THERE ARE NO PURE CULTURES.

In the 1990s, a powerful narrative of “globalisation” convinced many that they were living in an unprecedented age, cut off from the normal flow of history. This story claimed that fixed boundaries – territorial, cultural, even psychological – had dissolved, leaving humans unmoored from older geographies and identities and thrust into a borderless “global village” shaped by corporations, integrated markets, and a standardised “global English.” Globalisation was cast as a disruptive force that compressed time and space, produced hybrid “inauthentic” identities, and severed people from ancestral ways of life. Consequently, anti-globalisation movements began to present a retreat to supposedly pure roots and stable borders as a path back to a lost golden age.

Yet this scare story rests on historical amnesia. Globalisation neither began in the 1990s nor with container ships, the internet, or modern supply chains; it is a deep, continuous process woven through human history. Long before Columbus’s 1492 voyage and the subsequent “Columbian exchange” of plants, animals, and pathogens between the “Old” and “New” Worlds, people, goods, technologies, and ideas had been circulating across vast distances. Early modern globalisation (c. 1500–1800), which created global markets, mixed populations, and fostered new ideas of “self” and “other,” was itself only an accelerated episode of a much older pattern of connectivity. Archaeological, linguistic, and religious evidence – from the diffusion of major crops and domesticated animals to the spread of world religions, alphabets, and shared myths – reveals that human cultures have always been mutually entangled rather than neatly sealed.

This long history is obscured by what some theorists call “glocalisation”: the way local societies absorb global inputs and recast them as “their own.” Imported foods, symbols, or practices are domesticated, reinterpreted, and eventually misrecognised as authentic emblems of local or national identity. Potatoes become “traditional” European fare; tomatoes and maize anchor cuisines far from their American origins; wine grapes and cattle, once migrants, are recast as native markers of Frenchness or Americanness. The more successful a wave of globalisation is, the more its products are naturalised and forgotten. What looks locally rooted is often the sediment of countless prior exchanges.

Seen at the right scale, then, cultural distinctiveness is largely an illusion of time and perspective. Human culture, in the singular, functions like a genotype: a shared adaptive repertoire that enables the species to survive in diverse environments. Particular cultures are phenotypes: local expressions of that shared repertoire, shaped and reshaped as ideas, techniques, and institutions circulate. National histories, by obsessing over origins and inventions, reinforce the fantasy of self-contained cultures. But the decisive stories are often about circulation rather than creation: a wheel design, an alphabet, a religious image, or a medical theory becomes globally influential not because it appears, but because it travels, is adopted, and is reworked in many settings.

Underlying this ceaseless circulation is human mobility. As a species, humans are both unusually sedentary and profoundly cosmopolitan. They build enduring homes, yet over tens of thousands of years have repeatedly moved, resettled, mixed, and intermarried, populating almost every habitat on Earth. Modern migrants, refugees, and nomadic groups stand in continuity with Palaeolithic journeys out of Africa and across continents. Mobility has been a core survival strategy: a way to escape ecological stress, violence, or scarcity and to preserve dignity when conditions become intolerable. Attempts to sacralise rootedness and demonise movement – through rigid borders, anti-migrant ideologies, or nationalist myths of pure ancestry – run against this long adaptive history.

Periodic anxieties about global entanglement, however, are also recurrent. Earlier eras experienced their own “polycrises” in which climatic shocks, epidemics, wars, and political upheavals appeared linked across regions, prompting calls for closure and cultural retrenchment. Policies of isolation, bans on foreign goods, restrictions on intermarriage, or censorship of “dangerous” fashions and foods have all been used to defend supposedly threatened identities. Such measures, however, consistently fail in the long run: goods once vilified as spiritually corrupt, like maize tortillas in early modern Spain, or textiles condemned as morally corrosive, like Indian cottons in 17th-century France, eventually become normal components of a shared global culture.

Today’s anti-globalist rhetoric, with its fears of cultural dilution, demographic “replacement,” or cosmopolitan elites, replays these old patterns under new conditions. It misreads genetic and cultural diversity as threats rather than evidence of a rich, interwoven past. DNA, invoked to police boundaries of belonging, actually records millennia of migration and interbreeding, including encounters with other human lineages. It testifies less to fixed racial essences than to the adaptive mobility that has repeatedly remade human populations. To weaponise such differences in the service of identitarian ideologies is to ignore that all large-scale conflicts are, in a deep sense, civil wars within a single, globally constituted human family.

Recognising that “we have always been global” unsettles comforting myths of pure origins and sealed cultures, but it also offers a more realistic framework for confronting shared crises. It suggests that what we cherish as authentic – cuisines, languages, religions, ethical codes – is the cumulative product of innumerable globalisations. It reframes cosmopolita

nism not as a suspicious elite stance, but as the ordinary condition of a species whose history is one long experiment in movement, exchange, and mutual transformation. In that light, the real task is not to defend imagined cultural islands against a threatening tide, but to understand how our intertwined past can ground responsibilities that reach beyond borders, and guide how we continue, together, to become who we are.

SOURCE- THE AEON ESSAYS

WORDS COUNT- 700

F.K SCORE- 15