Oh, gosh, please don't throw away lixiviated culture quite yet! I have for the past few days been considering the similarities between the process and the washing away of cultures.
A movie I mentioned on Miscellany, "The Weeping Camel," shows just that sort of insidious lixiviation in Mongolia, at first focusing on families working their sheep and camels on the desert, and finally showing in a very subtle way the movement of television into a nearby town. One of the old ones senses the threat of television--images in glass, he calls it. And the shots of poles to carry electricty look so foreign on the desert where the sheep and camel herders live. The poles look like invaders and the motorcycles from the town look threatening, too.
But it is all subtle, insidious, creeping on the surface, but likely to snap the nomadic culture apart if it takes root.
Evisceration works, too, but it seems more like a bomb...not so subtle. Lixiviation seems as though it could work slowly, insidiously, like contaminated water leaching soil nutrients, a process so subtle, but sure, that it can go undetected for years before the damage is done and hard to turn back.
