MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Monoculture is a word that has in itself several connotations that are context specific – thus having different usage depending on place, language and arena. So, what is monoculture? Like the word ‘culture’ (from the Latin cultura – meaning cultivation), monoculture comes from agriculture, to describe the practice of focusing on the cultivation of a single homogeneous crop or livestock species in farming (and the opposite of ‘polyculture’ which focuses on variety). It has been adopted in thinking about society, particularly in the social sciences, and so for many, it is understood in the societal and political senses of the word, to talk about patterns of social behaviour.

Agriculture is the practice and livelihood of cultivating plants and livestock. The practice was an essential development in sustaining human civilisation, as farming of domesticated species led to large enough quantities of food to enable people to live in cities. Industrial-scale agriculture based on monoculture techniques in the twentieth century dominate agricultural production. Crops in particular have a certain capacity to adapt to local cultivation conditions and to human-nutritional requirements and tastes; something that brings both food security, health and culinary gratification to communities. By inbreeding plants for several generations, it has been possible to empty them from almost any genetic variation. This is referred to as ‘modern plant breeding’, which is also protected by legislation. Since the UPOV (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants) convention, which brought legislation of restrictions on intellectual property for new plants of 1962, only distinct, officially recognised plants are allowed for commercial cultivation within countries that have signed the convention, including all the members of the EU.

The philosophical undercurrent to our investigations in Monoculture – A Recent History comes via the notion of ‘ambiguity’. In particular, this is through the pioneering, and under-recognised work of the Polish-Austrian psychoanalyst Else Frenkel-Brunswik.

 In 1950, a group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley – a philosopher/sociologist and three psychologists: Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford – published The Authoritarian Personality. They sought an answer to the question of how the destructive ideologies responsible for the atrocities of the Second World War had managed to attract such a huge mass of followers. In her article ‘Personality theory and Perception’ Else Frenkel-Brunswik further elaborates the concept of  'ambiguity intolerance’. With this complex and versatile theory, she examines the connection between the ability to deal with an ambiguous visual language and tolerance for ambiguity in the world, the other and oneself. Ambiguity here, might for example be another person of ambiguous race, gender or sexuality, but could also be with other encounters such as with objects and sensorial experiences. In ‘Environmental Controls and the Impoverishment of Thought’, Frenkel-Brunswik takes a closer look at anti-intellectual tendencies and the attitude towards science in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Until Immanuel Kant, Western philosophy mainly tried to eliminate ambiguity. Philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Simone de Beauvoir have rejected the ideal of this unequivocalness, which still lives on in the natural sciences. Today, ambiguity is a key concept for philosophers, social scientists, writers, and artists who oppose unequivocal interpretations of reality, understanding that to be human is also to be fundamentally ambiguous or unresolved. 

We are putting art in this category, understanding that art can be fundamentally ambiguous, not only aesthetically, but also ontologically – in terms of the nature of its existence in society. In this sense, art is also a reflection of the ambiguity of the human condition. With the inclusion of ambiguity, artistically and philosophically-speaking, in this exhibition, we also wish to look at what practices, values, and ways of living or perceiving might be excluded by the formation of monocultures of all kinds.

Alongside the examples of philosophical thought, this part of the exhibition included the works of Carol Rama, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, and Nicole. 

Eugenics is the set of theories and practices aimed at improving the inheritable qualities of the human race, and engineer a better society. Greek in its origin, the term, which literally means ‘well-born’, was introduced by British geneticist Francis Galton in 1883, in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. Soon afterwards, the first national eugenics organisation was established in the United States, where eugenics rapidly gained popularity and considerable weight in scientific society. As a result, during the first decades of the 20th century the US states passed numerous eugenic legislations, including sexual sterilisation of persons with inferior hereditary potentialities varying from criminals to the ‘feeble-minded’. Eugenic ideas laid the foundation for the development of the Nazi ideology of ‘racial hygiene’ in the 1930s. In the decades following World War II, with the adoption of a number of laws protecting human rights, many countries began to abandon eugenics policies. 

Eugenics in Great Britain 

Sir Francis Galton introduced the very term eugenics and laid the foundations for a movement that would develop in the following decades. Inspired by the theory of evolution by natural selection introduced by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin, he dedicated his studies to the improvement of the human race. Galton was convinced that eugenics studies could replace Darwinian ‘natural selection’ with more effective processes. G.K. Chesterton’s book is a significant, but rare example of anti-eugenic essays circulating at that time in Britain. He predicted the abuse of eugenics and believed that it would be used as means of suppression of the poor. Even though Chesterton was accused of irrationality because of his ideas, the book had a considerable influence on British parliament. Despite the fact that the movement of eugenics was founded in Britain, the eugenics legislation as it was introduced in the United States and later in Germany was never passed in Britain.

Eugenics in North America

Madison Grant was an American writer and zoologist known primarily for his work as a eugenicist. The subtitle of the book refers to the key theory promoted by Grant – the superiority of Nordic race and its responsibility for human development. Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was an American historian, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and author of several books which advocated eugenics and scientific racism. His strategy to frighten readers with the spectre of a race war, by presenting the enemies of the 'white race' as being strong enough to pose an existential threat, but weak enough to defeat, is still being practiced, some hundred years later, by white supremacists. James Woodsworth’s book served as a blueprint for Canada’s 'Immigration Act' enacted soon after the publication of the book. In this book, Woodsworth provides a hierarchy of races and ethnicities based on their ability to assimilate into Canadian society. Those belonging to 'prohibited classes' were deported and denied entry to Canada.

Eugenics in Nazi Germany

Eugenic ideas laid the foundation for the development of the Nazi ideology of ‘Racial hygiene’ in the 1930s. Nazi eugenic legislation led to forced sterilisation and murder of hundreds of thousands of individuals deemed ‘unfavourable’ and formed the basis for the Shoah. In 1906, Eugen Fischer conducted field research in German South West Africa (now Namibia). In this context, he conducted the first medical experiments on people in concentration camps, the harbinger of the Nazi practice that would follow a few decades later.
In contrast to other eugenicist of his time, who asserted and promoted cultural and intellectual superiority of the ‘Nordic race’ above others, Wilhelm Schallmayer’s approach was not racist. He was the first to address the subject from a managerial logic of efficiency. Thus, among his suggestions was the introduction of a system of bonuses and fees in order to encourage high-level civil servants and representatives of educated middle classes to have larger families. Hans Günther was the only racial theorist to join the party before the Nazis came to power in 1933, and was nicknamed ‘Rassen-Günther’ and ‘Rassenpapst’ (race pope) in those circles. His book Human heredity and Racial Hygiene was considered to be the ‘standard textbook on racial hygiene’ in Germany and the blueprint for Nazism’s attitude toward other ‘races’. While Fischer is infamous as an ardent advocate of eugenics, Gerhard Kittel is a more paradoxical figure, a prominent lexicographer of biblical languages and one of the most competent New Testament experts, he was also known as an open anti-Semite and an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis. According to Kittel, “World Judaism” which has world domination as its ultimate goal, has been present from the ancient times. Kittel presents an anthology of anti-Semitic clichés with racist interpretations.

Das Wunder des Lebens

Das Wunder des Lebens was a propaganda exhibition organised to promote the racial ideology of the Nazis. It was shown in Berlin at the Kaiserdamm and the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, in 1935, and later travelled to other locations. Organised by Bruno Gebhard (1901-1985), a professional physician who was known as a curator of several renowned propaganda exhibitions, including Die Frau in Familie, Haus und Beruf (1933) and Deutsches Volk-Deutsche Arbeit (1934), the exhibition Das Wunder des Lebens introduced new representations on the theme of ‘Der Mensch' (‘The Human’). The major aspects of this extensive show were 'Die Lehre vom Leben' (‘The Teachings of Life’) with its highlight being the transparent sculpture of man, 'Der Träger des Lebens' (‘The Bearer of Life’) featuring the German family, and 'Die Erhaltung des Lebens' (The Preservation of Life), dedicated to the health system in Germany. Pictorial material presented in the exhibition included healthy 'Aryan' types, different images of Jewish people, images of physically or mentally disabled people, and representations of other 'undesirable' categories who, according to Nazi ideology, were considered to be a threat to German public health. 

Nazism

The most extremist example of monocultural ideology is that of National Socialism in Germany. A pertinent reminder of this is Psychologist Erich Rudolph Jaensch, president of the German Psychological Association in Nazi Germany, who developed an influential body of policies outlining Nazism as a biological movement. As well as outlining ideas of racial purity, Jaensch also describes the German and anti-German ways of looking. The ‘antitype’ to the German has inclinations towards the aesthetical, intellectual and the playful; whereas the German would possess rigid, unambiguous, stimulus-response relationships, with no space for interpretation. Thus, we see how Nazi pseudoscience saw identity in relation to perception – their ethnocentric monoculturalism also as a mode of seeing – leaving little space for individual human subjectivity. The cases of the Entartete Kunst and Grosse Deutsche Kunst exhibitions are well known as propaganda tools for how the Nazis used art to demonstrate an ethnocentric and monocultural conception of culture. It is a stark reminder that artistic impoverishment can reflect a wider societal impoverishment.

Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil)

Blut und Boden was a key slogan of Nazi ideology. This included the organisation of agriculture, referring to the nationalistic ideal of an intrinsic bond between the racially pure national body (blut) and settlement land (boden). The nationalist ideology was based on the imaginary idea of traditionally sedentary German peasantry in opposition to rootless Jewish nomadism. The programme was famous for its wide ideological and propaganda support. The government encouraged the return of youth in cities back to villages, because cities were primarily seen as places of decadent modernity and overall 'un-German' life. With the help of the Blut und Boden policy, German society was meant to be restructured into a farming society. It also provided ideological justification for the German military expansion into Central and Eastern European territory.

Nazi propaganda exhibitions

One of the most striking historical examples of ideological monoculture in the cultural field was of ‘entartete kunst’ (‘degenerate art’) in Nazi Germany. Holding up the modernist avant-garde, or in fact anything that didn’t fit the narrow ethno-centric definition of German art and culture, was considered as an aberration. In his book, which was a major inspiration for Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Wolfgang Willrich gives a negative overview of modern art in Germany, viciously attacking such prominent modernist artists as Barlach, Dix, Grosz, Heckel, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff and others whose work fell victim to subsequent confiscation and elimination. Published in 1938, a year after the opening of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, the book of Adolf Dresler is a typical example of Nazi criticism of modernist art, with expressionist and abstract works being juxtaposed with politically favourable German ('Deutsche') works. The artworks condemned by the author were selected from the list of 'degenerate artworks' presented at the infamous exhibition. Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (The Great German Art Exhibition) took place eight times from 1937 to 1944 at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich. The exhibition was propagated as the most important cultural event in Nazi Germany and the main representative of art under National Socialism. Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) was the largest pre-war anti-Semitic exhibition, which was intended to represent a supposed Jewish attempt at bolshevising Nazi Germany.

Colonialism 
The term colony comes from the Latin word colonus, meaning farmer. Colonialism is a practice of domination, involving the subjugation of one people by another, generally with the aim of economic dominance. In the process of colonisation, colonisers may impose their cultural practices, religion, labour conditions and language on indigenous peoples. The coloniser seeks to benefit from the colonised region’s people and resources. Colonialism is strongly associated with the European colonial period beginning in the 15th century. At first, European colonising countries followed policies of mercantilism, aiming to strengthen the home-nation economy, so agreements usually restricted the colonies to trading only with the colonising nation. However, by the mid-19th century, the British Empire gave up mercantilism and adopted the principle of free trade. Belgium controlled the Belgian Congo (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) from 1908 to 1960, and Ruanda-Urundi (Rwanda and Burundi) from 1922 to 1962. The Belgian Congo originated as the personal property of the king Leopold II, before sovereignty was transferred to the Belgian state in 1908. European slave traders, primarily the Portuguese, Spanish, British, Dutch and French empires brought large numbers of African slaves to the Americas. The European colonial system took between 10 to 12 million Africans to the Caribbean and to North and South America as slaves. Christian missionaries were active in most of the European-controlled colonies. It is estimated that by 1914, colonisers had gained control of 84% of the globe. Following the Second World War, colonial powers were forced to retreat, and between 1945–1975, nearly all colonies gained independence, entering into postcolonial relations.

Colonial Exhibitions and the Human Zoo
Exposition Internationale Coloniale, Maritime et d'Art Flamand, Antwerpen, 1930
Apartheid

Négritude
Négritude was conceived as an emancipatory cultural movement, initiated in the Interwar period by francophone intellectuals of the African diaspora who sought to reclaim the value of African culture. Based upon an appropriation of the French word négre, which like its English counterpart is considered to be derogatory, the term itself is a neologism which gives a positive sense to a pejorative word. It was coined by Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, who along with French Guyanese poet Léon Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor (a poet and first President of Senegal after decolonisation) was considered to be the founder of Négritude. The key proponent of Négritude, Senghor would further develop the poetry movement into a philosophy based on a ‘strategically essentialist’ (term by G. Spivak) notion of black identity. The Négritude conception of culture remained the impetus and guiding principle of Senghor’s thinking.

Sources of Inspiration for Léopold Senghor
Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) was a German ethnologist, archaeologist, and proponent of a culture-historical approach to ethnology. He is also considered to be one of the key figures that influenced the Négritude movement. In the introduction to An Anthology published on the occasion of Frobenius’ hundred years anniversary, Léopold Senghor claimed that the latter had not only “revealed Africa for the rest of the world”, but also “Africans to themselves”. Indeed, in his Kulturgeschichte Afrikas, the German ethnologist not only points out that the “barbarian negro was a European invention”, but also elaborates on such concepts as emotion, intuition, art, myth, and Eurafrica, which would become crucial for Senghor’s understanding of black subjectivity. Paideuma. Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre (Paideuma. Outlines of a Soul and Culture Theory) is considered Frobenius’ most significant contribution to ethnography. Paideuma can be described as a unique faculty or manifestation of an attitude to life formed by a specific environment and upbringing. Therefore, man is understood as a product of culture, not the contrary.

The First World Festival of Negro Arts
1er Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (The First World Festival of Negro Arts) was held in Dakar, Senegal, 1–24 April 1966, initiated by Léopold Senghor under the auspices of UNESCO. Visitors from around the world, as well as Dakar residents, were able to attend a vast programme of events, including exhibitions presenting tribal and modern art, conferences and street performances. According to Senghor, the festival was supposed to be an illustration of Négritude, a major showcase uniting the work of African and African diasporia artists. A colloquium that took place two day before the opening, which was considered the intellectual fulcrum of the event, gathered artists and intellectuals to reflect on the role of art in the emerging post-imperial world as well as the meaning of Négritude. The first side of this record consists of texts, music and slave songs, and the second side presents two different aspects of black music – short instrumental improvisations inspired by Senegalese traditional music and 'the Songs of New Nations' – Ghana, Nigeria, Congo – performed by a choir with native drums and percussion.

Authenticité
Authenticité (Authenticity) was a radical version of Afrocentrism introduced in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Mobutu Sese Seko as an official state ideology of the Republic of Congo-Léopoldville, later renamed Zaire. The Authenticité policy implied numerous changes to state and to private life, and aimed to eliminate the influences of Western colonial culture in order to create a more centralised and singular national identity. This included the renaming of the country and its cities, as well as an eventual abolition of Christian names for more ‘authentic’ ones. In addition, the campaign banned Western-style clothing in favour of a tunic labelled the ‘abacost’ and its female equivalent. The policy had mostly been abandoned by the end of 1990s with the death of Mobutu, who had served as President of Congo/Zaire from 1965 to 1997.

Soviet National Politics 
The culture of nationalities, which was developing in the USSR under the concept of “national in form and socialist in content”, was considered as the main weapon in the struggle against antagonism among the individual Soviet nations. The vagueness of the concept allowed the Soviet government to concurrently implement such policies as the Latinisation of Islam-based cultures, in parallel with campaigns against ‘Great-Russian chauvinism’ aimed to support minorities and promote local languages at work and in schools. In the arts, the policy took even more peculiar forms. 

Socialist Realism 
Socialist Realism was an artistic phenomenon and 'creative method' of the Soviet Union. Introduced as a doctrine of the single creative method in 1934 during the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, it was applied to all spheres of artistic endeavour. Often characterised simply as a style, it hardly fits into such category due to the obvious lack of a clearly articulated artistic language, or rather, the consistent erasure of any formal stylistic features. The relation of Soviet Realism to previous realistic traditions in art and to reality itself is also complicated. Aimed to present an analysis of “reality in its revolutionary development” and establish “a culture of the masses that had yet to be created”, it was primarily oriented not toward the Soviet reality of the time, but the bright Socialist future. This utopian aspiration and the belief in the transformative potential of art and strong collective spirit, makes Socialist Realism a total and totalitarian aesthetical-political project, or, as put by theorist Boris Groys – Stalin’s gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Deeply rooted in communist ideology, Socialist Realism was not simply its product, but the very means of production. This makes it an example of a unique propagandist strategy.

The Corn Campaign
The Corn Campaign was the mass introduction of corn into the agriculture of the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s as a solution to the problem of feeding livestock. The idea of introducing the foreign crop came to Nikita Khrushchev, then the head of the USSR, in 1955 when he met the American farmer Roswell Garst, who told him about the role of corn in US agriculture and its advantages. Shortly after Khrushchev’s trip to the United States, American seed corn was imported to the USSR. The Ministry of Agriculture established a corn research institute in Ukraine, issued a new scientific journal dedicated to the crop, and launched one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the history of the USSR. Endless slogans in newspapers praised “the queen of the fields”, and through poems, songs, posters, souvenirs, and even a full-length animated film titled Чудесница (Chudesnitsa), the government sought every opportunity to popularise the fodder crop. Mass propagation of corn did not take into account the climate of the country, nor the agricultural traditions. In the early 1960s, a quarter of arable land was occupied by corn, which led to a shortage of wheat by autumn 1962. The inevitable failure of monocultural corn farming led to an agricultural crisis and the subsequent failure of Khrushchev’s political career.

Soviet Propaganda

The Novosti Press Agency was founded in 1961. The Agency operated as an impressive propaganda machine with numerous branches all around the world and a total annual publication circulation of 20 million copies. Their range of books covered such topics as the Soviet contribution to the economic development of 'Third World’ countries, the Soviet policy of support for National Liberation Movements, criticism of “contemporary colonialism” and the imperialist policy of the West. First Time in Moscow tells the story of a fictional African child called Dudu, who was given a free trip to Moscow as the winner of a contest. The patronising and romanticised tone of the book makes it a striking example of propaganda material created in the USSR under the “International Friendship” policy. The Peoples’ Friendship University was founded in 1960 and later renamed after Patrice Lumumba following the assassination of the Congolese independence leader in 1961. The University was praised for its educational accomplishments and was considered as an epitome of solidarity and internationalism by its proponents, and denounced as a communist institution for spy recruitment by its opponents. The very concept of a university established especially to provide education for students from 'Third World' countries was also questioned by the very governments of the countries it was aimed at.

Congress for Cultural Freedom

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was an organisation, founded in 1950 at a conference that gathered a group of anti-communist intellectuals in West Berlin. Organised in response to the formation of The World Peace Council by the Soviet Union, the CCF aimed to withstand post-war sympathies towards the USSR. Covertly funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it was established to oppose global Communism, counter Cold War neutralism, and to promote Western cultural and liberal values. The organisation was active in thirty-five countries, organising cultural events and conferences, publishing books and numerous periodicals. Another important vector of the campaign was aimed to alter the perception of the U.S. in Europe through the promotion of American modernist art. The covert enterprise dissolved in 1967, after the disclosure of the CIA’s active involvement.

Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic and political system based on private ownership of the means of production for goods and services in the free market. Often seen as contrary to the principles of socialism, which redistributes wealth via taxation, free market (laissez-faire) capitalism implies the reduction of governmental interference in the economic affairs of individuals and society to a minimum. This has been the model adopted by the US, where participation in the capitalist system is synonymous with freedom. Seen by some as an ideal modern and even moral system (Ayn Rand), for its critics however, the liberal capitalism is seen as the driving force of growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor, as well as unsustainable and exploitative.

Das Kapital
Ronald Reagan
Objectivisme
Call for an Alternative

Culture Wars

The phrase culture war is a translation from the German Kulturkampf and was first used in the second half of the 19th century to refer to the power struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and the German government under Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The concept is now used more generally to refer to the struggle between conflicting cultural values within a society. With his theory of cultural hegemony, Italian Marxist journalist, philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci stated in the 1920s how a culturally diverse society is dominated by the group that controls the mass media, education and other major institutions. In the early 1990s, sociologist James Davison Hunter introduced the concept of culture war to the US, to describe the polarisation of society along ideological lines, between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’. The so-called School Wars (schoolstrijd, guerre scolaire) in the 19th and 20th centuries, which were crises over the issue of religion in education, and of subsidies from the state, are seen as examples of culture war in Belgium.

Cultural Relativism
Unipolarity
Identity Politics
Segregation
Key Exhibitions in New York
American Context
Belgian Context 

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formally established during the meeting held on the Brijuni islands, Yugoslavia in 1956 by the signing of the Declaration of Brijuni by five world leaders including Josip Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The first Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries was held in 1961 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The aims of the movement were derived from the ideas expressed during the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung (1955). Having appeared in the bipolar political climate of the Cold War, the NAM represented the “third way” in international relations. Based on the principles of peaceful co-existence and mutual support, the movement advocated for respect of sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs. The NAM, Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) and The Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL) all collaborated, however, the members of the latter were distinguished by a more radical and less conciliatory attitude towards Western imperialism. The NAM is currently formed by 120 world states.

 OSPAAAL and Tricontinental

Bandung Conference
On April 18-24, 1955, leaders from twenty-nine Asian and African countries, most of which were newly independent, gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, for the first large-scale Asian-African Conference, also known as the Bandung Conference. The key organisers of the meeting included Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The participants of the conference aimed to promote Afro-Asian solidarity against any form of colonialism and neo-colonialism, as well as to foster economic and cultural cooperation in the regions. 

Further Non-Aligned Movement Conferences

Nation State

A nation state is a political entity regulated under a system of government which holds power within its defined territory, and conducts international relations with other states. It was the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, ending the European wars of religion, which created the blueprint for a new political order based upon the principle of co-existing sovereign states and national self-determination. A nation may also include a diaspora or refugees who live outside its area. Some states are sovereign states, whilst others are subject to external sovereignty or hegemony, such as in the case of a colony, where supreme authority lies in another state. A state where no one ethnic group dominates can also be considered a multicultural state.

Migration 

An immigrant is a person who moves to a new country or destination where they do not immediately possess citizenship, in order to reside and settle. People migrate internationally for different social and economic reasons, often to become a permanent resident or naturalised citizen, or to take up employment as a migrant worker. People also migrate to seek asylum due to such factors as persecution, genocide, war and social marginalisation. Immigration has taken place throughout human history and has been fundamental in the formation and development of societies around the world.

Religion

Religion is a set of cultural systems which designate practices, world-views, rituals and ethics, that position the human as the receiver of teachings from transcendental or spiritual orders of existence, gods or the divine. Religion and the observance of faith has diverse practices globally, including rituals, sermons, initiations, commemoration ceremonies, meditation and prayer. The Abrahamic Religions are religious communities that claim to originate from the practices of ancient Israelites and specifically the teachings of the Prophet Abraham. They are Semitic religions originating in the present-day Middle East, with the three largest being Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The largest religions globally are Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, however according to some conservative estimates there are approximately 4200 religions in the world, with new religions and denominations continuing to emerge. Atheism is the rejection of the existence of gods or deities. Some modern societies possess a plurality of both non-belief and belief.

Universalism

In philosophy, universality is the idea that universal facts exist and can be discovered, as opposed to relativism, which asserts that all facts are merely relative to one’s perspective. It posits that it is possible to apply generalised norms, values and ethics to all people and cultures, regardless of the contexts in which they are located. These norms may include a focus on human needs, rights, or biological and psychological processes, and are based on the perspective that all people are essentially equivalent. Universalism has been critiqued by post-modern and post-colonial thinkers, who find lack of evidence for any ideas or values that can be applied truly universally. In his book European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (2006), sociologist and economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein considers universalism as a successor to colonialism as a means of speaking on behalf of the developing world and interfering in the business of other countries. He charts how the Western world has attempted repeatedly to create universals since the Enlightenment, from such things as modernism as an attempted universal language or condition, though to such things as human rights. In his understanding, universalism can be seen as the shift from the Western stereotypical perspective of the East (historically described as ‘orientalism’ by Edward Said), to a Western sense of something shared, to which the Non-Western might not always conform. As universalism is ascribed the status of being natural law by the West, non-conformity permits the right to intervention, whether through aid, cultural intervention or even warfare.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 
Universalist Exhibitions
Universal Languages
Modernism 
Modernist architecture