ABSTRACT
In times of globalization, almost everything seems to have become ‘hybrid’. There are hybrid music and dance styles (Indo-jazz, salsa); there is fusion food; there is Bollywood; there are hybrid vehicles that use two or more distinct power sources; there are hybrid computers combining analogue and digital features. Hybridity, it seems, has become the normal status quo, and contributes to a positive connotation of many objects, practices and phenomena. This is important to highlight since originally, the term ‘hybridity’, stemming from Latin, meant the off-spring of a tame sow and a wild boar, hence a half-breed or bastard. As a result, for long there have been mostly negative undertones: hybrid meant something barren, bastard, inauthentic, less fine and thus degraded or hotchpotch.
