Page 109 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

EXPERIENCE, EMPATHY AND STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISM 103

interchange between groups of people, it also arrests the prevailing tendency to
ghettoize African diaspora and ethnic studies as an addendum to general
education requirements. In other words, the artificiality of these categorizations
also becomes more pronounced.
Protestations notwithstanding, the concept of culture, traditionally linked to a
geographical site, continues to evoke a sense of boundedness and homogeneity.
In part, this slippage explains why mention of the term includes an obligatory
qualification which insists on the fluidity and porousness of culture. The problem,
I think, is that in spite of this stipulation, culture remains a code word for
accentuating commonalities within certain ethnic and racial groups, rather than
their internal diversity. Yet, even where difference in itself has become a form of
identity, reference to culture is used to author and authorize its authenticity.
What seems to have been forgotten is that culture is a metaphorical construct.
Here I want to shift my focus and return to the culture concept which is
inescapably associated with anthropology. Traditionally, the objective of
anthropology has been to account for difference. Thus diverse and distinctive
ways of acting, thinking and speaking have been defined, investigated and then
translated as customs and practices which are unfamiliar. But pause here a
moment: unfamiliar? To whom? That is the question which students should learn
to always ask and never take for granted. The answer, of course, is that
‘unfamiliarity’ is relative and has been defined against the social locations of the
anthropologist and his or her audience. The West became the norm against which
to look at and evaluate others.
The goals of anthropology reflected a general Western and Christian anxiety
about boundaries in real and imagined terrains. The interest in human diversity, I
would suggest, hinged on a will to knowledge and, through this, an affirmation
of being. To reflect on and grasp the Other, and thus to understand their place
(spatially and temporally), presented the possibility of appropriating and seizing
a position of authority in the domain of knowledge and power. The predicament
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facing European thinkers has been the realization that an apprehension of self as
a totality requires the presence of the Other and is therefore intrinsically bound
up with the notion of intersubjective relations, the freedom to act responsibly and
finally the ethical implications of these aspects of self and Other. 19 At the
moment when reason and knowledge are privileged in Western discourse,
knowledge comes to be seen as an end in itself: discovery, revelation and
appropriation. It is here that we find a self-consciousness looking outside itself
and concluding that the world which can be described can also be possessed.
Western thought inheres an aggressive ontology, ‘in which the same constitutes
itself through a form of negativity in relation to the other, producing all
knowledge by appropriating and sublating the other within itself’ (Young, 1990:
13; Montag, 1993). In that context, the shift to a scientific interest in mapping
out the origins and diversity of human beings was also a secularization of the
European Christian project towards selfdefinition: