Cultural Revivals

The term cultural revival refers to the formation of group identity around a common culture, where a claim is forwarded that the aspects of culture with which the group identifies have been recovered after losses due to colonization, forced or voluntary relocation, oppression, or modernization. Cultural revival is predominantly associated with minority populations and frequently underwrites demands for rights, restitutions, and political or legal recognition as an ethnic group. Much scholarship on the subject has taken examples of cultural revival at face value, undertaking to document the strategies such groups employ and analyze the cultural practices and materials they recover. Work by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists in the 1980s and 1990s, however, theorized the phenomenon as a hallmark of social formations under capitalist modernity.

According to these scholars, cultural revival is a tactic pursued—consciously or unconsciously—by minority communities to consolidate political identity and gain recognition through an appeal to foundationalist cultural logic—that is, the belief that "authentic" traditions are unchanging and ancient, unique to and defining of a given community, and properly transmitted only to members of that group through heredity and ancestry.