Music box
Alphonse Grenier, 1908-1980
1972
Québec, Canada
Wood, metal, glass, fabric
Collection : Musée
de la civilisation, Québec, Canada
74-148
The two scenes on this music box depict a group of disparate people, one stranger than the next, teeming from the folk artist’s imagination. In our musical montage, these characters become actors in a cultural metissage. Sounds, rhythms and world views clash or meld in a metissage that is alternately dissonant and harmonious.
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These are the thumbnails and texts for this alcove. They can be printed.
In the course of our lives, we talk. Our language mediates our culture and our identity. As our lives progress, we make discoveries, but above all we encounter other cultures, other identities. The endless exchanges of words, of ideas, of ways of being and existing. How rich, and how spiteful. A culture’s first instinct is to consider itself the best, yet we know that humanity has been intercultural and polyglot since the dawn of time. Depending on how generous people are, it works out well, or it works out badly. In today’s world every culture is the result of encounters, for good or ill, that humans have made since they first walked and talked. We’re all the same, but we’re also all Wallawalla, Nambikwara, Breton, Basque, Tutsi, Chechen, Samoyed, Ainu, Berber. Humanity is nourished on diversity.
Metissage: Cultures
No culture is pure, homogenous and monolithic. Everyone alive today, of whatever background, is a product of the great waves of migration that have shaped history and modified cultures.
The French-Canadian culture, for example, is the result of a meeting between the French language, the British political system, the American lifestyle, the Roman Catholic religion, and the First Nations’ influence.
In 1997, more than 170 million people lived outside their country of origin. Increasing migration is contributing to the interweaving of cultures.
Whether an encounter leads to metissage or to rejection depends largely on the ideologies and power relationships that separate cultures into the dominating and the dominated, the mainstream and the marginal, the global and the local, the central and the peripheral.
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