Culture Contacts and the Making of Cultures: Papers in Homage to Itamar Even-Zohar

Description

To speak of “Culture Contacts and the Making of Cultures” is in fact to speak about the fundamental processes through which cultures are formed and maintained. There is a seeming contradiction between these two agendas of inquiry: while “the making of cultures” evokes the investigation of concentrated efforts invested in the creation of discrete social entities through marked cultural boundaries, “culture contacts” calls for the search of the fluidity of such entities and the constant complex transfer and exchange between them. But of course, it is the interplay between the two forces that underlie cultural dynamics in whatever social setting, from (what seem to be) the most rigidly closed and “uncontaminated” ones to those that seem extremely heterogeneous and unsettled. It is the understanding of this multifaceted culture dynamics as the machinery that makes social worlds going which has been the driving force of Itamar Even-Zohar’s life-long scholarly project, to which he has been dedicating his intellectual work for over forty years, in theory as well as a long series of case studies. Encompassing knowledge of so many different cultures, their languages, histories and everyday practices, from medieval Scandinavian and Russian speaking territories, through modern national Hebrew, Italian or Iberian cultures, to recent developments in contemporary Iceland and Newfoundland, Even-Zohar has collected enormously diverse evidence, all of which underlie his wide theoretical view of such processes of socio-cultural formation, change, consolidation or disintegration. This volume of papers by Even-Zohar’s colleagues is an expression of the latitude of his work. [Rakefet Sela-Sheffy, “Introduction”]