Page 131 - Cultural Theory

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••• Peter Beilharz •••

establishments specially intended for this purpose. Most of the societies which we
call primitive would regard this custom with profound horror; it would make us in
their eyes, guilty of that same barbarity of which we are inclined to accuse them
because of their symmetrically opposite behaviour (Lévi-Strauss, 1955: 508). Such
institutions of separation might be called concentration camps, more specifically
death camps (in Nazi Germany) or detention centres (in contemporary Australia).
Bauman’s variation on this critical theme is to view order-building as a war of attri-
tion against strangers and the strange. As he elaborates:

In this war (to borrow Lévi-Strauss’s concepts) two alternative, but also comple-
mentary strategies were intermittently deployed. One was anthropophagic,
annihilating the strangers by devouring them and then metabolically transform-
ing into a tissue indistinguishable from one’s own. This was the strategy of
assimilation: making the different similar; smothering of cultural or linguistic dis-
tinctions; forbidding all traditions and loyalties except those meant to feed the
conformity to the new and all-embracing order; promoting and enforcing one
and only one measure of conformity. The other strategy was anthropoemic,
vomiting the strangers, banishing them from the limits of the orderly world and
barring them from all communication with those inside. This was the strategy
of exclusion – confining the strangers within the visible walls of the ghettos or
behind the invisible, yet no less tangible, prohibitions of commensality, connu-
bium and commercium; ‘cleansing’ – expelling the strangers beyond the fron-
tiers of the managed and manageable territory; or, when neither of the two
measures was feasible – destroying the strangers physically.

(Bauman 1997: 16)

Anthropophagic strategies follow the logic of assimilation, always a superior strategy
to exclusion, except within its own limits: assimilation is an attack on difference or
ambivalence, and its tolerance is volatile, depends on political and nationalist senses
of limits. Liberal tolerance is always preferable to exclusion, but its availability is depen-
dent on the will of the host. Anthropoemic strategies follow the logic of expulsion, dis-
cipline and punish along ethnic or racial lines. The modernist state strategy is precisely,
for Bauman, one which acts out the dynamic of creative destruction. Except that the
logic even of totalitarian power is never complete, and the residual humanity left both
in matters and slaves never subsides. Culture persists, even in the face of power.

Conclusion

Bauman’s encounter with Lévi-Strauss is suggestive, though it is by no means singu-
lar; his interlocutors are many and various, and this is one reason why his work is
interesting. Bauman’s more recent elucidation of this especial enthusiasm within his
repertoire is by no means novel, however; culture recycles as well as innovates, redis-
covers as well as inventing.

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