CULTURAL TRANSFER – CULTURE AS TRANSFER. HOW ALMOST EVERYTHING THAT IS FAMILIAR TO US HAS A MIGRATION HISTORY

Abstract

William Tell is an immigrant from Scandinavian mythology who was transmitted to Switzerland by a German poet. The pointed hat of the magicians in fairy tales, Harry Potter or Halloween was used in the Middle Ages to identify Jews. The word ‘taboo’, which has become indispensable in our psychology, was picked up by James Cook in Polynesia. The name of the online retailer Amazon was adopted from the name of a South American river ―and this in turn from the legends of an Asian female warrior tribe. Almost everything that is familiar to us has a migration history. Objects, symbols, ideas and words migrate and change their meanings in the process: from the potato to Superman, the @ sign or the swastika. What fundamentalists consider to be original is actually alien. What we call ‘culture’ is the result of ‘transfers’. ‘Appropriation’ is the norm. The article reports on a research project that the author carries out with the anthropologist Michael Toggweiler and the comparativist and writer Raoul Schrott.