As an assessor for international affairs of the Ministry of Culture of Brazil, I became involved in the discussion and elaboration of a pluralistic and transversal agenda for cultural policy, based on the principles of decentralization, cultural diversity and democratic participation. My involvement in this process inspired me to ask questions I have never thought of asking before, for instance: why cultural diversity is so important? why should the government promote a decentralized agenda? why participation should be encouraged? In my ‘naive’ view of the world, there was no need to protect cultural diversity, because, as Laraia has argued human beings are cultural beings, diverse by nature and unique in themselves. However, as I got involved with the governmental agenda for culture in my country, I came to realize I had a narrow view of the issues I was working with.
For this reason, I decided I needed help in understanding some of these issues and I sought the academic sphere to help me unwind many of the questions I could only begin to ask. My main questions were about cultural diversity and the involvement of society in the formulation of cultural policy. I wanted to understand how society got involved in the discussion of cultural diversity and if cultural diversity was a demand of civil society or a political discourse to justify the interest of certain groups. My curiosity in understanding these issues led me to two sociologists who have been discussing the relations between identity in post-modern society, Stuart Hall (1992) and Zygmunt Bauman (2004).
Bauman has argued that identity is a fiction “born out of the crisis of belonging” (2004: 20) in the eighteenth century, when modern society went through important changes. In the same vein, Edward Said (2000) points out that the decline of old institutions such as family, religion and dynastic bonds allowed the rise of invented memories as a coherent identity for people who adopted these narratives as symbolic references of belonging. At this point, I started understanding the importance of national identity for the discussion of terms such as identity and cultural diversity.
Stuart Hall (1992) states that there is no ontological conceptualization for identity. Identity is an unconscious process that starts at birth and continues throughout our life as we try to find our “I” in the “view” of others. Identity exists as something imaginary or fantasized. It lingers incomplete, it is always in “process” of “being formed”. This way, Hall argues that instead of talking of identity, it would be more accurate to talk in terms of identification, and regard it as an ongoing process. As I read the arguments and assumptions of these two sociologists, I started to question the conceptualization of cultural diversity from a different perspective. I understood that I should be asking ‘why’ are we protecting and promoting cultural diversity in a pluralistic, democratic and decentralized way, but ‘who’ is we and why is this issue so important for ‘us’.
In my search for these answers, I couldn’t find a suitable response on the sociological approach to the issue. The macro analysis of the issues of identity and cultural diversity often draws conclusions based on a ruling elite that establishes discourses and narratives, but it doesn’t explain how these discourses are included in the vernacular creating the divisions between pariahs or outcasts and the citizens or nationals. For this reason, I decided to take the Memory/History and Reconstructions of Identities course in the Anthropology department. From the brief description of the course, I felt most of my questions could be answered from an anthropological perspective.
For my surprise, this course has taught me more than I expected. Once more, I felt I should revise my questions about identity and cultural diversity. Instead of questioning who is ‘we’, I learned from the literature on memory and identity that I should first ask who am ‘I’ in relation to ‘we’. As I dove into the literature, I began to question the silences and absences in the discourses and the narratives of the ever-changing identity formation process. I realized that I was not interested in discussing identity and cultural diversity as two intrinsically related issues, but that my goal is to find out the missing pieces or the silences in the cultural diversity and identity discourse.
At first, I thought I should explore the involvement of civil society in the formulation of the cultural diversity discourse and policy as way to show how this process is a top-down strategy of elite groups to promote their interest. But the literature on memory and identity has changed my view of the issue. As I read Radstone (2000), Gupta and Ferguson (1992), Sassen (2008), Sharma (2006) and Said (2000), I realized that ‘identity’ is has become a reified concept in post-modern society with no clear definition; a venue for justifying the domination of certain groups over others. Although I adopt Hall’s definition of a fluid and open-ended process of identification, I also realized I should explore how the issue of identity is included in society today in relation to the nation, especially in terms of citizenship.
Through citizenship, nation-states legitimize national identity and, as a consequence, their autonomy over its territory and people (Mavroudi 2010). They separate who is the insider and the outsider by controlling the territorial boarders. In other words, the nation-states create the illusion of a natural and essential connection among people, place and culture (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) through which they include or assimilate the desirable peoples and exclude and repressed the unwanted ones. In this sense, citizenship becomes a venue for legitimizing a discourse of nation-ness or nationality. At the same time, this process also creates silences and marginalization considering that the elaboration of a national discourse is usually based on the narratives of the conqueror and not the the weakest (Mavroudi 2010), the heroes and not the masses (Said 2000).
At this moment, I started to question the discourse of citizenship in the light of cultural diversity, in other words, which people are not considered citizens of a nation and why. I became especially interested in minority groups and their claims for affirmative actions. The most important contributions for me was the work of Said and Sassen. Based on Said’s article on Memory, Invention, Identity, the issue of human social spaces brought to my attention the question of pre-colonial civilizations and their dimly recognized role in the discourse of national identity, especially their claims and demands for recognition and human rights. This brings me to Sassen’s discussion about the emergence of centrifugal multiplication of particular/specialized assemblages of Territorial, Authority and Rights (TAR) that unsettles the existing normative arrangements and produces a new type of segmentation in the state apparatus.
Sassen contends that there has been a proliferation of new normative orders which was once ruled by the state and the dominant logic of centripetal unifying normative framing. However she argues that these new normative frames can coexist with older orderings, but they bring consequences that may be strategic of the larger normative questions. She does not dismiss the role of the state as an normative body, but she argues that these assemblages are unsettling the older national frameworks in an complex and illegible way.
Sassen’s approach is particularly interesting when analyzing the issue of national identity, specially if we consider that the changes that occur in society reflects in the individual and vice-versa creating a symbiotic flow (Hall 1992). If the changes in modern society created national identity as a substitute for traditional institutions as argued by Said (2000) and Bauman (2004); the changes suggested by Sassen will also have an impact at the individual level. My intent is to look at the discourses of affirmative action of contemporary society in relation to cultural diversity to see what is being registered as memory and what is being silenced.
REFERENCES
Bauman, Z. 2004. Identity. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1992. "Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." Cultural Anthropology 7(1):pp. 6-23.
Hall, Stuart. 1992. A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade; tradução Tomaz Tadeu da Silva e Guacira Lopes Louro: Rio de Janeiro: DP&A.
Laraia, Roque de Barros. 1986. Cultura: Um conceito antropologico. Ed.14. Rio de Janeiro. BR: Jorge Zahar.
Mavroudi, E. 2010. "Nationalism, the Nation and Migration: Searching for Purity and Diversity." Space and Polity 14(3):219-233.
Radstone, S. (ed.) 2000. Memory and Methodology, Oxford: Berg. Read “Working with Memory: an Introduction”, pp. 1-21
Said, E. 2000. “Invention, Memory and Place.” Critical Inquiry 26 (2): 175-92.
Sassen, S. 2008. “Neither global nor national: novel assemblages of territory, authority and rights.” Ethics & Global Politics 1 (1-2): 61-79.
------. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights : From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Sharma, A. 2006. "Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization" in Aradhana Sharma & Akhil Gupta. 2006. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
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