Showing papers by "Fredrik Barth published in 1995"

Other Knowledge and Other Ways of Knowing

Abstract: WHEN "CULTURE" ENTERS discourses outside our discipline-when, as Bohannan says, culture is loose on the streets-how is it used? In many ways embarrassingly like the uses we make of it inside our discipline, but with greater consequences. Culture is used selectively for that which seems most salient to the outsider, namely difference. This use gives a truncated account of what others are thinking and doing. It does not represent their grounds for action, but only those grounds that are contrastive, special for "the other," and not reasons that would hold for "us." It thus leads to exoticizing, but more importantly to mutilating the other's point of view: representing it only partially, and therefore inadequately rendering its rationality and reasonableness. Further, in personal interaction whenever the thoughts and actions of another are interpreted as cultural, they tend to be turned into exemplars of exotic behavior. Thereby the item of behavior in question is not situated as a link in a chain of interaction between persons (to be understood and judged in communicative, social, and moral contexts); on the contrary, it is removed from the interaction and situated as a collective, stereotyped feature of groups and contrasting identities. This depersonalizes and impedes the flow of exchange and the process of convergence (Wikan 1992) in the interaction. Thirdly, "culture" is increasingly used in public debate to define an arena for contesting discourses on "identity." Under current conditions, such discourses provide an extremely fertile field for political entrepreneurship; they allow leaders and spokesmen to claim that they are speaking on behalf of others; they allow the manipulation of media access; and they encourage the strategic construction of polarizing debates that translate into battles of influence. Such battles create hegemony and reduce options; they disempower followers and reduce the diversity of voices. Such effects of the concept of culture are contrary to most anthropologists' intentions. What might then be our best countermoves? We achieve nothing by denying the existence of power and hegemony in the world; and we turn ourselves into hostages of the undesired discourses if we merely look for faultless victims who deserve our advocacy. Our strategy must be to transcend and thus transform the debate. But no matter how often and how compellingly anthropologists arrest reification and oppose homogenization, these selfsame features seem to crop up again and again in anthropologists' own unguarded speech and thought.