Sacre impronte e oggetti - Università degli Studi di Torino

10
Michael Singleton
short, subsidies to the arts are the first to suffer, yielding to priorities
such as repairing motorways or building nuclear power stations. On the
other hand, what is taken to be absolutely true by higher culture allows
the aristocracy to distinguish itself 1 from the popular culture of the lower
classes or incites the more missionary minded of the upper classes to
put genuine literature and authentic art at the disposition of the vulgus
plebs. The second equivocal result of imagining that culture is not all inclusive
is the taking for granted what must be proved namely that such
categories as the cultural, the economic and the political enjoy substantial
transcultural significance. We will shortly see, for instance, that there
is no such reality in sub-Saharan Africa as the “religious”, at least as
this field is conventionally understood by the Western world. Thirdly
and far more disastrously (pre)supposing that the cultural must answer
to the (super)natural leads automatically to an intransigent, intercultural
intolerance. For if the Really Real is supernaturally Revealed and/or
naturally Rational then the only culture(s) which can legitimately pretend
to last till the End of Time are those whose essential identity ever
increasingly espouses the (super)natural Order of Things.
A simple schema can illustrate this primordial bifurcation between
those who accept that cultures cannot be definitely referred to non-cultural
criteria and those who decisively refer cultures to (super)natural realities:
In both figures, the top line represents an indefinite series of cultures.
As it stands, printed on paper, the schema represents cultures syn-
1 As P. BOURDIEU, La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, Paris 1979, classically
showed.