Reading log Bhabha, Wikan, Riley

9 March Glad to see your log Catarina! I look forward to the resource that you will create on intersectionality. 130.243.100.240 09:45, 9 March 2009 (UTC)Sangeeta

Läslogg KOIIA 2, vt -09 Catarina Schmidt

Unni Wikan, Generous Betrayal – Politics of Culture in the New Europe

Unni Wikan was born in 1944 and is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo (Wikipedia, 2009-03-01). Wikan leads in her book ”Generous Betrayal” a discussion about culture, cultural rights, human rights, identity and democracy. In the centre of the discussion are young women whose parents have immigrated to Norway or Sweden. Cultural rights are put against human rights when those young women are forced to marry, are denied human democratic rights or in the worst scenario are victims of violence and/or murder. Within anthropology the concept of culture has always being used but not always questioned. Different cultures have been described and taken for granted without being mirrored towards laws and conventions about democracy and human rights signed by societies and nations all over the world. At the same time we are, according to Wikan, building a system of society with traditions and customs containing oppression which stands in open conflict with fundamental human rights. Wikan means therefore that the word culture can be a trap where children and weaker members of a group tend to be losers. The word culture tends to be a label standing for the exotic and strange – which in the name of culture is not being questioned. What those young women in Norway and Sweden, which have been exposed with honor of violence, have in common is that they belong to a patriotic culture associated with traditions which can result in violence and oppression in order to defense the honor of the family. Within this culture there is no room for individualism – variations in aspects of gender, age, ethnicity, social class and education are being denied or reduced. There are simply not many alternatives in being a woman or a man. Since identity is created by gender, age, ethnicity, social class and education the conclusion is a denial of the identity itself. The concept of culture becomes a trap which denies any variations of identity when we instead need the opposite;”a society worth living in must make room for people to craft identities” (p. 74). This sentence from Wikan opens in my opinion up for a meeting between human beings and if the individuals can meet can perhaps in the long run cultures can meet. Because of this Wikan claims that the respect for the individual”may require that”culture” be demoted or resisted” (p. 77). Wikan go as far that she speaks of the concept of culture as”a new concept of race” (p. 79) meaning that it maintains a politic which denies human rights. The author means that since culture is only a concept it has no own autonomic or material existence. Wikan means that culture and power walk hand in hand and that the authority always is resting by those who have the power:

”Some people have the right – or seize the right – to define what is to count and for what, and the result, the authoritative”truth” is often called culture.” (p. 87).

By exaggerating external and internal differences between different cultures and also to prevent differences within a certain culture a false image of a homogeny culture appears, something that will affect those members of the group that from different reasons want to go other ways than the head line. Wikan argues that the concept of culture”covers up the complexity of human existence, the fact that we are both children of”our culture” and unique individuals” (p. 88). All together I understand that Wikan’s recapitulation about the problems regarding the culture concept can be summarized like this:


 * Culture is a concept – not a thing
 * There is no objective definition
 * Culture has no agency – only humans have the power to act
 * Culture has no power – only what people give it
 * Cultural things change
 * Culture and power go hand in hand – some people seize the right to tell what is the “truth”
 * Culture is usually taken to mean difference, not difference and similarity
 * There are internal differences but culture tends to play down them which gives a false picture of homogeneity

(after Wikan, p. 88)

The question ringing in my head after having read Wikan’s book is why are we not doing anything? For me the answer is that we very often are blind mice, but with the help of Wikan we can be at least near sighted.

Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture

Homi K. Bhabha, an Indian theorist of post-colonialism, was born 1949 and is according to Wikipedia (2009-03-01) currently teaching at Harvard University. From what I understand Bhabha in his book “Location of Culture” consequently punctures thoughts that support ideas about any better or worse of cultures. There is, according to the author a great need to redefine the concept of national cultures:

The very concept of homogenous national cultures, the Consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or ‘organic’ ethnic communities – as the ground of cultural comparativism – are in a profound process of redefinition. The hideous extremity of Serbian nationalism proves that the very idea of a pure, ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through the death, literal and figurative, of the complex interweavings of history, and the culturally contingent borderlines of modern nationhood. (p. 7)

His vision includes instead an articulated, clear hybrid of cultures and it is this space that he calls “the third space of enunciation” (p. 53). Within this space Bhabha means that there is a possibility to create a conception of culture that is not based on exotic descriptions which in a one-sided and uninterruptedly way put the others aside as the worse. We can, as I understand Bhabha, achieve this by finding the words where we can talk about ourselves and the others. To ascribe some cultures a kind of intrinsic inherited pureness which is not questionable is, according to Bhabha, untenable. Generations of authors have described meetings between cultures in the old colonies. After having read this book I understand why Bhabha includes so many literary quotations since those give descriptions that cover everything from integration to vast gulfs and oppressing violence between cultures. The Western compulsion to colonize has, of course, had a huge impact on our view of foreign cultures and through colonial and postcolonial authors we can see the possibility to change and, again, the vision of the third space. The different contributions from post colonialism expose both the colonists and the former colonies and have an ambition to explain today’s problems in society as a consequence of the western European colonization. The author’s contribution, as I understand it, is about the cultural and social effects within the post colonialism and by emphasizing the colonists and the colonized dependence from each other he argues that all cultural systems should be constructed in “the third space of enunciation” (p. 53). This, Bhabha means, will help us to escape from “we” and “them” where we are using and giving each other troublesome binaries. Binary oppositions are fatal since they unthinkingly dominate the second, again there is a better and a worse culture and examples might be civilized/savage, rational/irrational, enlightened/ignorant and eventually west/east and white/black. The binaries need according to Bhabha to be destabilized and he argues that culture must be understood to interact in a much more complex manner than those traditional binary oppositions can allow.

To take this perspective would mean that we see ‘racism’ not simply as a hangover from archaic conceptions of the aristocracy, but as part of the historical traditions of civic and liberal humanism that create ideological matrices of national aspiration, together with the concept of ‘a people’ and its imagined community. (p. 359)

The idea of race is present through Bhabas book and as I understand it is something we have to deal with and revise in our time. Bhabas uses, as always, the literature and one example is Fanon from “The fact of blackness”:

‘Dirty nigger!’ Or, simply, Look a Negro’ (p.338)

From this quotation Bhabha draws conclusions and the senses of not only being the individual ‘nigger’ but also of belonging to the marginalized group of black people –but also about developing black identity in human with ideological matrices. And shortly afterwards he again quotes Fanon with the sentence:

You come too late much too late, there will always be a world – a whole white world between you and us. (p. 339)

Where is culture located and how do we see upon culture through the lenses of race? After having read this book I am more aware of the complexity than before but still very confused. Bhabas book is not an easily read book. The language is intense and compact with many adjectives and many, many quotations from the world’s literature describing colonialism, colonists and the aftermaths from it. The author requires a great deal from its reader and I wonder if he could have done it a little easier and hopefully a bit clearer. His theory is also a controversial one and full of demands. It is about you and me, how we look upon ourselves and others. What he wants is this:

What is crucial to such a vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical. (p. 367)

Philip Riley, Language, Culture and Identity

Philip Riley is emeritus professor of Ethnolinguistics at Nancy University in France. A central theme in Rileys book is communicative practices where language plays the most important role and he claims himself that the thrust of the book is “to study the linguistic and communicative aspects of the social knowledge system” (p. 8). From the very start Riley emphasizes the complexity of language, referring to Herder:

…since language is at one and the same time the tool, the content and the form of human thought, and every act of knowledge is only possible through the medium of language. This interdependence means that the modes of thought and cultures of people can only be studied and analysed in and through their language. (p.9)

Rileys book is a cross-disciplinary contribution showing how social knowledge systems and language work to shape and perform individual and collective identities. In almost every chapter he does a historical review and he cites prominent academics all over the book. In his first chapter he lays the foundation and understanding of the concept of identity and explains that it is socially constructed but also a part of the surrounding society. Riley claims that “the reflection on our interactive experiences – facilitated and canalized by language – enables to become who we are” (p. 16). Society itself, language and interaction are, according to Riley, the very sources of individual identity. In chapter two Riley describes the social knowledge system and the linking and primary mechanism is, again, language. Another crucial ingredient is intersubjectivity which can be explained as a state of shared meaning between the participants and seen by Riley as necessary for the development of identity:

The ability to establish intersubjectivity, to enter into social and meaningful contact with another, is a necessary condition for the formation of identity. (p. 33)

In this way communication and culture are dependent from one another. Riley argues, as Wikan, that the term culture is polysemic, but in a more pragmatic and humoristic way:

Individuals acquire and construct their personal cultural repertoires on the basis of the interactional opportunities available to them. A country-dweller and a town-dweller, a doctor’s child and a labourer’s child, a Muslim and a Catholic will have access to participation in different ranges of interaction……In other words, acquiring culture is not like serving oneself from a soup tureen, where every bowlful has identical contents, it is more like lunching from a vast smorgasbord. (p. 39)

Culture continues to exist through language and Riley seems to mean that culture in itself is knowledge. This knowledge is distributed on different levels; the family level, shared by all in the neighbourhood and then shared by everyone on another level. Riley argues that each kind of knowledge corresponds to an aspect of social identities like family and communities like professions, religious groups or sport clubs. This is for me very close to the concept of literacy – the ability to read and write is always connected with social activities and domains which include relationships and a history in a chronological order. Through all these activities is the competence of communications used and Riley points out how different competences of language are needed, with in my opinion, an outstanding metaphor:

…linguistic competence means being a grammarian, communicative competence means being a speaker and sociocultural competence means being a member. Rather, the three can be imagined like Russian dolls, nesting inside another, so that sociocultural competence includes communicative competence which in turn, includes linguistic competence. (p. 53)

So, the knowledge of culture is communicated in different communicative practices and for this are the competences of language cited above needed. According to Riley communicative practices do not only communicate messages, they also communicate social identity which “is made up of a configuration of memberships and each membership is knowledge-and-language based” (p. 113). And, again, the conclusion is, that if we want to study identity we have to study language. Identity is formed by subject-positions materialized of power relationships and Riley gives a lot of example of this beginning with the gendarme with his uniform and revolver shouting at an innocent boy who in that second becomes a criminal. Communicative practices can also be gendered when we say things like “big boys don’t cry” (p. 139) and “nice girls don’t use words like that” (p. 139).

Riley also dwells over the concept of the stranger, quoting Simmel and Schütz and with the help of the later Riley points out different kinds of mobility addressing membership and belonging. One example is the candidate who wishes to become a member of an exclusive club and another is the new recruit joining the army. In order to form social identity recognition is needed – the stranger has to be recognized by others. Riley refers to Hegel and says:

It is otherness which makes interaction both possible and Necessary. I can only exist as an individual if other individuals exist and if we know it. A human community is a community of recognition: it can only exist to the extent that the individuals concerned recognize the existence of one another. (p.176)

The Me is, according to Riley, seen as the individual’s own perception of his or her social identity while the memberships of social groups form a bundle with roles and positions which the Self occupies. Eventually public perceptions of the Me and the Self form ethos. For me Riley has tried to answer the question about where identity is and how it is created. The answer is a of course complex but also as simple as his last words “just as history tells us who we are, identity is made of the stories we tell ourselves” (p. 244).