Transmission Across Cultures.

Transmission across cultures denotes the historically layered and often asymmetrical movement of symbols, practices, and texts as they are carried, translated, and transformed between distinct social formations rather than merely reproduced intact from one locale to another. At once descriptive and analytical, the concept brings together anthropological accounts of cultural transmission, which classify pathways of social learning (vertical, horizontal, and oblique), with literary-critical attention to how narratives and forms circulate through translation, adaptation, and canon formation across linguistic and national boundaries. Within such a framework, culture is not imagined as a self-sufficient, territorially sealed entity, but as a dynamic ensemble of practices that is incessantly reconfigured in transnational networks of exchange, negotiation, and contestation.​

In anthropology and social theory, cultural transmission names the processes through which knowledge, norms, and repertoires of behavior are acquired via socialization and enculturation, ensuring both continuity and change as they move between generations and groups. Classic models distinguish vertical transmission (parent to child), horizontal transmission (among peers), and oblique transmission (from non-parental elders or institutions), thereby foregrounding the plurality of channels through which cultural elements travel and mutate. When extended across cultures, these mechanisms map onto large-scale movements—migration, colonization, trade, missionary work, and digital communication—through which stories, ritual forms, and aesthetic conventions traverse borders, producing hybrid formations such as Creole cultures or diasporic literary traditions that refuse simple origin narratives.​

For literary studies, this cross-cultural transmission of texts and genres has become increasingly central to comparative and world-literature paradigms that reject the methodological isolation of national canons. Translation, long treated as secondary or derivative, is now recognized as a primary vehicle of transmission: it disseminates works across linguistic boundaries while simultaneously re-inscribing them within new ideological, aesthetic, and market regimes, so that each translated text functions as a historically situated rewriting rather than a transparent conduit of an original. The same holds for adaptation, citation, and intertextual allusion, which create intricate webs of reference through which motifs, narrative templates, and figurative structures migrate from one cultural context to another, often under conditions marked by power differentials such as imperial domination or global capitalism.​

A networked conception of cultural transmission in literature thus emphasizes relationality over rootedness, attending to how texts are embedded in circuits of circulation that criss-cross languages, media, and institutions. Rather than reading a work as the expression of a single bounded culture, such approaches track the multiple affiliations and itineraries that shape it—its reliance on translated sources, its negotiation of foreign forms, its reception in distant interpretive communities—thereby uncovering patterns of collaboration, appropriation, resistance, and cross-fertilization that underwrite its aesthetic and political force. In this sense, transmission across cultures is less a marginal phenomenon than a constitutive condition of literary production and reception in a world where the movement of people, languages, and texts continually unsettles the idea of culturally homogeneous traditions.

VOCABULARY FROM THE PASSAGE

1. Asymmetrical – Unequal or imbalanced in structure, power, or effect.​

2. Enculturation – The process by which individuals learn and internalize the culture of their group.​

3. Repertoires – Ranges or inventories of skills, practices, or expressive forms.​

4. Transnational – Extending or operating across national boundaries.​

5. Canon formation – The process by which certain texts become privileged as authoritative or classic in a tradition.​

6. Intertextual – Relating to the shaping of a text’s meaning by other texts (through allusion, citation, rewriting, etc.).​

7. Hybridity – The mixing or fusion of distinct cultural forms, identities, or traditions.​

8. Diasporic – Pertaining to dispersed communities living away from a putative homeland.​

9. Relationality – Emphasis on relations, connections, and networks rather than isolated entities.​

10. Appropriation – The taking up or use of elements from another culture, often with issues of power and ethics.

SOURCE- BESAHARA MAGAZINE

WORDS COUNT- 550

F.K SCORE- 14