The Case for Contamiation

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
January 1, 2006
The Case for Contamination
By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

[...]

Our guide to what is going on here might as well be a former African
slave named Publius Terentius Afer, whom we know as Terence. Terence,
born in Carthage, was taken to Rome in the early second century B.C.,
and his plays - witty, elegant works that are, with Plautus's earlier,
less-cultivated works, essentially all we have of Roman comedy - were
widely admired among the city's literary elite. Terence's own mode of
writing - which involved freely incorporating any number of earlier
Greek plays into a single Latin one - was known to Roman littérateurs
as "contamination."

It's an evocative term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural
purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American
family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a
counterideal. Terence had a notably firm grasp on the range of human
variety: "So many men, so many opinions" was a line of his. And it's
in his comedy "The Self-Tormentor" that you'll find what may be the
golden rule of cosmopolitanism - Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum
puto; "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." The context is
illuminating. A busybody farmer named Chremes is told by his neighbor
to mind his own affairs; the homo sum credo is Chremes's breezy
rejoinder. It isn't meant to be an ordinance from on high; it's just
the case for gossip. Then again, gossip - the fascination people have
for the small doings of other people - has been a powerful force for
conversation among cultures.

The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman
Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa
"celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation
that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings,
cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in
mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange,
hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the
world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of
"mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the
larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless
process of imitation and revision....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.html

Appiah, Kwame Anthony.  Cosmopolitanism:
   Ethics in a World of Strangers.  NY: W.W. Norton, 2006.

http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall06/032933.htm