A fear is loose in the world today: the fear that venerable and established cultures are everywhere under attack, threatened, retreating; that Pizza Huts are, in essence, on the march. This anxiety is being expressed more or less everywhere. But on this trip I began to hear it with a special plaintiveness once I left a country that has relatively little attachment to traditional culture -- my own; once, in other words, I crossed my first border.
The thick-mustached owner of a small café in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, provided an interesting example of the cultural imperialism that so many now fear: Santa Claus. "In this town," the café owner explained, "there's a tradition that when your neighbor asks for something -- two turkeys, for example -- you simply give it." The understanding is that your neighbor will be willing to give you a gift when you find yourself in need. But, this man said, that tradition is fading in favor of the heavily promoted "Santa Claus tradition" of simply giving presents, needed or not, once a year.
"Unfortunately," the café owner complained, "the former customs, the customs of the pueblo, are being erased. If we don't try to save them, they will be gone completely. And the main culprit is television."
A similar complaint, featuring the same villain, is currently being voiced by café owners and their patrons all over the more tradition-conscious parts of the world. But does life in that Mayan village provide hope that, in some areas at least, traditional culture remains strong?
I'm not sure it does. For it is also possible to walk through Zunil and collect evidence to support the opposite conclusion. Take, for an example, the thread that woman was using on her backstrap loom: the colors are acrylic. The old natural dyes would wash out too easily, she explains. In Solola, a nearby Mayan village, they've had some success lately weaving traditional tunics out of rayon.
And after she finishes demonstrating the back-strap loom to me, that Mayan woman moves over to a desk to work on the weaving collective's account books. Those books must be getting a bit more complicated. These Mayan weavers now have a side business: selling cell phones.
Cell phones are particularly important in Zunil, for this is a classic leap-technology village. Traditional telephone service was extremely difficult to obtain. One storekeeper estimates that there are only ten regular phones in this village of about six thousand people, but now "everyone" -- okay, "not everyone," he admits -- is going wireless.


Zunil is taking a similar leap into television. The thirteen-year-old boy behind the counter in another shop here is engrossed in an episode of The Three Stooges. Four years ago, no television was available in this village: The steep surrounding mountains made it impossible to receive signals. Now, thanks to cable, that thirteen-year-old has access to twenty-two channels. His mushroom haircut -- long at the top, tight on the sides -- is evidence that someone's been studying some of those channels closely.
So the "main culprit," television, is just beginning to work its magic, if you'll excuse the expression, in Zunil. Might the back-strap looms and all those wonderful traditional outfits in time disappear?
Not to worry, says, Audelino Sac, a Mayan priest with whom I have a chance to chat. His day job is working with international organizations. His wife, Lina Barrios, is an anthropologist. Both are committed to "revaluing" and preserving Mayan culture. She and her young daughters wear the huipil and the skirt; in fact, one of the girls caused something of a fuss by insisting on dressing in traditional clothing for a school beauty pageant: She won.
Guatemala's population is about two-thirds "indigenous." This effort to preserve and strengthen Mayan culture, consequently, has large political significance, especially since for a time, the country's leaders seemed to believe that wiping out Indian villages was an effective way to counter the leftist rebellion in the mountains. (Those rebels were committed to helping the Indians; in fact, one ponytailed former guerrilla I talked to is now putting most of his political energies into Mayan issues.) And, of course, the "revaluing" of traditional culture, from Kurdish to Hassidic, is also becoming a large political force in many other parts of the world -- as parents of all ethnicities are discomfited by the television programs their children watch.
Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.
Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."
Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert. I assume I'm not the only one to notice, for example, that the lovely, flowered patterns on those traditional Mayan huipils look awfully Spanish. Cultures always borrow.
It's the part about taking "positive things" that's throwing me. How exactly are we supposed to work it out so that people take only the good stuff from other cultures? Once the TV channels start arriving, can we keep Mayan boys from watching The Three Stooges and Mayan girls at their grandmothers' feet? Do we want to?

Talk about the spread of the global culture with just about anybody over the age of seventeen these days, and you'll find they want -- their high-minded selves want -- the people of the world to select "positive things" from their traditional cultures and the global culture.
Positive things like back-strap looms; distinctive, colorful, heavily embroidered blouses; and an appreciation for the spiritual qualities of nature (which is also a part of the Mayan tradition). Positive things like clean drinking water and democracy. What, when we dream of picking and choosing, are the negative things? That seems easy: slash and burn agriculture, the belief (which has apparently lingered long among the Maya) that girls don't need to go to school, black candles, and Pizza Hut. (Yes, there's one about twenty minutes drive from Zunil.)
Can we get our wish? Can we pick and choose? In some areas, maybe yes. That former Guatemalan guerrilla, David Aguilar, is now helping organize "gender workshops" in Mayan villages. We can also -- through education, workshops, laws -- help people protect themselves against infectious diseases and help them find ways to clean up their environment. (If you've forgotten just how black car exhaust can be, come to Guatemala!)
I talked to one Mayan woman who had worked for a number of years in a nearby factory where boxer shorts and T-shirts are sewn together for a U.S. company. She had predictable and important complaints: a nasty foreign supervisor, compulsory overtime, the firing of union organizers. Clearly there's some picking and choosing -- through strengthened labor laws, unions, and global protests -- that might be done here, too.
But I know of no one who has put together successful workshops, protests, or laws to get people to stay home and cook tamales rather than, if they can afford it and are so inclined, pick up some fast food. And I know from personal experience that neither a reasonably good education nor fatherly suasion will prevent boys from watching The Three Stooges.


The name of that café owner in Oaxaca, who was lamenting the loss of the traditions of the pueblo, is -- if I can read his handwriting -- Erasto Galusn Canseo. After he finished, I asked whether there isn't any good that comes from television and the global culture. His answer was surprising. "You learn to free your imagination," he said. It seemed a wonderful thing to say. He cited the movies Jurassic Park and Apollo 13.
And then he said something else, which was important and moving: "This was a very provincial place fifty years ago. My family worked in the fields, and at night they would go to the center of town to listen to the band. They didn't know about other things. Education was at a very low level. They didn't know about Newton or Einstein. Now the things we are talking about can be discussed even with country families. Now information is more accessible. It's been a slow evolution."
And, he was acknowledging, television has played a part in that evolution. However, the café owner was soon bemoaning the fact that young Mexicans were imitating the dress of the rock musicians they see on TV. I tried to bring him back: "But television and the global culture have helped make things less provincial around here, haven't they?"
At that point this man made an interesting gesture. He held out both of his hands, as if to make a kind of scale, and alternated moving one up and the other down, to show that it was a trade-off, that there were losses and gains, positive choices and negative choices. But instead of holding his hands palms up, as I would have when making this gesture, he held them palms down. That right there, I thought, is a cultural difference. I wonder whether it will survive.

I spent an extended period of time in one other Indian village, Santa Ana del Valle, as I drove from the United States to the Panama Canal. It was a Zapotec pueblo about half an hour away from Oaxaca. I don't pretend this village is representative: It is relatively well off in an area where poverty, even hunger, is common among Indians. But I want to end this article with what I saw in this pueblo because it seemed -- it could have just been my mood that day (or theirs) -- a place where the cultural trade-offs, the picking and choosing, that so much of the world is currently worrying about, are being handled relatively smoothly.
No traditional clothing is worn in this village, unless you count the blue and pink aprons that the women, like older women in many parts of the world, favor. And the looms here -- this is also a weaving village -- are post-Colombian; they stand on the ground; a few are even made of metal.
In fact, there's a not-very-traditional-looking game being played in the town square: A bunch of men, the pueblo's presidente among them, are bouncing a ball and occasionally trying to throw it through a hoop. A few teenagers are having their own game at the other hoop: two of them -- in their back-turned baseball caps and extra-baggy white pants -- would have looked at home on a basketball court in Los Angeles.
Actually, at any one time a percentage of the young men of Santa Ana del Valle are in Los Angeles, wiring money home. It's become something of a coming-of-age ritual. This pueblo has what one nonresident describes as a "pipeline" to California. The fellow who showed me around spent three years up north -- in Thousand Oaks, to be exact -- working, for one stretch, as a cook in an Italian restaurant.
Santa Ana del Valle has also been progressing technologically at a steadier pace than Zunil. My guide estimates that the pueblo, with its four thousand residents (all of whom he knows), now has six hundred television sets, one hundred telephones, eighty automobiles and two computers (one belonging to some guy who mostly lives in New York and the other to a teacher).
Santa Ana del Valle would seem, consequently, to be a rather up-to-date, global kind of pueblo; it would, at least, if you kept your eyes closed. Most of the streets here are dirt. The houses are often made of adobe, with courtyards enclosed by bamboo and cactus. In one such courtyard, a few generations of women are spending the day shelling garbanzo beans, though they could probably make more money weaving rugs. Everyone in this town is a weaver, my guide reminds me; but everyone also is committed to a routine of daily or seasonal chores and tasks. They complete them moving at about the same slow speed as the chickens, pigs, goats, turkeys, horses, and cows that share their courtyards.
As we stroll through the village, my guide stops to tickle a niece of his under the chin or to whistle something to a friend. (The men in town have an intricate language of whistles; I count a vocabulary of at least eight phrases.) A man walks by carrying a large basket of cornhusks on his back.
When it was suggested to one of the better-off weavers in town that a computer might help his business, his response was: "Oh, it's too much money." I was told that means, in part: We're not ready for that yet -- not ready, in other words, to choose that part of the global culture yet.
They have chosen basketball, but some designs painted on the backboards on that court in the middle of the pueblo catch my eye: One is a pretty accurate version of the familiar NBA symbol, the other a jagged, snake-line design copied from some nearby Aztec ruins. Maybe in that little bit of picking and choosing -- that small example of dynamic cultural borrowing and mixing -- there's also hope that huipils and The Three Stooges might coexist reasonably comfortably in places like Zunil for a while.

Mitchell Stephens is a Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University and the author, most recently, of the rise of the image the fall of the word (Oxford). You can read more about his travels at roadthinker.com.

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