Page 110 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

104 CULTURAL STUDIES

The time of history and of collective memory provides the basis for the
objectivization of the world, and thus for a new definition of alterity. It is
no longer a question of including or translating the other in its subjectivity
which characterizes Christian historiography. Western epistemo logy claims
that it exclusively controls true knowledge, and thus is purportedly
supported by the evidence of what exists and what has happened. Only
such an epistemology is permitted to picture the future in terms of the
present produced by the past in its right direction, the direction of progress. 20
(Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe, 1993:6)

If thinking ‘difference’ is not unique to the West, it was instead the Western
classification and construction of hierarchies which enabled a three-fold
political, as opposed to an ontological move. First, they are not like us; second,
we can dominate them, and finally, we can colonize them and make them be like
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us. Difference, as I will argue, comes to be an object of scrutiny for the purpose
of managing what have always been intercultural encounters. Here is where we
might step back somewhat and revisit the manner in which difference roots itself
as a mode of thinking which privileges the West.
I want to make a detour in order to underscore my proposition for the
necessity of thinking carefully about the social vocabulary of culture as masking
a discourse on race. Here I will briefly present an interpretation of how race and
culture fuse in the nineteenth century and how culture comes to serve as an
organizing mechanism for Europeans to make sense of a different social order.
Consider the question of how meaning is made of sensory categories and how
‘race’ is imagined through seeing. In an examination of classical texts,
V.Y.Mudimbe finds that space—geographical distance—organizes
understandings of barbarity, savagery and Amazons (Mudimbe, 1993).
Imagining and categorizing cultural differences takes place across distance and is
mapped out without privileging sight or, in turn, the primacy of physiological
attributes (Hymes, 1974:21f; Hodgen, 1964). But the mode of thinking
difference through this spatial reference—as characterized by Greek geographers
—changed when physical attributes such as skin colour ceased to be merely a
curious observation, and instead became a phenomenon to be explained through
biology. Race then structured and was structured through slavery and
colonialism. Not incidentally, while travel on land—by foot and camel—meant
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gradual adjustments to change in the social and geographical landscape, the
invention of oceangoing transport— with the monotony between points of
departure and arrival—facilitated the process of thinking in racial terms (Shreeve,
1994:60).
The point to be stressed is that interest in physical differences and distinctive
religious markers existed prior to the nineteenth century, but a preoccupation
with the idea of savages and primitives, integral to the repertoire of difference,
required the intervention of science which sought the explanation of different
social practices through visible physical differences. In other words, although