I (admittedly as a member and/or tiny cog of bogey-man #1 in many of these ‘homogenizing globalization’ stories) am always of two minds about trying to preserve cultural artefacts as living entities (the value of the preservation of records of history I’m 100% on board with).
‘Change’ is hardly a synonym for ‘improvement’, indeed the opposite has proven to be true more than a few times; but when you focus on preserving a culture or aspect of a culture as a living entity, you run into the potentially sticky fact that ‘culture’ is something that survives by a process where the old people successfully, by suasion or by force, imprint their mores onto the young people faster than they die. This isn’t always a pretty process, indeed it frequently devolves into reactionary crackdowns on ‘kids these days’ with their noise music, disobedience, disrespectful slang, and utterly unacceptable dress.
How do you draw the line between trying to preserve delicate cultures (without economies of scale) from the onslaught of the Hollywood/McDonalds-industrial complex, ever hungry for new consumers; and actually spending UN money helping the most reactionary elements of a society force the next generation to live in their own image (with all the human rights/self-determination issues that that can raise, ‘traditional’ cultures often having more than a few warts of their own, especially if you are unlucky enough to be a woman or an untouchable or other error of birth…)
It’s undeniable, and ugly, what has been, and continues to be, done in order to ‘open new markets’ for assorted homogenous global material cultures; but it’s also the case that cultural change is a constant thing, and to try to ossify a culture is a direct, forceful, imposition on those within the culture(mostly the young, and radicals) who would change it.
