) always in the mix. Third, culture wars are multimodal language wars fought not only on social media, but also via legacy media and face-to-face communication (Postill 2018). I end the talk on a methodological note by outlining the benefits for students of the culture wars and related topics (populism, polarisation, extremism, disinformation, etc) of reading full ethnographic monographs. This should be through prolonged immersion in texts rather than quick AI summaries. No machinic synthesis, I argue, can replace the embodied experience of reading about other human lives. To paraphrase Chairman Mao Zedong, let a hundred monographs blossom.

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