Losing Culture

What does losing culture mean to you? I personally think it is a mix of different things coming together and either changing something old into something new or this something old completely dying out. There are probably many different interpretations to essentially the same thing, and I have most likely not thought of or forgotten something that others would find important to define loss of culture. Whatever your definition for this phenomenon is we can all agree that it is happening and it is happening at an alarming rate. Just for clarification change is not inherently bad and keeping traditions alive is not always good.

Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to an article written a while back about the loss of traditional songs sung by people living in different villages on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. The article mainly focuses on one village in particular called Shui Hau, where a lot of the elderly people have lived their entire lives and are among the last people alive who still remember and sing songs native to this part of Hong Kong. The article talks about how there are different methods being used to keep these songs alive for newer generations to listen to and enjoy. For instance in this case the songs were recorded digitally as part of a documentary which had screenings in the village itself a few different times. This ensures that even with the passing of the people who knew and sung these songs, at least the culture they were a part of isn’t lost forever and can still be enjoyed by others going forward.

Through assistance from the children and grandchildren of the women, Lai and her team began transcribing their “mountain songs” – popular Waitau Wa rhymes that they learnt to sing in their youth.

While the songs themselves might not get passed on traditionally they at least have been immortalised and hopefully future generations will want to learn about them and their significance to parts of history slowly being lost to time and ageing.

The thing though is that we are always fighting against time to both find and record pieces of different cultures that are important or unique before the last people who remember them are gone, taking their experiences and their parts of culture with them. Different languages around the whole world are dying out faster than they can be identified and recorded, meaning that they are lost forever, while some lucky cases they get recorded before the last people who speak them die. In the case of the songs recorded in Shui Hau the languages spoken are not necessarily unique or in danger of being lost, but instead it is the songs themselves that are important because they cannot be found anywhere else in Hong Kong. This means that they are of significant value and are important to the villages historical culture.

Lai said that some songs included descriptions of birds that only appeared in Shui Hau village in certain months of the year given their migration patterns: “This is something very geographically-specific.”

What is my personal interest in this topic? I guess the story initially piqued my interest because it is about the village where I lived for most of my life growing up and I personally witnessed some of the changes the village went through. It made me think about how much has changed in the 10 plus years I spent there and what has been lost over that time, I most likely was part of that change, being that my family and I were one of the first foreigners moving into that village. I’ve seen families come and go, houses being built and trees being felled to make more space, not much stayed constant, so to me that was normal, part of everyday life, but to those who grew up and lived their whole lives in this same village the changes must have been strange and possibly alarming to see. Still I am glad that some parts of their culture have been preserved and hopefully will be remembered in the future.