Friend,
foreigner, patriot?*
Aleksandar Boškoviæ
University
of the
I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, all of those that merge, those that past, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing.
(Beckett 1958: 386)
In selecting the
topic for today’s seminar I was considering both the place (location) where I
am speaking and the place (location) where I come from.
The location of
where I come from is a somewhat complicated matter. I came here from
Therefore, I
simply do not have a notion of stability and order, so common in most of the
Western European cultures, with their institutions and traditions of political
life going back for decades and perhaps centuries. The notion of flux,
instability, constant change (involving total destruction) and uncertainty is
something that comes “naturally” to me — but I am well aware how frightening
these notions might be for someone raised to think in specifically well-determined
and well-defined categories. (I am not implying here that all change is the
same — but I do feel at ease with the notion of constant change.) What is today
the
On the other
hand, the hyperreality of the remnants of ex-Yugoslavia is both comical and
sad, as I wrote elsewhere. Most recently, the name of the country has been
changed into “
This sense of
alterity (dis)locates the spaces that I inhabit as well as the ones where I
wish to go. There is a strange reality, of course, in which my (Macedonian)
passport identifies me without any ambiguity as a “non-European” in European Subject, where she
questions the “European” identity – from the perspective that there should be
more general, universal humanist values that must take precedence over particular
tribal or ethnic feelings. This is a type of “humanism” that I respect, despite
feeling uneasy about its universalist pretensions. I am close to the opinion
that “
Last but not least, there is a bit of uneasiness as to what is the scientific (or “scholarly”) discipline I come from. Having my Ph.D. from social anthropology forces me into some kind of professional identity (reinforced by membership in several professional organizations), but I am very reluctant to accept it. I feel that what I am about to say here fits much more along the borders of two vast fields – of “cultural studies” and of “social sciences” (although some of my friends would like to push me somewhere into the “humanism” as well). In effect, my research does create a certain (anthropological, social-science) bias, but my intentions are cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. I hope that what I am about to say will be understandable to people from different scholarly backgrounds.
Imagining
the other
Modernity, by comparison, seems never to have entertained similar doubts as to the universal grounding of its status. The hierarchy of values imposed upon the world administered by the north-western tip of the European peninsula was so firm, and supported by powers so enormously overwhelming, that for a couple of centuries it remained the baseline of the world vision, rather than an overtly debated problem. Seldom brought to the level of consciousness, it remained the all-powerful ‘taken-for-granted’ of the era. It was evident to everybody except the blind and the ignorant that the West was superior to the East, white to black, civilized to crude, cultured to uneducated, sane to insane, healthy to sick, man to woman, normal to criminal, more to less, riches to austerity, high productivity to low productivity, high culture to low culture. All these ‘evidences’ are now gone. Not a single one remains unchallenged. What is more, we can see now that they did not hold in separation from each other; they made sense together, as manifestations of the same power complex, the same power structure of the world, which retained credibility as long as the structure remained intact, but were unlikely to survive its demise.
(Bauman 1993: 135-136)
Hatred and fear usually go together. In a strange twist, they can also be programmed retroactively, as witnessed by some observers (and pointed by some cultural critics like Slavoj Žižek) in the case of the former Yugoslavia, where journalists, diplomats and various people of good will went around asking people “Isn’t it true that you always hated your neighbors?” and projecting their own fantasies of conflict and negotiation. Unsurprisingly, the members of the public let them live out their fantasies in full, confirming that indeed “they always hated their neighbors” – even though they knew it was not true. Somehow, however, this made sense – in a world divided between Good and Evil, the Evil ones were a necessity. Furthermore, they could then justify the claims that the results of the horrendous war for territories (masked as “ethnic conflict”) should be accepted as fait accompli – no right of the return for millions of refugees, for example (as implied recently by a noted American anthropologist – cf. Hayden 2002).
A kind of a global rationalization of inequality among peoples
occurred in the late 16th and early 17th centuries CE. The “discovery” of the
The debates that arose immediately after the Spanish conquest of
However, the theoretical question of the use of force in converting
the native population to the “true faith” and “true God” had already been
raised by the lawyer from Córdoba, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, in his treatise “Democrates alter sive de iustis belli causis”
(
The unknown that was introduced to the Western world in the late 15th and early 16th century were other worlds. Of course, the contacts and the interchange between Western and non-Western cultures had a long history, but it was always limited by sheer distance or in some cases simple cultural incompatibility (mostly based on the premises of different religions or different ideological systems). In the case of the Western European expansion that started in late 15th and early 16th century with Columbus reaching the Antilles in 1492 and Vasco da Gama sailing around Africa in 1498, the “West” put itself in a position of absolute domination and control, its master narrative was to become a master narrative of the whole world that it wanted to subjugate; it had appropriated (“discovered”) new worlds, and something had to be done about it.
What was done was essentially a rationalist revolution, initiated by René Descartes in philosophy and Sir Isaac Newton in science. This revolution claimed the separation between the mind and the body, it started to treat different systems of knowledge as always incompatible, different systems of values as mutually exclusive, and at the same time set up a standard (of the Western colonial powers in expansion — although, to be clear, neither Descartes or Newton were particularly involved or interested in the colonial expansion) that was to become the standard for judging and evaluating all other (different) cultures. This stood in sharp contrast to the humanist ideals of the Renaissance (in fact, Toulmin calls this revolution “Retreat from the Renaissance” [1990: 30]), and it has made several important breaks with the earlier tradition.[6]
First of all, the emphasis shifts from the oral to the written, rhetoric losing its position as a legitimate field of study, and the stress is put on the rational presentation of arguments, in the sense of producing proofs. Who presents the arguments, in which context, to what audience, becomes totally irrelevant. Decontextualization enters the West European science and humanities. Secondly, there is a shift from the particular to the universal; in the world that was becoming (colonially) globalized, particular cases and situations lost their importance, the laws are set with universalist claims (primarily in the context of raging religious wars in Europe).
If respecting the other was implicit in the moral and philosophical theories of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from the 17th century onwards, this respect became irreconcilable with the strategies of domination, where the other had to be subsumed under the General Law of Reason. There is an important shift from the timely to the timeless, closely associated with the new strategies. While in previous centuries scholars paid much more attention to the context of specific situations (following the advice from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics), this interest is lost in the rationalist revolution.
Although Toulmin looks at this break primarily from the perspective of the actual political and historical context of the 17th century Europe (which led to the savage war that from 1618 until 1648 raged in Germany and Bohemia), his arguments deal with the characteristics of Modernity itself, its emphasis on rationalization, the pursuit of Truth, and the quest for certainty that eventually became self-fulfilling.
“European”
rationality – the Modernist project
The basic presupposition, it seems to me, still stands: namely, that the question is not “Fascism – yes or no?”, but “How much fascism?”.
(Moènik 1998: 10)
Two concepts are
of special interest for me here – universality and rationality. They are both
interconnected in the big project initiated five centuries ago: universality
sweeps away all the potential differences between cultures in contact, as
rationality tells “us” that even if “we” would recognize the differences, there
is still the good and the evil, and it is clear where the good is. The dominant
culture does not ever posit itself as just one of the many – it firmly
positions itself as the model against
which all the other cultures (peoples, customs, moral codes, individual
behavior, etc…) will be measured and judged. The dominant culture of the era is
the culture (or “civilization” – as
In a recent paper, in his typically irreverent style, Žižek (2001) has questioned the perceived limits of our tolerance for other cultures and points of view. He looks at the other extreme, at the paradoxes brought by completely equating different points of view and different perspectives (for example, a German Nazi film director complaining in 1950 how American Jews don’t understand him – 2001: 340). I am a bit uneasy with the broad-sweeping consequences of Žižek’s critique, as much as I agree with some details of it. I am afraid that what he postulates is a specific kind of imperial look – or simply refusal to deal with other cultures that are based on different cultural premises from the “Western” ones. Having said that, I wish to stress my agreement with him in the specific examples (and authors he mentions, like Rorty and Singer – 2001: 340-341), but also the fact that cognitive relativism does not mean moral relativism, as well as that there are many people (myself included) who are cognitive relativists – but not moral relativists.
This has to do
with the whole complex of alterity as something different and embodying
different people – “strangers”. Julia Kristeva (1991) (a “stranger” herself!)
in her study traces some of the reactions to others through history. However,
she focuses on the notion of the individual (even when she/he is “co-opted”
into a larger whole by virtue of similarity or dissimilarity) – and in recent
years we have been witnesses of some large scale violence directed against the
whole ethnic groups (nations): Bosnia and Herzegovina (at least 200,000 dead),
Rwanda (800,000) and Congo (two million) stand as stark reminders of what the
consequences of alterity could be. Therefore, I think that we should turn our
attention to perceptions of others as part
of groups (or larger entities – “ethnic groups” or “nations”). For once
others are perceived as obstacles – be it to progress, development, good
living, or even “civilization” – the rational choice is to get rid of them.
Once their humanity is abstracted or even called into question (for “they” are
so different from “us”!),[7]
their lives become expendable. Once racist policies are wrapped in the aura of
self-righteousness (as with Zionism in
However, it is
not enough just that “the might is right” – the rationality calls for a rational and above all moral justification. Killing and
destroying (expelling, if there is no other option) as many others as possible
is “good” for “us” because that will enable safety and security (again,
(Mis)placing
the other: gender and race
Tickets are expensive. So are the hotels.
Names range from Rita to Juanita.
In walks a policeman, and what he tells
you is “You are persona non grata in terra
incognita.”
Joseph Brodsky (“Abroad”)
Ethnicity is just one form of identifying and establishing the border between “us” and potentially hostile “them”. Others include gender, class and race. I will not deal here with class in detail – a very good overview is in Balibar and Wallerstein 1997 – but just mention some peculiarities about gender and race.
A few words about the discipline where I find
myself working (and learned people from anthropology say that I should regard
myself as one of “them” because of my training, my current institutional
affiliation, research and my degree) should help contextualize this discussion.
Anthropologists are engaged in some form of a post-colonial discourse whenever
they step (professionally, of course) into the world of a “strange” or “exotic”
culture (the fact that it might be their own culture does not affect this). “Step
into” might not be the correct expression, since one of the most important
conditions for the understanding of another culture (and the whole different
set of values, norms, representations, etc.) is being aware of the differences.
Except in the cases where the anthropologist/ethnographer is himself/herself a
member of a certain community (and sometimes even in those cases, but on a
different plane), there is a fundamental difference. Two worlds meet. Or,
alternatively, two (or more) cultures, worlds (sometimes literally centuries)
apart.[8] This “stepping into” should not be taken only
in a literal sense, since it presupposes any form of communication about or
with a culture or a society (or group, individual, etc.) that is being studied.
Another thing that it presupposes is that there will be elements which the
anthropologist will find impossible to classify or explain, so he/she should
not try to force her/his preconceptions on the culture, but to accept the
potential unintelligibility of certain elements of the studied culture as a
fact, culture as a specific set of values for each individual and distinctive
community or group.
Of course, the question arises of the objective
(if there is such thing) validity of doing any
research. It was as far back as in 1881, that one of the founding fathers of
anthropology, Adolf Bastian, remarked that
For
us, primitive societies (Naturvölker)
are ephemeral, that is, as regards our knowledge of, and our relations with
them, in fact, inasmuch as they exist for us at all. At the very instance they
become known to us they are doomed.
(quoted
in Fabian 1991: 194)
So knowing others, getting in contact with them
(“contact” in the 19th-century usually meant death sentence for many
African cultures) is the first step towards their destruction. In the
contemporary world, this destruction need not be physical or brutal – it is
enough to insert different cultural values, to make people obedient to any authority (one of the important aspects that
facilitated Rwandan massacre – Zarembo 1997), or to institute the policies of forced removals (which effectively
ripped apart the social fabric of many South African black communities). But
there are different kinds of others and different strategies employed to “deal”
with them.
In a sense, women are the ultimate “others.”
They are an integral part of the world and at the same time have been
throughout history excluded (partially or completely) from full participation
in it (Riley 1988). Observed and studied in
“primitive” societies, they have only recently become active
participants in “mainstream” sciences
and humanities, adding a specific (or should I say: gender specific) point of
view. This opens numerous possibilities, as summed up by Toni Flores:
What
is interesting, I think, is that because male culture is officially the valued
and powerful one, women come with some determination to grasp what we have been
denied — and from this realization come the various women’s movements. On the
other hand, because female culture, along with the feminine possibilities it
carries, is both devalued and disempowered, it is hard for men to recognize or
accept that they lack something, much less attempt actively to grasp what they
hardly know they want.
(Flores
1991: 143)
Of course, I would not agree with phrases such as “male culture” or “female culture” — they both seem to be too general and too universalizing and totalizing, trying to subsume a great variety of different discourses under a common denominator. However, it seems to me that in everyday life there exists a sense of polarity and ambivalence when it comes to the issues dealing with gender. Anthropology and social sciences in general are no exception to this. The picture has been distorted, people realize that and begin to wander what the “real” image looks like.
The extent to which anthropology can (or even should) reshape this distorted picture remains unclear, but anthropology as something standing outside the contemporary world, in the realm of the “pure” science is a fiction.[9] It is my belief that anthropologists (as well as social scientists) have a duty and an obligation (both as human beings and as critical intellectuals) to at least try to present “others” in an acceptable way (acceptable for the others in the first place!). Since they depend on their existence (that is to say, the very existence of others is a prerequisite for their profession), it is in their (existential) interest to assure that the others are represented in an acceptable way and that the “natives” are able both to represent and to express themselves in a ways that they find most appropriate.[10]
I do not intend to fully adopt here Asad’s (1979) thesis that what
really matters in terms of social change today is the movement of world capital
and the globalization of world economic processes (although I do believe that
terms like “market economy” are nonsense invented by the people in power in
order to retain and globalize this power[11]),
but this thesis reflects a part of the problem. (On another note, as I pointed
out in an earlier paper on
An interesting situation also occurs when feminist authors (as “others”) write on women (as “others” as well): are they “feminist” or radical enough? (For example, by Henrietta Moore in her Passion for Difference.) Where does feminism end and “pure” or “disengaged” research start? Is it possible to be a feminist and do this kind of research on feminist discourses or practices? Since others are “there” (and we are “here”) — and there is no way to find out whether they have always been, or were just constructed by ourselves — then, the main question for me is how to approach this fact. What to do with the others?
The answer is not as obvious as it seems. Obviously, one does not ignore others, although it is relatively easy to pretend that they do not exist (since this is only pretending, one is still aware of them and just makes a conscious effort to avoid them). But this attempt at avoiding does not deny their existence! Even if we bypass something, we implicitly acknowledge the fact that there is something out there (to be avoided). Others can be studied, but then the question might arise from whose perspective and why. What gives the right (any right) to anthropologists (or social scientists in general) to go around and study various ethnic groups, and then subsequently publish the most intimate details of their lives? From another perspective, the dependence of anthropologists on their “informants” (the word has a slightly Orwellian sound for me) is almost complete, and very rarely do anthropologists question the data that they have obtained in the field. Very rarely they assume that they might have been told something simply because the “natives” wanted to please them or to avoid probing into the more intimate aspects of their lives.[12] Questions relating to the privacy and the actual wishes of the others (the “observed ones”) are increasingly becoming paramount in any serious research project. Although the situation seems to be most tricky with regard to the fieldwork (positioning of oneself with his/her “objects of study,” questions regarding even ethics of disclosure of certain details, anthropologists’ personal life “in the field,” etc.), it is even worse when one actually studies texts.
The relationship between different
social-studies’ approaches and the study of gender is in no way simple or
straightforward, as noted by Marilyn Strathern:
[T]he
constant rediscovery that women are the Other in men’s accounts reminds women
that they must see men as the Other in relation to themselves. Creating a space
for women becomes creating a space for the self, an experience becomes an
instrument for knowing the self. Necessary to the construction of the feminist
self, then, is a nonfeminist Other. The Other is most generally conceived as
“patriarchy,” the institutions and persons who represent male domination, often
simply concretized as “men.”[cf. Toni Flores, above.] Because the goal is to
restore to subjectivity a self dominated by the Other, there can be no shared
experience with persons who stand for the Other.
(Strathern
1987: 288)
However, the questions relating to otherness and identity lead to the ones on difference(s). The other is recognized as other because it is different. Although, as noted above (footnote 7), these differences are often constructed or simply invented retroactively in order to justify actions.
Another good example is provided by the race. Most social scientists reject the very existence of it. Genetically, it makes no sense. However, the fact of the matter is that people do look different to some people – and this has serious social, political, or economic implications. I again refer to Linke (1999) on the (West) “European” construction of “race” – what is interesting to me, coming here from South Africa (and after Brazil), is the way that South Africans and Brazilians are burdened and frequently overwhelmed with this concept and its implications.
While the official Brazilian discourses in the last 60 years (following right-wing writer and intellectual Gilberto Freyre) or so speak of the “racial democracy” (democracia racial), South Africans had their “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC) to help them deal with the horrific legacy of the apartheid regime. For the outside world and for the politicians, the TRC has been a huge success. For the less privileged people, however, the story is much different, as it is perceived as the mechanism that enabled some mass-scale murderers to get away with their crimes. (And as Judy Grant pointed out,[13] the women remained victimized during the proceedings as well!) There was some talk of reparations for the victims, but the reparations are not on the agenda of the current South African government.
The race is the determining factor of South African politics – black people (majority of the population) will always vote for the ANC – regardless of the ANC government’s policies (that recently include totally ignoring the HIV/AIDS pandemic that is literally killing thousands of people in the country – it is officially the leading cause of death). On the other hand, the “official opposition”, DA, seems incapable of addressing the non-white population, they appear to be locked into the South African whites’ (especially when it comes to the English-speaking whites, who believe that they are actually in England and for example simply refuse to learn any Black African language) isolation – as they have lived for decades separate and sheltered lives, their points of reference also tend to be in complete isolation from the non-whites’ problems or perceptions. The problems are made worse by the perception (see for example the reports of the International Working and Advisory Group 2000) that only whites can be racist. This masks the obvious racism that exists in the majority of the black and coloured population as well – directed not only against whites, but even more against (black poor) immigrants from other African countries (like Angola or Mozambique), who are frequently attacked, abused, or even killed. However, as South Africans today officially subscribe to the policies of “non-racialism”, it is politically incorrect to talk about this, so the problems of dealing with the burden of race just get postponed for the indefinite future.
The situation in
“It wasn’t me!”
is quite a common excuse of the privileged minorities in both countries. “It
has nothing to do with me – the others were doing it!” As one had nothing to do
with the previous oppressive policies, the collective amnesia takes place and
the world begins in the year zero (a moment chosen by the privileged community
and sanctified by the mechanisms such as the TRC in South Africa), without any
effort to understand what has happened in the past and what are the
consequences for the future. By perpetuating a certain type of discourse (in
South Africa, directed to English-speaking whites and affluent blacks), excluding
the less privileged ones, societies create boundaries of “us” and “them”,
boundaries that cannot be transgressed, as people are (in both South Africa and
Brazil) simply “born into” defined racial categories. Similarly to the Hegel’s
famous analogy of the Master and Slave, the oppressed ones in
Concluding
remarks: Deconstructing the other
We National Socialists have found a very specific definition for the state… it has only a purpose if its final task is the preservation of the living folkdom. It must not only be the life preserver of a people, but thereby primarily the preserver of the inner essence, the maintainer of a nation’s blood. Other than this, the state has no purpose in the long run.
Adolf Hitler speaking in 1937 (quoted in Linke 1999: 209)
Locating others in space and time helps create boundaries (Barth in Cohen 2000; Balibar 1997: 381-395) that in effect help us establish our identity (either by constructing it, or by choosing an appropriate one for an occasion). Others are important markers of where does the familiar end. Problems arise when people start to seriously believe in the unity of their ethnic group or race (or any other similar category), when the assumption is that the purity is almost there, just a little effort away. Of course, historically speaking, there are no (and, as far as we can tell from the available archaeological data, there were no) ethnically “pure” populations. Striving for one looks like a misplaced ideal, attempt to achieve something that its creators know (or at least should know) is impossible.
However, racism
sells. Nationalism is popular – from the buses adorned with MiloπeviÊ’s
portraits in
Some of this is
seen in the debates about “multiculturalism” – perceived as a dangerous virus
threatening to dilute the perceived heterogeneous fabric of societies
(frequently identified as “blood” – Linke 1999). This is what gives rise to
extreme right-wing politicians throughout “
I wish I could end on a more positive note, but my point is that being aware of certain phenomena or processes (and making them visible in public and exposed for what they really are) could help one determine whether to take certain actions or not. The choice is important here – people can make a difference if they want to. (The French voters could have voted for candidates other than Le Pen, but many opted to stay at home… Taking a look at French politics, can one really blame them?) It seems quite obvious that the respect and recognition of the other are necessary if we want to be respected and recognized by anyone outside ourselves – for what are we all if not others for some other observers, in other situations, under other points of view, in other circumstances and other perspectives?
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*
Acknowledgements. This is
a version of the paper presented in the seminar in the Department of Sociology,
[1] It is a well known fact that
before the 16th century, race was simply not an issue in the Western European
art — and, although infrequently, representatives of other races were
represented in sculpture or painting.
[2] I am not implying that this ethnocide
and ecocide was a necessary or in any
way justifiable price to be paid for this broadening
of intellectual horizons — I am just stating this as a fact.
[3] Without getting into the
detailed explanation of these important institutions, I will only say that they
refer to a series of regulations that basically connected (tied) native
inhabitants to the lands that were purchased by settlers or given away as
gifts, thus keeping the native population practically as slaves.
[4] Among the most notable ones
were Bartolomé de Carranza, Melchior Cano, and Domingo
[5] Of course, one should not
forget that Las Casas on the theoretically similar grounds justified the
slavery (and slave trade, which was becoming a profitable business venture) in
[6] In this section of the
paper, I am closely following Stephen Toulmin’s account, so I am not giving
specific page references.
[7] And ironically, of course,
in all of the three cases referred to above, it was the lack of difference that
was taken to constitute the difference itself! It seems that the sameness of the people irritated them to
such an extent that they had to invent and re-invent the perceived “inhumanity”
of their neighbors.
[8] Of course, there are differences within specific cultures as well
as differences between anthropologists/ethnographers and cultures they come
from — I am just using these universal concepts here to illustrate my
point.
[9] At least as much as the very
concept that any science can be “pure,” “objective,” “disinterested,” or
politically “neutral.”
[10] Of course, the question then arises (and I do
not claim to know the answer to it): who decides what is an adequate
representation of the other in a specific context and based on what criteria?
[11] To claim that any
[12] Several years ago, a
delegation from a South Pacific ethnic group came for a farewell visit to an
anthropologist who did his fieldwork there and was getting ready to leave with
his wife. The delegation expressed their
gratitude for the anthropologist’s stay in their village, because that
presented them with an opportunity to observe the life of a white family!
Participant observation at its best.
[13] At the “Hidden Genders”
conference at the
[14] Again, the phenomenon is not
that new – I presented something about it as far back as May 1997 (BoπkoviÊ 1998a: 127).