Preserving the Past in a Globalized World

Maher Asaad Baker
Greener Together
Published in
4 min readSep 10, 2024

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Culture has been an important aspect of people’s lives for many centuries and with the increased globalization, the question of conservation arises, these the preservation of cultural assets, practices as well and information. In this regard, Indigenous cultures are precious and unique sources of global orientations, experiences, voices, and creations. However, the forces of globalization threaten the existence of these enlarged cultures.

For the indigenous people, the Western consumer and media culture means assimilation and loss of languages and lifestyles. But still managing a huge number of organizations dealing with the promotion of multiculturalism through community programs and technologies, governmental grants, and cooperation with partners from different countries. There is a middle ground which is an option of moderate interaction with the activities of the modern world hence retaining their indigenous culture.

Currently, Indigenous people live in approximately ninety countries and their total number reaches 370 million. These groups are still perpetuating social, cultural, economic, and political activities that are in some way or another deviant from the activities of the main or the majority societies. Indigenous people offer a frame of huge diversity in the international area in terms of ways of life, media, visible, and performing arts, spiritual beliefs, and language.

Special emphasis should be paid to the fact that Indigenous languages are the bearers of traditions, worldviews, values, and people’s identities. Still, considering the number of languages, which is approximately 6700 currently being used in the world, it has been identified that as many as forty percent of these languages are endangered or at threat of being endangered — the overwhelming majority of them being Indigenous languages. Thus, the death of a language also means losing a culture and its related stories and histories, arts included as well.
Globalization results in the emergence of the cult of world consumers and media which originates from the western countries. Therefore, indigenous youth embrace other youth cultures as well as language instead of maintaining indigenous cultures as well as language.

Many global indigenous people have united to protect culturally authentic contexts, approaches, and ways of knowing that have been threatened by globalization and neoliberalism, which attempt to assimilate societies.

Some of the cultural posts are community cultural centre museums and Indigenous Knowledge Centres that create programs that involve the gathering of oral histories, genealogies, Medicinal knowledge Arts, and performances. Digital repatriation initiatives also create virtual spaces for the separation and storage of the fragments of the decentralized cultural identity that is lost in museums and libraries across the world.

The passing of which inter alia entails the transfer of the intangible, undocumented indigenous cultural practice from the elders to the youths. All cultures choose Indigenous elders as the keepers of cultural values and as the people who act as responses to the knowledge bank, history, culture, beliefs, and languages.

Oral tradition is another way that is used to pass old generation stories and also to pass lessons to the young ones. Cultural revitalization projects are there all over the world where people are attempting to write down what elders have to offer before the knowledge escapes them.

Language nests function as early years education facilities that are focused on the task of reversing language and writing extinction among young learners. Indigenous broadcasting and publishing funded by the government disseminated languages throughout the nations and generated new material in indigenous languages.

Indigenous activists and community language warriors also engage in grassroots advocacy for the use of peripheral Indigenous languages in on-top communicative practices and peripheral language education.
About the problem of stabilizing funding sources, one must state that it is one of the most vital issues when speaking about cultural renewal strategies that require Sponsorship from cultural institutions. Funding is required to be recurrent especially given the dynamism in the political administration of governments and funding agencies.

They also have internal conflicts as to how the process of maintaining the anthropology of tribally preserved Indigenous nations and the potential for cultural shift and development can be solved. More relevant are the consequences that climate change brings which erases the very fundamentals of cultures associated with their ancestral places and earth.

Continuity of Indigenous people as it goes to the next level of implementation also remains critical, this in turn, entails addressing threats within and outside the Indigenous people. Global action has to be in a position to defend and affirm the right to the collective assertion, identity, and cultural autonomy of a plethora of Indigenous people in a growing globalized environment.

Maher Asaad Baker
ماهر أسعد بكر
https://maher.solav.me

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