"In certain cases, culture, in projecting an image for others, claims a radical difference from others, often further defined qualitatively as superiority. Already, in this insistence on uniqueness and "higher" development, we sense a linear, anthropomorphic drive. For centuries (and especially within the last three), Europe has found itself in hot contest internally over this very issue. Culture has been territorialized and, with it, groups of its diverse adherents. Cultural wars have become territorial wars have become cultural wars again, and indeed into this maelstrom have been sucked concepts of "race," "virtue," and "nation," never to re-emerge. Not so much the content of these cross-cultural feuds startles as the vehemence and aggression with which groups of people wrangle over where one coverage ends and another begins. The incipient desire to define "race" and "culture" in the same breath as "identity" and "nationality" finally coincides with great upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe-among them, the over- turning of the feudal monarchies of Central Europe and the discovery and subjugation of black and brown masses across the seas. Herein the word culture gains two fateful senses: "that with which one whole group aggressively defines its superiority vis-à-vis another" and, a finer one, "that held at a level above the group or mass, for the benefit of the culture as a whole, by the conscious few (i.e., the distinction between haute and basse culture)." At the same time as Europeans were defining themselves over against other European nations, and some of them even against members of their own nations, they were also busy defining "European culture" as separate from "African culture," the ultimate otherness, the final mass."
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