Traditional Cultures
There are many peoples around the globe whose lives and livelihoods are
still intimately dependent upon the land.
Khanty Fishing Camp in Siberia
While these peoples may share, to a greater or lesser degree, some of the
tools and resources of the industrialized world -- tractors and rifles,
electricity and telephones -- they do not participate entirely in the
industrial, wagework economy of the nation-state, nor in the values,
beliefs and institutions which sustain it. Their lives are shaped by
loyalties to their local community and by adaptation to the specific
environment in which they find themselves.
Cowboy Families in South Central New Mexico
Outnumbered and overpowered, they often find themselves at odds with the
demands of the larger, industrialized world within which their communities
exist.
Culture, in its anthropological sense, refers to the beliefs, values and
behaviors shared by a group of people which enable them as a group to
adapt to and to modify the world around them. Years of experiencing
conflict and difference with other groups often transform some of these
values, beliefs, and behaviors into symbols of group identity, such that
any threat to them is considered an attack on the very nature of the
cultural group itself. Persistent cultures, as the anthropologist Edward
Spicer called them, are those which, despite the most violent attacks on
their population, their land and their leadership, have sustained a sense
of group identity by clinging to these identity symbols. Group identity
can be bound to symbols associated with
ethnicity...
Tigua Indians at Tortugas in the 1920s
religion...
Las Posadas in Doņa Ana, New Mexico
occupation...
Fall Cleanup Branding, Crow Flats, New
Mexico
It is often expressed through behaviors such as
ritual...
Tortugas Matachines
architecture...
Ranch House
music...
Josie Ostos, Fok Arts Apprentice, Learns from Master Nacho
Barela
as well as storytelling, and craft.
Tradition reflects a group's sense of its past.
Segregated Booker T. Washington School, Las Cruces,
1930s
Far from being something passively inherited from the past, the sense of
tradition is continually being recreated in the present as groups respond
to external forces and internal factions which threaten their sense of
themselves.
Old St. Genevieve's Church, Landmark of Historic Las
Cruces
The loss of leadership, the sudden alteration of the physical and social
context through relocation or industrialization, or the erosion of
language and traditional practices, any of these can provoke anxiety, even
hopelessness within a community, especially a community that does not
understand how these forces are embedded in the larger social and
political context in which they live.
The Heritage Center aims to help communities conserve and strengthen their
core symbols of cultural identity by understanding how these elements
function in the community, how they are or will be impacted by external
forces, and assisting in developing a conservation strategy for them.
