The Making and Unmaking of Differences: Anthropological, Sociological and Philosophical Perspectives [1. Aufl.] 9783839404263

Table of contents :
CONTENT
Untrivializing Difference. A Personal Introduction
Diversity Versus Difference: Neo-liberalism in the Minority-Debate
Social Constructivism and the Enigma of Strangeness
Witchcraft, Evidence and the Localisation of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Uganda
Critical Note. Is African Philosophy Different?
Philosophy, Queer Theories, and the Overcoming of Identity
Cultural Differences and the Problem of Translation
Coming Back to One's Own: What Happens to Tradition in Neo-Traditionalist Movements?
How different? Re-Examining the Process of Creolization
Strangers in the Night: The Making and Unmaking of Differences from the Perspective of an Anthropology of the Night
On the Authors

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Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, Shingo Shimada (eds.) The Making and Unmaking of Differences

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Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, Shingo Shimada (eds.)

The Making and Unmaking of Differences Anthropological, Sociological and Philosophical Perspectives

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Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

© 2006 transcript, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, inlcuding photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout by: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Project Management: Andreas Hüllinghorst, Bielefeld Typeset by: Alexander Masch, Bielefeld Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 3-89942-426-3

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C ONTENT

Untrivializing Difference. A Personal Introduction RICHARD ROTTENBURG

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Diversity Versus Difference: Neo-liberalism in the Minority-Debate THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

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Social Constructivism and the Enigma of Strangeness RICHARD ROTTENBURG

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Witchcraft, Evidence and the Localisation of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Uganda HEIKE BEHREND

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Critical Note. Is African Philosophy Different? LUKAS K. SOSOE

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Philosophy, Queer Theories, and the Overcoming of Identity FLAVIA MONCERI

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Cultural Differences and the Problem of Translation SHINGO SHIMADA

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Coming Back to One’s Own: What Happens to Tradition in Neo-Traditionalist Movements? KARL-HEINZ KOHL How different? Re-Examining the Process of Creolization CHARLES STEWART

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Strangers in the Night: The Making and Unmaking of Differences from the Perspective of an Anthropology of the Night BURKHARD SCHNEPEL

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On the Authors

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Richard Rottenburg

U NTRIVIALIZING D IFFERENCE . A P ERSONAL I NTRODUCTION I. It has become something of a ritual to celebrate the constructedness of difference and identity at every possible occasion. I will not examine this emphasis on construction here, although I would insist that it is in fact pleonastic, as identities and differences are always necessarily constructed. What interests me rather are the implications that invariably accompany such celebrations of the constructed nature of difference and identity. These ritual occasions reinforce a commandment extolling the advantages of pursuing non-difference. If differences, so the implicit argument goes, are constructed, then we might as well dispense with them completely or at least dispense with some of them and make the rest more enjoyable. This argument implicitly presumes that most differences are the result of avoidable performative acts and that they are at least potentially evil as well. Suppressing these performative acts with the help of this commandment would thus reduce the dangers of difference. While all of this is perhaps correct in a certain limited sense, it is nevertheless based on a number of gross simplifications about the construction of realities (including those of identities and differences) and thus leads to serious trivializations. In this short and rather personal introduction, I would like to suggest how we might begin undoing some of these assumptions and their consequences.

II. The overarching backdrop for current debates about difference and, by implication, about identity is that of globalization. We may be justified in doubting whether the much discussed process of globalization is really a fundamentally new phenomenon. Nevertheless we can identify several aspects that distinguish the present wave of globalization from its historical predecessors. These include the dynamics of globalizing markets, increased personal mobility, and the effects of new information and communication technologies. Similarly conspicuous are changes in the domains of state sovereignty, transnational processes, and global regimes of governance. These developments have been accompanied by changes in perceptions of space and time. What is perhaps 7

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most important and really new in this most recent wave of globalization is 1) that it entails fragmentation and 2) that the foundations of globalizing ideas— nature and science—have lost or are losing their foundational power or universal validity (Latour 2002). Taken together, these transformations have generated new patterns of inclusion and exclusion for individuals, collectivities, and regions. One consequence has been that the relationship between alterity and identity has changed. We now pose different questions about issues of belonging, and we negotiate our answers to these questions rather differently as well. The fact that collective identities are often staged for and distributed by the media (or even created by the media) has made drawing boundaries between the self and the other more complex. The emergence of greater reflexivity regarding notions of belonging and identity is connected to this as well. This greater reflexivity has also been the result of processes in which collectivities emerge as a consequence of new understandings of property rights resulting from global regimes of governance. In this process, the issue of difference is transposed onto new constellations. There is nothing new about the fact that social scientists investigate such phenomena. Already during the 1930s, leading social scientists emphasized the negotiable character, the situational dependence, and the dynamics and contingency of identity (and thereby of difference). Beginning in the 1980s with its new wave of globalization and the increased political articulation of cultural identities and cultural clashes, phenomena of difference and issues of “inter-cultural communication” became standard academic topics. The establishment of differences with respect to ethnic groups, nations, religions, gender, sexual preferences, social strata, and numerous other orientations have been examined both synchronically and diachronically. Attention later shifted to multiple forms of belongings and hence to the multiplicity and ambiguity of the phenomena of difference. The situational, relational and permanently shifting dimensions of belonging became the central theme in investigating constructions of identity, thereby making hybridity a central concept. However, differences in epistemological orientations—i.e., arguments about God and Nature—cannot be easily resolved within such hybrid constructions. Some of these constructions are actually at war with one another, and we were able to understand this war as aberrant and avoidable only as long as we believed that we possessed a single, universally valid solution. The new wave of globalization seems to demonstrate that this single universal solution is itself an illusion, the illusion of modernity. This process of disenchantment shows that the tension between globally homogenizing tendencies and the simultaneously increased production of cultural particularities in fact represents one version of an ever-present pattern. Homogeneity emerges only in certain situations and in particular aspects of identity; in other respects, differences multiply and continue to provide people with a plurality of alternatives for constructing their identities and their realities. Thus according to most authors, identity must be understood as dynamic 8

UNTRIVIALIZING DIFFERENCE. A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION

and interstitial, as the simultaneous participation in a number of collective intersubjectivities that are continuously changing. From this perspective, our task becomes addressing the question of how differences are produced in cultural, political, and economic processes. If we single-mindedly pursue this path alone, however, we run the risk of perpetuating the modernist presumption that all difference can ultimately be negotiated—and negotiated on modernist terrain, e.g., modern science. In other words, the assumption that all differences can be dealt with in terms of simultaneous participation, situational and relational hybridities unwittingly reinforces modernist claims to universal validity—those of science, technology, market, democracy, human rights, and the concept of an independent, autonomous, individual subject. Yet precisely these notions can and indeed are defined differently and constitute the core of the present transitions related to globalization or, more dramatically, the core of our present state of emergency.

III. It is impossible today to talk about making and unmaking differences without considering the relation between academic positions on this issue and the politics of difference, identity, and recognition. Since the 1980’s, anthropologists have learned to avoid speaking about alterity in an unguarded manner and to abstain from offering self-contained representations of the other. Even a casual remark or a vague implication that could be construed as somehow reminiscent of essentialist differences (not actually invoking such differences but merely appearing to leave the door open for them) often leads to accusations of othering. I offer a personal example here: My book Far-Fetched Facts includes an analysis of aspects of bureaucracy in African organizations. Now, bureaucracy is all about rules that have been fixed in writing. In the book I describe the various practices of writing and dealing with written information within such organizations; and I conclude that there are significant differences between the culture of writing implied by the model of bureaucracy as it is appealed to by the respective organizations and the culture of writing actually found in these organizations. One concerned reviewer of the book warned that this observation brought the author dangerously close to culturalist explanations. Well, I do indeed assume that writing is done in different ways and that some of these do become institutionalised in such a way that it makes sense for us to speak of cultures of writing. And if this is the case, why should we assume that writing is done the same way and means the same thing everywhere? What would the implications of such an assumption be? And if we do not explain these differences through the particular historical and socio-cultural conditions in which they arose and continue to arise, how then do we explain them?

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What I am trying to say is that as long as we adhere to the commandment of non-difference, we frustrate and ultimately trivialize one of anthropology’s central tasks: de-familiarizing and de-centering the Euro-American worldview through pursuing the enigma of radical alterity, through allowing ourselves to be touched by unexpected and unforeseen ways of “world making.” In order to do this, anthropologists’ strategies for dealing with alterity have themselves become the object of anthropological enquiry. From this meta-perspective, the currently prevailing focus on the social construction of bridgeable differences—i.e., on the harmless alterity implicit in multiculturalism and the hybridization of identities—excludes in principle the possibility of unbridgeable difference—i.e., of radical alterity that allows for epistemological differences and thus for the unpredictable. This careful hedging of real differences is an immunization strategy that ultimately protects universalist claims from any substantial subversion. If my argument here is correct, then one of our most pressing tasks is to critically re-examine the theoretical preconditions underlying the commandment of non-difference. To what extent can the exclusion of radical alterity be justified without recourse to universalist claims? How can we talk comprehensibly about something that is incomprehensible? How can we approach something radically different without at the same time subsuming that difference and thereby eliminating it? With these last two questions, we return to the aforementioned trivialization of the anthropology of difference implicit in the commandment of non-difference. While the two questions are not entirely misguided, they do conceal the basic presupposition of the problem. This presupposition becomes clear if we pose a different question: How can we talk comprehensibly about something that is comprehensible? This seemingly absurd question contains the whole point of the argument in nuce. The point I want to make here with Derrida (1967)—who died in 2004 shortly before the conference at which most of the contributions to this volume were presented and discussed—is non-trivial, simple, and runs as follows: Talking about difference implies talking about sameness, i.e., about a thing that is identical with itself and not with something else. Without sameness there can be no difference and vice-versa. Something can be identical with itself only by being different from something else. Talking about the same implies regular repetition and hence laws of repetition. For something to be identified as the same it must be a repetition; and for something to be a repetition it must follow a law of repetition, for otherwise it would not be a repetition. We can outline this law in two steps: 1) If there is repetition, there is sameness. There is only repetition if it is repetition of the same. 2) Repetition of the same, however, can never be identical. It is this fundamental dissociation of the same from itself that constitutes the principle governing the identity of an idea. Hence, the same is a combination of identity and difference governed by simultaneous repeatability and differentiality. The most striking and simplest example of this is the handwritten signature. If two signatures are one-hundred-percent identical we have good reason to assume that we are 10

UNTRIVIALIZING DIFFERENCE. A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION

dealing with a case of forgery. It is the minor differences between two signatures that prove they are written by the same hand. Derrida coined the word differance to describe and perform the way in which any particular meaning of a concept or text arises only through the effacement of other possible meanings, which are themselves merely deferred and can be invoked in different contexts. Thus differance both describes and performs the preconditions according to which all identities and meanings occur. The general message is this: Without an absent, unspeakable thing, without a gap, we would never have anything to say and, moreover, we would have no possibility of saying it at all. Luhmann (particularly in Chapter 4 of his Soziale Systeme, 1984) offers a similar argument to explain the possibility of understanding (Verstehen). First, a difference must, according to Luhmann, be set between system and environment as well as between a proposition and its referent. Second, there must be a difference between the information and the message (Mitteilung) of a communicative act, a difference that can never be fixed and always remains open. It is this difference between information and message that requires interpretation, and only as a result of this do we have the necessary precondition for understanding the meaning of a statement. Otherwise we would be dealing with the transmission of information as it occurs between two fax machines, which are reliable precisely because they do not understand each other. If we agree that anthropology’s most delicate and yet most significant task is to de-familiarize and de-center the Euro-American (or any other hegemonic universalist) worldview, then anthropologists would be well advised to adopt the non-trivial notion of difference as it has been outlined here. We should not regard difference as something to be avoided as much as possible, but rather accept it as a precondition for saying anything at all about the world. For this reason, any statement necessarily includes difference within itself—a blank spot, a void, an arcanum—that cannot be overcome. The desire to overcome such difference remains an aporia. What we can do, however, is to vary our portrayals of otherness in such a way that they unveil or give voice to those meanings that have been effaced in conventional representations of otherness—this in itself would already be a rather significant accomplishment. The unavoidable price for this is the effacement of other meanings. However, according to this approach, our criteria for determining which particular effacement (or Invisibilisierung, as Luhmann calls it) is best at any particular moment cannot be limited to that of faithfulness to the other. It must also ensure that the meanings we unveil subvert prevailing presumptions and certainties (Gewissheiten, see Rottenburg 2003).

IV. The papers collected in this volume are based on presentations made at a conference on “The Making and Unmaking of Differences,” which was held at 11

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the Institute of Social Anthropology at the Martin Luther University in HalleWittenberg in October 2004. While the conference served as the inaugural conference of the university’s new Institute of Social Anthropology, the conference organizers—Burkhard Schnepel, Shingo Shimada, and myself—were convinced that this issue should not be limited to anthropologists, but rather must also provide space for voices, approaches, and opinions from other disciplines. For this reason, the present volume contains not only anthropological perspectives on this issue, but also sociological and philosophical ones, as well as perspectives from the interstices between these fields and from other disciplines. We would like to thank the Martin Luther University and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for providing the financial means that made this conference possible.

References Derrida, Jacques (1967): L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Latour, Bruno (2002): War of the worlds: what about peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Luhmann, Niklas (1984/1987): Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Rottenburg, Richard (2003): “Crossing gaps of indeterminacy: Some theoretical remarks”. In: Translation and ethnography. The anthropological challenge of intercultural understanding, ed. by Maranhao, Tullio and Bernhard Streck. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 30-43.

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Thomas Hylland Eriksen

D IVERSITY VERSUS D IFFERENCE : N EO - LIBERALISM IN THE M INORITY -D EBATE In the ongoing intellectual and political European debates about cultural diversity in the context of immigration and globalization, two dimensions are often missing: First, class tends to be drowned out thanks to a widespread eagerness to discuss cultural differences, and yet, it remains absolutely crucial to distinguish between horizontal and vertical forms of differentiation, or hierarchical and egalitarian difference if one prefers, when one tries to make sense of contemporary cultural complexities. Second, the blanket term “cultural difference” can refer to a lot of different kinds of phenomenon, from the cosmetic and aesthetic to the moral and social-structural. What I am going to do here consists in an examination of some of the widespread conceptualizations of difference as they are expressed not in academic discussions, but in public life. Now, of course multiculturalism is not a simple term with a well-defined meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary, tracing its earliest appearance to an article about Switzerland published in 1957, defines it as “[t]he characteristics of a multicultural society; (also) the policy or process whereby the distinctive identities of the cultural groups within such a society are maintained or supported”. However lucid this definition may be, it leaves important questions unanswered. As a matter of fact, very different “multiculturalisms” are being promoted, and this is a main reason why it is so difficult to discuss with outspoken opponents of “multiculturalism” who tend to associate “it” with either an exaggerated tolerance of foreign customs and beliefs or an uncritical support of any kind of immigration into the country, where immigrants are accorded many rights and few duties. In a review of the term, Stuart Hall (2000) mentions no less than six multiculturalisms: Conservative, liberal, pluralist, commercial, corporate and critical or “revolutionary” multiculturalism. Each has its own distinctive approach to the central problem in culturally complex societies, namely how to reconcile diversity with social solidarity. At the extreme ends of the spectrum are “assimilationism” (everybody who lives in the same country should have essentially the same culture) and “difference multiculturalism” (a kind not mentioned by Hall, see Turner 1993), which demands that society should not be based on one set of values, but should accommodate, recognize the equality of, and indeed celebrate a great variety of cultural values. In practice, most theories of multicultural societies and most state policies in the Western world try to strike a balance between these extremes. On the one hand, too great di13

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versity makes solidarity and democratic participation difficult to achieve. On the other hand, total cultural homogeneity is an impossible (and, to most, undesirable) goal to achieve even in ethnically homogeneous societies; there will always be religious sects and sexual minorities, to mention only two of the most obvious examples, demanding their right to be “equal but different”. What is of interest in the present context are the kinds of difference discussed in contemporary European societies, their evaluation by majorities, and, indirectly, the ways discourses about cultural difference relate to power relations, notably class. My examples are Norwegian, but similar examples would not be difficult to come by in other countries in Western Europe.

1. Diversity versus Difference It is easy, common and politically uncontroversial to “celebrate diversity”. An important UNESCO report on cultural rights and cultural variation (World Commission on Culture and Development 1995) was titled “Our Creative Diversity”, and it managed to combine a strong defence of local cultures with a similarly strong engagement in favour of universal, global values (see Eriksen 2001 for a critique). How can this be possible? How is it possible to defend cultural variation and simultaneously insist on a shared set of values? As if values were somehow independent of culture? A cursory reading of the report nevertheless makes it clear that values and diversity are held to exist in separate domains. “Diversity” is, in the UNESCO report, largely associated with phenomena such as rituals, food, folktales, arts and crafts, as well as a few traditional economic adaptations which are either threatened by modernity or proven to be consistent with it (and should by that token be given a chance). The social organisation of society, including its political structure and voting rights, human rights, its kinship structure and rules of inheritance, its gender roles and educational system, its labour market and its health service are kept separate from the notion of “creative diversity”. There is in fact nothing in the report which suggests that its authors regard child marriages, political despotism or religious intolerance as expressions of creative forms of diversity. Notwithstanding the many fine distinctions that can be made here, I propose a simple contrast between diversity and difference in order to highlight two fundamentally distinctive ways of dealing with, and identifying, cultural variation. Bluntly put, there is considerable support for diversity in the public sphere, while difference is increasingly seen as a main cause of social problems associated with immigrants and their descendants. In the present context, then, diversity should be taken to mean largely aesthetic, politically and morally neutral expressions of cultural difference. Difference, by contrast, refers to morally objectionable or at least questionable notions and practices in a minority group or category, that is to say notions and practices which are held to (i) create conflicts through direct contact with majorities who hold other notions, (ii) weaken social solidarity in the country and thereby the legitimacy of 14

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the political and welfare systems (Goodhart 2004), and (iii) lead to unacceptable violations of human rights within the minority groups. Interestingly, politicians and other public figures often praise the immigrants for “enriching” the national culture. At the same time, they may worry about arranged marriages or Islam as impediments to national cohesion. This seeming contradiction indicates that cultural difference is not just one thing. Broadly speaking, we may state that diversity is seen as a good thing, while difference is not. A non-technical but potentially useful distinction could be made between “shallow” and “deep” cultural differences. In a typical endorsement of diversity, Robin Cook, the then English foreign minister, said in 2001 that “Chicken Tikka Massala is now a true British national dish” (quoted from Christiansen and Hedetoft 2004: 8). At the same time, concerns about gender roles, political loyalties, democratic values and religious rigidity have turned “the question of integration” into a political issue of the first order. The same people who endorse diversity tend to reject difference. The question, which the examples below may serve to illuminate even if they may not answer it conclusively, is where the boundary between diversity and difference is located. However, it is also necessary to explore whether it could be the case that this kind of boundary, usually seen as one between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” cultural differences, is a token one, concealing conflicts of another order, to do with politics and class.

2. The Murder of Benjamin Hermansen In the evening of 26 January 2001, a fifteen-year old Norwegian boy of partly African origin, Benjamin Hermansen, was on his way home in the Oslo suburb of Holmlia. Intercepted by some youths in a car, he was stabbed to death. The murderers were soon caught and were revealed to be members of a small right-wing, possibly neo-Nazi group called “Boot boys”. The media reactions to Benjamin Hermansen’s murder were unanimous, using terms like “shameful”, “shocking” and “outrageous” in describing it. Soon afterwards, an anti-racist demonstration was organized as a testimonial to the boy. In spite of the unusually cold weather—it was almost twenty degrees below zero—more than ten thousand individuals, the vast majority of them white Norwegians, participated in the event, which took place in central Oslo. Leading clergymen, politicians and media celebrities made appeals condemning the murder and praying that a similar atrocity would not happen again. There can be no doubt that a huge majority of Norwegians sympathised with these views. Having grown up with his white Norwegian mother, Benjamin was culturally Norwegian and part of a multiethnic social environment in the Holmlia suburb (an area where nearly a hundred languages are said to be spoken). His only fault, seen from the perspective of his right-wing killers, consisted in having the wrong colour. The virtually unanimous expression of 15

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disgust and outrage in the aftermath of Benjamin’s death may suggest that blackness is not, in contemporary Norway, a marker of undesirable difference. In a strict sense, it may not even be a marker of diversity, since many black Norwegians are culturally one hundred per cent Norwegian, meaning that they do not deviate from mainstream culture concerning language, religion, food habits and other everyday practices. Many years ago, during a 1980s television broadcast of highlights at the nationwide Constitution Day celebrations, a major public ritual in the country characterised by ubiquituous flags and folk dresses, the commentator remarked that in a not-so-distant future, many of the children in the procession might be brown. He did not intend this comment as a warning, but as a matter-of-fact prediction. Significantly, this programme, almost sacred in character, never deviates from mainstream Norwegian nationalist sentiment. The commentator Knut Bjørnsen, a household name from innumerable sport broadcasts, knew what he was doing and was to my knowledge never reproached for it. This kind of comment would not have been seen as equally innocent twenty years later. The reason is not that Norwegians have, as a rule, become more racist in the most restricted sense of the word, but that the semantic centre of blackness has moved from mere colour to strong cultural connotations. Apart from Somali and Eritreans, there are comparatively few sub-Saharan Africans in Norway. Dark skins are thus associated primarily with South Asia and the Middle East, and a comment to the effect that in the future, half the kids in the 17 May processions will be brown, may be interpreted not as meaning that Norwegians are going to intermarry with non-Europeans, but that half of the children will be Muslims. Colour, culture and religion are not easily disentangled as markers of difference. Only a few days ago, I came across a newspaper story about a Pakistani-Norwegian who owned a flashy BMW car and who had been asked ten times by the traffic police to show his credentials since he bought it. The newspaper had found seven ethnic Norwegians who owned almost identical cars, and not entirely surprisingly, only one of them had been stopped by the police, and that had just happened once. The Pakistani-Norwegian BMW owner, by profession a successful shopkeeper, might have been one hundred per cent integrated into Norwegian society at the level of culture—he may not even have been a Muslim believer for all I know—but at the level of ascribed identity, he remained as “entropy-resistant”, to use Gellner’s (Gellner 1983) term, as black Americans under Jefferson. The question is: Which kinds of difference, that go beyond mere diversity, are subconsciously drawn on by the police in treating non-whites differently? In all likelihood, class is the main strand of association here. Since non-white immigrants largely belong to the working class, the policemen may reason, if one of them has a flashy car it cannot have been acquired by honest means. In other words, although the police’s behaviour cannot be put down to “old racism”, it has an inescapable racial dimension in that it results in a systematic discrimination of non-white citizens with nice cars. 16

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There is a website devoted to the memory of young Benjamin. Viewers are invited to post their messages, and nearly five years after his death, people (judging from the style, most are teenagers) still send their condolences and expressions of concern to the site. His death has come to signify the evil of racist violence. At the same time, it has been well documented that non-white residents in Norway with exotic names have difficulties in getting high-level jobs. Documented examples include a man with a higher degree in engineering, who had not been shortlisted for a job once in several years—he had applied for around two hundred—and who eventually changed his name to a Norwegian-sounding one. He was immediately hired by a large company. In other words, racist violence is generally frowned upon. Skin colour as such, with no further cultural or religious connotations, does not seem to function as an important marker of difference, in spite of the fact that the term neger, negro, is still in common usage in the country (Gullestad 2002 dissects the debate over the term). Yet at the same time, having the wrong skin colour, or a kind of name which suggests the wrong skin colour, does mean that one must be prepared for systematic discrimination. Although it is not related to skin colour as such, this does little to help those who become victims of a cultural semantics which connects colour to other traits deemed undesirable, that is to say difference as opposed to diversity.

3. Hijabs Like every West European country, Norway, too, has had its share of hijab controversies. The hijab or Muslim headscarf was rarely seen in the country before the 1990s, but it has quickly caught on among many Muslim girls and women of South Asian, Somali or Middle Eastern origin. The debate, which was very visible in most of Western Europe and elsewhere in the first years of the new century, had interesting national variations. Some claimed that the Muslim headscarf was incompatible with secular values (in France), others claimed that it was oppressive to women (in Scandinavia) or at odds with “common values” (in the Netherlands). Some Muslims, who had been indifferent to headscarves before, now began to take an intense interest in it. Some of their leaders said that it is the duty of a Muslim woman to cover herself up, including her hair. To many Muslim girls and women, the result is a catch22—a double-bind situation. If they cover themselves up, they retain the respect and recognition of other Muslims, but are denounced as unwilling to integrate by the majority. If they choose not to cover their hair, they retain the respect and recognition of the majority, but lose their honour in the Muslim community. One of the most publicized incidents involving headscarves was the attempt to dismiss a young woman working as a cashier in a large furniture store because she had taken to wearing the hijab at work. In stark contrast to the simple Benjamin Hermansen case, the politicians and public commentators 17

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tors were divided on this issue. While most of the latter felt, on principle, that the woman should be allowed to keep her job and wear a hijab, there was perceptible discomfort around the hijab as such. Like in France, there were suggestions in the Norwegian public sphere to the effect that it should be banned in schools. Many, both women and men who had formerly taken no interest in feminist issues, claimed that the headscarf was per se a symbol of male oppression and should therefore be condemned. Interestingly, those academics and intellectuals (including myself) who defended the right of Muslim women to cover their hair in any kind of situation, never once invoked a cultural relativist argument defending the other cultures’ right to be different in any way they liked. Instead, it was pointed out that the hijab might signify many different things, including a deliberately chosen freedom from the outside pressure to assimilate. Another argument, from the liberal tradition, stressed the individual’s freedom to make his or her own private decisions, even if one might oneself dislike them. The debate thus narrowed down, the questions that remained to be answered were (i) whether hijab use was something chosen by individual Muslim girls or women, or whether it was enforced on them; and (ii) whether it could be said that the hijab necessarily signified female subordination. In the Norwegian public sphere, there seemed to be no disagreement over the desirability of gender equality and individual choice regarding dress. Simultaneously with the hijab controversy, there was a more low-key debate in some local newspapers about dress codes in schools, where adolescent girls increasingly were wearing sexually tantalising clothes, revealing their often pierced navels and so on. Many felt that these kinds of dress should be banned in schools, which ought to conform to certain moral standards. Although the hijab debate was more wide-ranging than this, understandably so since it was directly connected with the increasingly strained relationship between non-Muslims and Muslims in the post-9/11 world, the two issues were not dissimilar from one another. The questions concerned, in the first case, the hijab’s inherent meaning (if any), the freedom of the individual to choose and the issue of male oppression; in the second case, the main question was whether or not young girls were subjected to a harmful pressure to act out their sexuality prematurely. No unanimous conclusion about Islamophobia can be reached from this discussion.

4. Female Circumcision Another Norwegian incident involved a group generally considered vulnerable and subaltern, namely Somali woman refugees, an anthropologist specializing in East Africa and, last but not least, the media. Following a controversial television documentary about female circumcision, which documented that the practice existed among certain Somali immigrants to Norway, a journalist with the largest Norwegian newspaper, VG, decided to write an opinion piece on the issue. She duly contacted Aud Talle, who had done fieldwork in 18

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Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia and among Somali women in London. Talle faxed her an article describing the social and cultural embeddedness of the practice, as well as explaining the practice on the phone. Soon after, VG published an article on female circumcision illustrated by an image of a veiled, chained woman trotting behind a brisk and confident female anthropologist. The story objected against the “cultural relativism” of the anthropologists, who preferred to study circumcision as an exotic rite rather than trying to combat it. At first, Talle was uncertain as to how she should react. Eventually she decided not to write a response in the newspaper itself. The fast media, she reckoned, were simply unable to accommodate the kind of detail necessary in an account which had to take all the relevant factors into consideration. So she wrote a book instead, Om kvinneleg omskjering (“On female circumcision”, Talle 2003). The book was published a year after the newspaper commentary, and it is written in a popular style. It ends with a few policy recommendations, where Talle makes an interesting comparison between North-East African female circumcision and Chinese footbinding, suggesting that the successful campaign against the latter practice a hundred years ago might inspire similar strategies today. Her main arguments are the ones to be expected from a social anthropologist, but which are, incidentally, rare in general public debate: Circumcision has to be understood as an individual experience, but also in the contexts of cultural meaning and power structures. Predictably, Talle’s book was not reviewed by VG nor by any of the other mainstream media. But it had its share of attention in the small elite media, and—more importantly—it began to be used by health workers and public servants, who are often reminded of their need to understand why certain immigrants do certain things. However different their interpretations of each other might be, none of those involved in this debate actually defends the practice of female circumcision on cultural grounds. During the debate about female circumcision, two minority views came across. One was the view, expressed by journalist Peter Normann Waage, that it should be legal but with an age limit of say, 18 or 20 years. When you have come of age, the argument went, you should have the right to make decisions about your own body. The other view, expressed by a minority of academics, was that female circumcision may be compared to body practices common in the West, such as piercing, extreme slimming often associated with anorexia nervosa, and silicone implants. They argued that societal pressure is exerted in both cases and that it cannot be claimed that the one is chosen and the other enforced. However, it was added during the debate, it does make a difference regarding the possibility to exert choice whether one is an infant or a teenager.

5. Arranged Marriages The final example, which like the previous ones is a staple in migration studies as well as public debate on minority issues, may also be helpful in drawing 19

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the boundary between diversity and difference. Although it has been shown time and again that arranged marriages is not a unitary phenomenon but rather a continuum of marriage practices, public and political debate on the issue have been less nuanced than research. Now, much of the immigration into Western European countries consists in “family reunification”, often meaning bringing young kinsmen and -women into the country in order to marry them to relatives already resident in the country. Denmark passed a controversial law on family reunifications in 2004, which made it illegal to bring prospective spouses under the age of 24 into the country. Officially an attempt to stop enforced marriages, the new law also sought to limit new migration into Denmark. While similar measures have been discussed in Norway as well, no such law has been passed yet. At the same time, arranged marriages, especially in the large Pakistani-Norwegian community, are often perceived in the majority as being more or less the same as enforced marriages. Marriage between relatives—there is a cultural preference for patrilateral parallel-cousin marriage—is seen as problematic, ostensibly for genetic reasons, and more importantly, it would appear that most Norwegians strongly favour individual choice over collective decisions in matters like marriage. Indeed, a generation gap has been identified among immigrants from South Asia, where members of the second generation, influenced by individualist values, are inclined to oppose the parental decisions. However, as Bredal (Bredal 2004) documents, the institution of arranged marriage continues to enjoy considerable legitimacy among Norwegian residents of South Asian origin. Now, arranged marriages cannot easily be banned, but enforced marriages are. A secondgeneration Pakistani working as a journalist and writer, Khadafi Zaman, once expressed the view that arranged marriages “are cultural”, while enforced marriages are just “uncultured” (ukultur in Norwegian). In other words, if it were possible to draw an unequivocal dividing line between the two, diversity would have been preserved, and difference would have been condemned. Of course, such a boundary is unthinkable. Merely a cursory look at the intricacies of marriage negotiations between and within families, where small sacrifices and larger compromises are the order of the day, shows that it is in fact impossible to identify objective criteria for distinguishing arranged marriages from enforced ones. Moral pressure is being exerted by all the parties involved, including the young persons about to be engaged, and a society that bans moral pressure ceases to recognise the most basic social tie known to humanity.

6. Shared Values? I have briefly presented four cases, where the boundary between difference and diversity is made relevant. The public debate and policies implemented suggest that the boundary is important in defining the shared values of the new Norway of multiple, contested identities. The question is whether or not 20

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diversity can be said to encompass more than curry houses and a sprinkling of brown in the 17 May processions. The cases indicate that neither variations in dress codes, in body practices or marriage strategies are seen as problematic in so far as they do not violate conformity to “shared values”. However, it appears that most such variations associated with immigrants are as a matter of fact seen to be at odds with these values, given the public reactions to cultural variations here. What are those shared values of the majority, then? The answer may have been straightforward a generation or two ago, when Norwegian society still defined itself almost uncontestedly as Lutheran and was equally uncontestedly based on the ideal of the nuclear family, the authority of the father and a cultural class structure according to which classical music ranked higher than pop ditties. Homosexuality was illegal and there were no non-European immigrants. Since the 1960s, the cultural hierarchies have, like in other Western societies, become less clear, and it has become increasingly uncertain what the shared values underpinning society are. In 1997, a “commission of values” was thus set up by the government with a mandate to define, and propose ways of strengthening, the shared values of Norwegian society. Its findings, disseminated through a series of publications, suggested that society is less strongly committed to a set of shared values than it may have been some decades ago. Individualism, sexual permissiveness and legalization of homosexuality, an increased variation in household structure, social and geographical mobility, democratization of the family and secularization are some of the keywords. In other words, if it can be said that certain immigrants fail to conform to the shared values of Norwegian society, it then becomes logically necessary to make those values explicit. Judging from the examples briefly mentioned above, it may appear that gender equality, individual choice in finding a partner and the right to make decisions pertaining to one’s body are seen as such overarching values. Interestingly, the Commission of Values made it one of its priorities to look into the situation of the elderly, concluding that there is a huge discrepancy between the values people in general claim to support, on the one hand, and actual practices, on the other. Elderly Norwegians are often isolated and institutionalized, and nobody seems to think that this is a good thing. By contrast, elderly immigrants tend to stay with their families until death. In this regard, immigrants succeed better than ethnic Norwegians in conforming to the “shared values” supported by the Christian Democrat-led government in power at the time of writing. As a preliminary conclusion, we may state that individualist values associated with the freedom to choose—the ethos of consumerism or neo-liberalism, one might say—are paramount, and that (intolerable) difference as opposed to (unproblematic) diversity appears whenever the collectivity overrules the individual. This situation sets the stage for a kind of xenophobia which is markedly different from earlier forms; the yardstick is now individual human rights

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and values associated with freedom, not adherence to national ideas and practices.

7. Conclusion: A Shift to Neo-liberalism Over the last decades, there have been changes in the ways multiethnic society is being debated publicly and in politics. This is not a situation unique to Scandinavia; in all of Western Europe, there has occurred a gradual shift in recent years, especially after 11 September, in the dominant framework regulating exchanges of views about immigrants and natives. Two changes are particularly noticeable. First, there has been a shift from a sociological focus on discrimination and racism, towards a focus on repression and rights violations inside the minority communities. Second, the anthropological emphasis on cultural rights (associated with language, religious practices etc.) has been replaced almost completely by public debates regarding individual rights and choice as unquestioned values, even in extreme quantities. Freedom values replace security values, and the burden of evidence is pushed from greater society across to the immigrants themselves. The stigmatizing right-wing term “culturally alien” (fremmedkulturell) has entered the everyday vocabulary of the press in spite of warnings from both academics and journalists. The blanket term “immigrant community” has become synonymous with oppression and dark powers. The tragic Fadime affair in Sweden, where a secularized Kurdish-Swedish girl was murdered by her father (Kurkiala 2003), demonstrated to the public sphere once and for all that groups are evil, and what now matters is to speed up and intensify “integration” (read Norwegianization). Both of these tendencies can be connected to neo-liberalist ideology, which transcends conventional political divides and is as widespread in the social democratic Labour Party as in the neo-nationalist Progress Party. This is the ideology which, among other things, promotes maximal individual freedom of choice and the adjustment of public services to render them more efficient and their institutions more compatible with market-economic commonsense. Neo-liberalism is not in itself xenophobic. Quite the opposite: it is a doctrine of freedom which promotes open borders and free competition. However, it is based on a view of what it is to be human, which conforms badly with lived reality in ways which can stimulate xenophobic attitudes. Neo-liberalist ideology can be described as an unreformed (and unreflected) individualism where the only thing the individual owes his surroundings is self-realization. This individualism carries with it conventional criteria of success—money, power, public visibility. Moreover, it implies that groups either do not exist (“There is no such thing as society”) or create obstacles to the individual’s freedom.

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The ideological shift has led to a change in emphasis in the standard presentation of minority issues (enforced marriages rather than discrimination in the labour market; unwillingness to integrate among immigrants rather than demands for cultural rights), and entails that greater society is either regarded as non-existent or devoid of responsibilities—it is up to the individuals themselves to sort out their lives—and cultural institutions in minority groups become disturbing elements; they curtail individual freedom and reduce the efficiency of Norway Ltd. As a part of the new rhetoric, it has become a common exercise among commentators to denounce the “kindness policy” of the 1970s and 1980s. Since both female circumcision and enforced marriages demonstrably occur among immigrants (however rarely), and researchers have devoted relatively little attention to such phenomena, myths have been spun and disseminated quickly and efficiently about powerful alliances of NGOs networks, researchers and high-ranking bureaucrats who have refused to face realities, and who have instead built a castle in the sky called “the rainbow society”. On the other hand, it is correct that it was until quite recently common to accept the validity of a structural understanding of problems associated with migration; that is, one could not just blame failures and shortcomings on individual decisions, personal idiosyncracies and so on. Someone who belongs to a minority is entitled to both freedom and security. He or she can take decisions, and greater society is obliged to ensure that the choices are real. For example, within the framework of a liberal society it must be possible, not just in theory but also in practice, for rural and working-class youths to take higher education if they want to, and it similarly must to be possible for a young woman with Pakistani parents to refuse to marry the man her parents have chosen for her. At the same time, it would be an expression of sociological illiteracy to deny that important aspects of the social world we inhabit have not been chosen, neither by ourselves nor by anybody else. We do not choose our early childhood experiences, our kin, our class background or our mother tongue. As every anthropologist knows, crucial experiences vary and imply that each of us make decisions on differing premises. To some of us it is not even certain that the decisions or choices are the most important things in life; maybe we prefer security, predictability and belonging to a group. There is a genuine predicament here, which incidentally goes right to the core of the foundational problems of social science. On the one hand, society is nothing but the result of a lot of individual choices. On the other hand, these choices are impossible unless there exists a society beforehand, which provides us with a language and a set of values, and identifies which alternatives it is possible to choose between. Eager to emphasize the freely choosing individual, public debate and policy have almost inadvertently done away with the groups. At the very least, this has happened in the minority debate. All of a sudden, culturally specific experiences and cultural differences have no value in the marketplace of 23

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ideas; and if they exist after all, they should be flattened out of consideration for the free choices of individuals. Just a decade ago, it was acceptable to talk about cultural differences in a respectful way, indicating that they had to be understood and acknowledged if the integration of culturally different groups in a single society were to be successful. Differences in child-raising and gender roles provoked and enraged social democratic politicians and social workers, and many were hoping that things would eventually change—but at the same time, everybody involved agreed that it was impossible to remove deepseated cultural practices by decree. Such changes come about slowly and gradually, as people acquire new experiences and notions. This kind of insight has become rare. The Norwegian public sphere thus tends to see only shortcomings and evil intentions when confronted with cultural differences. Diversity is fine; it is morally harmless and potentially economically profitable, but “the others”, bearers of difference, have again become inferior, as they were in the past. This time, however, they are not inferior as a race or a cultural group, but exclusively as individuals, who oppress each other, who tacitly allow themselves to be oppressed, and who cannot blame majority society if they are insufficiently integrated. The new way of talking about minorities and rights in Norway is not, in other words, a result of nationalism. The latter was a kind of collectivism which could occasionally propose compromise and peaceful co-existence with other groups. It nevertheless had its obvious weaknesses, which could only be addressed properly via a strong antidote of no-nonsense individualism. However, the pendulum has now swung so far in the opposite direction that concepts such as “ethnic group” or “cultural minority” are immediately associated with enforced marriages and authoritarian religion. In this kind of situation, entire life-worlds are opened to general suspicion and censored. In sum, diversity is economically profitable and morally harmless (see Hutnyk 1997 on the WOMAD festival), while difference threatens the individualism underpinning and justifying neo-liberalism. In this perspective, it is no wonder that immigrants were praised in the 1970s, when the collectivist ideology of social democracy still held sway in Scandinavia, for their strong family solidarity; while in the new century, they are criticized for it since it impedes personal freedom. Finally, through a narrow focus on moral issues, the hierarchical and structural dimensions of minority/majority relations is made invisible.

References Bredal, Anja (2004): ‘Vi er jo en familie’: Arrangerte ekteskap, autonomi og fellesskap blant unge norsk-asiater [‘But we’re a family’: Arranged marriages, autonomy and community among young Asian-Norwegians], Ph.D. thesis, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. 24

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Christiansen, Flemming/Ulf Hedetoft (2004): “Introduction”. In: Flemming Christiansen/Ulf Hedetoft, (eds.), The politics of multiple belonging: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe and East Asia, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1-23. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland (2001): “Between universalism and relativism: A critique of the UNESCO concept of culture”. In: Jane Cowan/Marie-Bénédicte Dembour/Richard Wilson (eds.), Culture and Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 127-148. Gellner, Ernest (1983): Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Goodhart, David (2004): “Too diverse?”. In: Prospect 95, 30-37. Gullestad, Marianne (2002): Det norske sett med nye øyne [Norwegianness in a new perspective], Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Hall, Stuart (2000): “Conclusion: The multi-cultural question”. In: Barnor Hesse (ed.), Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, London: Zed, 209-241. Hutnyk, John (1997): “Adorno at Womad: South Asian crossovers and the limits of hybridity-talk”. In: Pnina Werbner/Tariq Modood (eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of AntiRacism, London: Zed, 106-138. Kurkiala, Mikael (2003): “Interpreting honour killings: The story of Fadime Sahindal (1975-2002) in the Swedish press”. In: Anthropology Today 19, 6-7. Talle, Aud (2003): Om kvinneleg omskjering [On female circumcision], Oslo: Samlaget. Turner, Terence (1993): “Multiculturalism and anthropology”. In: Cultural Anthropology 8, 411-429. World Commission on Culture and Development (1995): Our Creative Diversity, Paris: UNESCO.

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Richard Rottenburg

S OCIAL C ONSTRUCTIVISM AND THE E NIGMA OF S TRANGENESS 1. The Enigma of Alienity as Anthropology’s Thorn Anthropology lives with a thorn in its flesh. If it were to remove this thorn, it would lose an important impulse for its work. If it were to give itself over to this thorn completely, it would turn into literature. Anthropology must, I believe, learn to live with this tension. What does the thorn of anthropology consist of? It is the paradox of that which is simply strange (Waldenfels 1998). The anthropologist’s calling is to provide the most accurate account possible of strange cultures and life-forms. However, when anthropologists engage in their work, they are occasionally overwhelmed with doubt about their ability to fulfill this calling. On the one hand, it seems highly unlikely that we could ever even approach the absolutely strange or strictly heterogeneous—what I will call “alienity” here—let alone comprehend it. On the other hand, it becomes immediately clear that if we can only talk about that which is strange in our own terminology, its strangeness threatens to be lost in the process. Because the enigma of alienity has repeatedly seduced anthropologists into engaging in methodologically questionable enterprises, anthropology has come to be seen as an uncertain candidate, no longer taken seriously by neighboring disciplines and confused and even uncertain about itself. In this essay, I would like to focus on the issue of alienity, an issue that can neither be dismissed off hand nor pursued methodologically in the conventional sense. While the virtue of empirical social science lies observing the limits of its own methodology and bracketing out all other issues as (at least provisionally) unresearchable, the discipline of anthropology cannot subject itself entirely to these strictures. We should, I believe, tolerate this disturbance if we are interested in gaining something truly worthwhile from the enterprise of anthropology.

2. Methodological Attempts to Remove the Thorn In their professional everyday life, anthropologists rarely discuss this fundamental epistemological issue. As a rule, they dismiss the question of alienity

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as a self-contradiction. In order to do this, various arguments are available, all of which arrive at the same conclusion (see Mersch 1997). There is an analytic argument, for example, which draws on the work of Donald Davidson (2001): An “other” of thinking cannot be thought, because this would mean thinking other than we do. Or as Wittgenstein put it: “Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically” (Tractatus §3.03). From this perspective, the assumption of radical incomprehensibility proves to be an aporia because it is presumed here that when we speak a comprehensible meaning already exists. For this reason, we need only to postulate a common framework and allow a principle of charity to reign. Hermeneutic and discourse theory arguments about the impossibility of alienity, drawing on Gadamer (1975) and Habermas (1994), insist on the necessity of assuming some form of mediation. From this perspective, the relativity of cultures presupposes universal structures of linguistic comprehension as a necessary given. Or formulated differently: Communicative reason is the condition for the possibility of the diversity of cultures. Philosophical anthropology assumes the unity of humanity as the root of different human cultures. The fact that we are all human beings and are able to reflect on our affective, practical, and symbolic bases enables translation and understanding. Finally, there is also a systems theory argument about the impossibility of alienity: A system makes its environment “readable” by copying its own framework or coding onto that environment. Only in this way do the events of the environment become meaningful as information for the system (Luhmann 1977). As a rule, anthropologists presume in their everyday work that alienity must be rejected as a contradiction in terms—either on the basis of one of these four arguments or, as occurs most frequently, simply intuitively. They then turn to an abated version of this issue, i.e., to familiar strangeness or otherness as a variety of oneself. The term for this is “alterity”. While alienity has been excluded as an option, a norm has emerged within the discourse of alterity that is difficult if not impossible to question. There appears to be general agreement today that anthropological representations of alterity are threatened by one particular kind of error: that of “othering”. According to the prevailing critique, anthropologists often “other” different cultures or life-forms, when in reality these are not all that other or different (see diagram). This accusation of othering usually assumes one of two forms. The first is called ethnocentrism. The sin here consists of interpreting and evaluating the other in terms of our own criteria and thereby failing to articulate the inner logic and value of that other. Ethnocentric arguments do not claim, “the other is like us,” but instead, “although the other is different than us, we are capable of seeing through it and can therefore explain it in socio-cultural terms”.

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The second variant of this accusation of othering is exoticism. Here the sin lies in describing the other to as great a degree as possible in the concepts and values of that other life-form. I leave aside the question of whether and to what degree this is even possible. According to this accusation, the attempt to represent the rationality and ethos of another culture or life-form unintentionally becomes a form of othering: Differences are magnified, while commonalities are covered over. Accusations of othering have been popular since the 1980s, particularly within the discipline of anthropology. It is now assumed to be self-evident that less is more, i.e., that smaller and situationally fluctuating differences are better than larger and more stable ones. Woe to anyone who asserts today that particular human beings, on the basis of their affiliation to a particular culture, think and act in a particular way. Admittedly, this kind of critique is as a rule justified because the situation is invariably more complex. I am not, however, interested in this here. My concern rather is the unnoticed discursive effects of such an argument, for it implicitly presumes that the problem of othering can be resolved through appropriation. As a consequence this argument, which is accepted almost unquestioningly today, denies the indisputable reverse error: that we can violate alterity not only by othering it, but also by appropriating it. In other words, here, too, we are on the wrong track. The path we have traversed thus far can be illustrated by a diagram: Figure 1 Enigma

Alienity

Alterity

Othering

Appropriation

Ethnocentrism

Exoticism

Readers will surely object at this point that the opposition we have drawn here between self and other as two already existing entities is incorrect. After all, the self can only be constituted as self-interpretation through the other. The entities “self” and “other” are merely auxiliary constructions of perspectival and relational self-ascertainment. Identity has at its basis no substance that could be thought without reference to alterity. Behind one mask we always find only another mask. 29

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I agree with this objection up to this point. But what can we conclude from it? The fact that collective identities are always plural social constructions that are hybrid, relational, and situationally fluctuating does not exclude the possibility of alienity. Trying to take into account radical strangeness does not necessarily imply naive realism or some other form of essentialism. Rather the opposite is the case: Only those who believe that they possess a universally valid explanatory schema will regard everything that eludes that schema not merely as irreconcilably strange, but as something that cannot even exist. From this perspective, there can only be alterity (i.e. familiar strangeness), but not alienity (radical strangeness). In contrast to this view, all of the different varieties of social constructivism do not seek to attain (absolute) universal truth and do not conceive of truth solely in terms of external reality. Instead they emphasize the simultaneous importance of conceptual schemas and the historical and cultural situatedness and contingency of knowledge practices. For this reason, the constructivist move from a universe to a pluriverse implicitly and principally takes into account the possibility of alienity. Thus, the conclusion that we draw from the arguments in this section must be a different one. If all the paths still available to us after the turnout to alterity prove to be cul-de-sacs, then perhaps we must return to the first fork in the road—alienity or alterity—and reflect on the matter anew. What was it that spoke against alienity? When the current anthropological conceptions of alterity, identity, and difference deny the possibility of alienity, they continue a long philosophical tradition, “that seeks either to explain or exclude, to appropriate or humiliate, to embrace or eradicate that which is strange”, as Dieter Mersch has argued (1997: 28-9), drawing on the work of Emmanuel Lévinas (1986). Both alternatives—the integration of alienity as well as its exclusion—pursue the same strategy of immunization: They assert that alienity is simply unthinkable. The form of argumentation employed here, according to Mersch, is homologous to the standard refutation of skepticism and relativism: “Not everything can be false, because then the assertion of universal falseness would be false as well. In the same way, nothing could be “absolutely other”, because we can have no concept of the other that does not always refer us back to our own thinking” (Mersch 1997: 33; see Davidson 1980: 221-22). This, however, is circular reasoning. It presumes precisely that which it is supposed to demonstrate, for the simple reason that it is unable within the limits of its own argumentation to provide the necessary proof. As a result, it does not prove the impossibility of alienity, but only the impossibility of expressing it logically within the framework of a predicative procedure. Again Wittgenstein expressed this point well: “Unless you can show that a puzzle is not a puzzle you are left with what really are puzzles: a puzzle is something with no solution” (Wittgenstein 1988: 348). If Wittgenstein is correct here, then we must continue to insist on the possibility of alienity. The scandalous enigma remains:

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Figure 2 Enigma

Alienity

Alterity

This, however, also means that alienity and alterity do not represent two separate paths that we could choose alternatively. If we examine something enigmatically strange for an extended period of time, it slowly becomes accessible to us, perhaps even familiar. However, if we continue to examine this strange object, we discover indissoluble traces of the enigmatic in precisely what had appeared to become familiar. And if we maintain this inquisitive attitude, we will at some point involuntarily turn to ourselves, and our own culture and life-forms will suddenly appear enigmatically strange. Following Mersch and Lévinas, we can therefore ask: Could it be that the methodological abolition of alienity is ultimately the most arrogant position we could take toward strange cultures or life-forms? Does this position contest the possibility that the vantage point of a strange life-form makes visible something that remains hidden from our own vantage point? Does it implicitly assert our own familiar image of the world as the only one possible? And why is it that the methodological abolition of alienity has gained general acceptance in an era, in which universal claims of any kind have encountered more difficulty than ever before? There is a minor anthropological tradition that does not follow the call to abolish absolute strangeness. This tradition experienced a little noticed renaissance with Fritz Kramer’s book The Red Fez. Art and Spiritual Possession in Africa, published originally in 1987. In this book, Kramer shows how African art and African cults of being spiritually possessed appropriate radical strangeness through a process of mimesis without at the same time abolishing it. Kramer analyzes mimesis as a way of approaching alienity, allowing oneself to be touched and moved by radical strangeness without reducing it logocentrically to oneself or to that which is familiar. Kramer was influenced here by Heidegger’s distinction between comprehending, fixating “talk about” and non-objectivizable, reserved “talk of” (1971). I leave aside the legitimacy of this distinction, as I do not want to pursue Kramer’s approach any further here. The reason for this is that I believe another approach is now possible and perhaps even necessary, one that also does not accept the methodological exclusion of alienity, but justifies this in a different way. This new approach— which was developed within the sociology of knowledge and research on science and technology—has had difficulty finding its way (back) to anthropology. I hope that this essay will be a modest contribution to this process. In or-

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der to present this new approach, I need to say a few words about the context in which accusations of othering arose.

3. The Background and Consequences of the Abolition of Strangeness The political and cultural changes in the 1980s that led to accusations of othering are connected to a number of different developments (Schiffauer 1997). I mention only three of them here. First, it was not until the 1970s and 80s that the (admittedly older) idea of the constructedness of all knowledge and the performativity of all descriptions of the world gained general recognition. This recognition made anthropologists more aware of the political responsibility they had for the knowledge they produced about strange cultures and lifeforms. Second, the devaluation of grand narratives of emancipation made the critique of domination more complicated. There was a shift from conceptions of power as a resource that can be centralized and capitalized to conceptions of power as a resource present in all social relations and made possible through the process of subjectivation. This gave rise to a concomitant shift from “we below/you above” to “we inside/you outside”. Finally, today anthropologists no longer address a primarily EuroAmerican audience interested in knowledge about distant countries and cultures. Precisely those people who are the objects of anthropological studies (or at least the intellectuals among them) are always potentially part of this audience as well. Like their Euro-American counterparts, these readers pay close attention to the differences constructed in such anthropological texts, although they tend to interpret them somewhat differently. That which might appear to Euro-American readers as a welcome inspiration for reflecting on their own established convictions is often regarded by readers who are the objects of such studies as oppressively restrictive and therefore insulting markings of difference. These changes in the 1980s meant that anthropology’s fondness for the losers of modernity and others on the margins could no longer present itself simply as “talking truth to power”. Today we presume, on the contrary, that anthropological discourse about excluded groups or cultures can itself contribute to their exclusion. It has, in other words, become more difficult to speak about difference, because the central topos of the present is exclusion and because the establishment of differences can contribute to mechanisms of exclusion in globalization. A number of current anthropological approaches can be understood as a response to these more difficult conditions of intellectual production. I am interested here in only two of them, which can be regarded as two sides of the same strategy. First, the notion of culture as a homogeneous and unified fabric of meaning has been replaced by the notion of culture as a heterogeneous 32

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arena of discursive practices that create the world. This has shifted attention to those spaces or practices lying between cultures (Shimada 2000). Second, concern with the self, which has always been constitutive in anthropology, has gained new significance. While anthropology is always necessarily also self-interpretation through the other, the anthropologist’s own culture has increasingly become the direct object of study as well. This has meant a growing concern with European, North American, and other industrialized societies. It has also meant focusing on modern forms of social ordering traditionally regarded as “Western” (e.g., formal organizations, laboratories, and the media), which are no longer limited to the Western world and, in a certain way, never were (Rottenburg 2002). Both of these anthropological strategies for dealing with a problematized strangeness aim at overcoming the so-called great divide between “modern and pre-modern” or between “the West and the rest” as an ideological description of the world. When I refer here to an implicit problem that this new anthropology has with strangeness, I do not mean to suggest that anthropology of the 1980s had no such problems or that we can or should return to it.

4. From the West/Rest Divide to the Reality/Representation Divide The old and persistent suspicion about pre-modern societies is that they lack the capacity to draw clear distinctions between the world and language or things and names, or on another level, between nature and culture. They are supposedly incapable of developing a notion of inanimate material and therefore continuously confuse nature and culture, remaining trapped in animism and magic. As a result, they are unable to develop a science that could control and manipulate nature. To state this suspicion abstractly: In pre-modern societies, human beings confuse cause and effect. This would mean, however, that the external great divide between West/rest is connected to an internal “great divide,” that of world/language. In the West, the internal great divide is understood as the overcoming of superstition through enlightenment. The development of an empirical science independent of theology and politics plays a central role here. This science in turn presupposes an external reality independent of God and human beings, whose laws science is supposed to uncover. Thus if we want to understand the external great divide, we have to look more closely at the internal great divide or at the relation of these two divides. Two trends in contemporary scholarship can be identified here. The first concentrates within the anthropological tradition on the question of whether and to what degree pre-modern societies actually confuse signifier and signified and therefore cause and effect. The second begins at the opposite end and asks what precisely humans in modern societies do when they treat world and language or nature and culture as always already separate entities. 33

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Anthropologists have investigated the first question exhaustively, drawing on the works of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1927/1965) and James Frazer (1890/1994). Lévy-Bruhl’s and Frazer’s answer to this question can be summarized as follows: Yes, “primitives” do confuse signifier and signified and therefore—this is their main point—confuse expressive action and technical action. Animism, according to this line of argument, is a mixing of things that do not belong together, a kind of hybridization, and magic a kind of false technology. The answer of the numerous scholars and critics who, inspired by Lévy-Bruhl and Frazer, have subsequently focused on this question, can be summarized as follows: No, “primitives” do not confuse expressive action and technical action. If they occasionally confuse signifier and signified, this is certainly an error in thinking, but it is a very complicated one. And if they do at times make this mistake, they are in very good company, as Edmund Leach pointed out almost thirty years ago in his structuralist theory of communication. Leach’s argument runs as follows: When we turn on the television in the evening with the remote control, we do so merely out of habit and not because our technical knowledge leads us expect that the remote control will actually function. We treat the remote control as signal A, which triggers an effect B, although for us the remote control is in fact merely a signifier, for the simple reason that we do not understand how it works. I find this kind of argument, whatever its merits, ultimately unsatisfactory. We may indeed use the effects of the television remote control as a kind of magic, but our conviction that it is technology and not magic is, I think, ultimately justified and verifiable as well. Furthermore, there is always a trace of hypocrisy, at best an ironic arrogance, in such superficial coquette attempts to assert an equality between “modern” and “pre-modern” (Leach 1976). This theoretical controversy has yet to be resolved, to say nothing of the existential issue of magic and witchcraft. The reason for this probably lies in the fact that Leach did not reject consistently enough one of the problematic premises assumed by Frazer. Frazer’s position presumes that only magic is in need of explanation (even when we suspect magic, as was the case with Leach, in our own culture as well); and only those who claim to possess an objective perspective, a “God’s eye view of the universe” are, on the contrary, capable of providing explanation. At this point in the argument, any attempt to appropriate the other becomes a denunciatory othering. In order to avoid this subtle othering disguised as its opposite, anthropologists in the 1970s began to address the issue in the other direction. Instead of investigating the question of whether pre-modern societies actually confused signifier and signified, their project—as “symmetrical anthropology”— focused on what actually occurs in modern societies and what individuals do when they distinguish between world and language, reality and representation, and ultimately nature and culture.

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5. From the Reality/Representation Divide to the Enunciation of Reality In order to summarize the problematic of the modern distinction between reality and representation or nature and culture, I turn to social-constructivist scholarship on science and technology. I will not examine the theoretical presuppositions of this development here but simply presume them as a necessary basis. In doing so, I omit a significant step: the momentous re-interpretation of the reciprocal effects of representation and social reality as they were worked out by Berger and Luckmann (1972). I mention only in passing as well the two central authors responsible for the next development, from the idiom of representation to the idiom of performativity: Pierre Bourdieu with his theory of practice (1977; 1990; in particular 1991) and Michel Foucault with his discourse theory (1971). While Bourdieu and Foucault focused on the production of social reality through representation, their students Bruno Latour (see below) and Michel Callon (Callon/Latour 1981; Callon 1986) radicalized this approach in regard to the production of reality in general, directing their attention consistently to natural science and technology. David Bloor (1991) and the Science Studies Unit at Edinburgh have contributed significantly to this radicalization. In Germany, Karin Knorr-Cetina (1981) has been decisive in the development and establishment of such an approach. It is rarely mentioned that already in 1936 Edmund Husserl (as part of The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology) outlined how Galileo was compelled to mathematize the world and thereby reduce its diversity and variety in order to make it fit into his philosophical project. Here is a brief summary of the scientific construction of nature according to social constructivists. The Constitution of the modern, as Latour calls it, presumes two propositions. The first is that in science scientists serve as the representatives or intermediaries of things, saying nothing but “what the things would have said on their own, had they been able to speak” (Latour 1993: 142-3; 1997; 2004). At issue here is not only the muteness of things, but also the demand that speaking in their name should be free of socio-cultural impurities, in short, free of politics. The second proposition is that in politics politicians serve as representatives who say in one voice no more and no less than what the many citizens they represent would have said had they all been able to speak. At issue here is not only the democratic principle of the faithful representation of citizens, but also the demand that nature be kept out of society as much as possible, so that we have it at our disposal as an object of human control and manipulation. On the basis of this quasi-constitutional conception, scientists and politicians, like all representatives and intermediaries, are continually subject to the suspicion that they have not been faithful in their translations, but have instead allowed their own interests to enter and thus have committed treason in the sense of the Italian saying: tradutore, traditore. According to the modern Constitution, the natural and social orders in their respective perfected forms 35

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could dispense with scientists and politicians, because objects and citizens would be able to truly represent themselves. This, however, can never actually occur, nor can we even conceive of representatives who function as purely passive intermediaries. It is necessary, in other words, to look for a different path here. The social-constructivist argument is irresistibly simple at this point: We do not have access to the external world in two distinct forms, once as representation (i.e., as image and word) and once as naked reality. Consequently we are never in a position to determine whether a representation in fact corresponds with reality. This moves us onto the terrain of the analytic philosopher Willard van Orman Quine, in particular his thesis about the empirical underdetermation of scientific theories. If we have access to external reality only once, then we are able to test the validity of a proposition only by repeating the various individual steps of the entire process of representation. In other words, we can always only compare different representations with one another; we never have access to reality itself in a direct or unmediated form. The impossibility of establishing a criterion of correspondence between reality and representation and the performative dimension of representation arising from this means that it is occasionally more appropriate to speak of enunciation than representation (as the root of “enunciation” recalls nuntiare [to preach or proclaim] and nuntius [messenger], and makes evident the proximity to “denunciation”). It is important to emphasize that this argument does not dispute the existence of a reality beyond human language. Rather, the construction of analogous regimes of scientific and political enunciation underscores the fact that external reality must be represented in order to attain social validity, just as the general will only becomes legitimate reality through political representation. According to this argument, representations always include more than the reality they represent. They inevitably include something from the necessarily selective and performative process of representation as well; and the choice of conceptual schemas and procedures can never be derived solely from the objects themselves. We can designate this position as empirical social constructivism. Thomas Kuhn (1970), Willard van Orman Quine (1960) and Hilary Putnam (1998) have helped us to understand that we can recognize the existence of multiple scientific truths without being compelled to regard all scientific conclusions either as equally valid or as simply contingent. Matthias Kaufmann (2003: 26) has called this “falsifiable direct realism”. This position relativizes the question of relativism (Latour 1993). Absolute relativism and universalism share the conviction that translation between languages, cultures, paradigms, and conceptual schemas requires a common standard of measure. While universalists are convinced that such a standard of measure actually exists, absolute relativists amuse themselves by contesting its existence. Relativized relativism shifts this question onto the terrain of pragmatics and praxis. In their research on science and technology, social 36

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constructivists—as relative relativists—have focused in particular on “putting things in relation”, on the construction of standard measures and measuring instruments, and on the process of standardization and the forms of investigation and manipulation that this enables.

6. The Great Divide as a Process of Purification In the perspective outlined above, enunciations of nature and society proceed not only analogously, but are inextricably intertwined as well. If we examine the practices of these two domains—i.e., work in scientific laboratories and activities in the political sphere—we find in both an inextricable mixture of nature and society. Technology—as nature transformed by human labor and functioning as a social actant—plays a central role in this mixing or hybridization. According to this perspective, instead of fruitlessly struggling to remove all traces of society from representations of nature and conversely to remove all nature and technology from representations of society, we should limit ourselves to making this mixing visible (e.g., with genetically manipulated organisms), without ever claiming to have unmediated access to an external reality that could serve as an absolute or ultimate ground. In this sense, social-constructivism shifts attention away from the ostensibly pre-given distinction between world and language onto the practices of producing or enunciating external reality and knowledge. While knowledge (including science) in fact co-produces technology, nature, and society through its mediations, so to speak, backstage, a process of purification follows that renders this mediation invisible for official accounts of the modern Constitution. After this laborious mediation has been concealed, the two poles reality/representation (or nature/culture) stand in apparently unmediated opposition as if they were the already existing starting points. Successfully rendering this mediation invisible thus results in a form of self-deception. The collectively recognized realities “nature” and “culture” are necessarily the effects of continuous practices of mediation, since we do not have unmediated access to either of them. Officially, however, the actual effects of these techno-scientific practices are recognized solely as their causes. The situation here is not unlike that of religion: While an external, unbelieving observer can regard God only as the effect of religious practices, within a particular religious discourse God appears solely as the cause of these practices. We speak of “culture” and “society” in a similar way in everyday discourse: While both “culture” and “society” can only be the effects of discursive practices, they appear to our everyday consciousness as causes or explanations for actions, in particular for the incomprehensible actions of others. Rendering invisible these practices of mixing and in this way treating modern societies as though they were identical with their official Constitution thereby surreptitiously confuses cause and effect. This in turn gives rise to the external “great divide” in the following way. Pre-modern societies, which of37

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ficially recognize their own mediation and thus allow for commonalities between living people, dead people, plants, animals, spirits, angels, devils, witches, and gods, treating them as equal actors, appear to commit a fundamental error, which distinguishes them from modern societies through a radical epistemological break. Only if we employ the modern Constitution as a comparative measure, does it appear as if pre-modern societies commit a unique epistemological error. If, on the contrary, we take as a comparative measure the modern Constitution together with the modern practices of mixing human and non-human actants, we find no radical difference in this regard between “modern” and “pre-modern”. There are in fact confusions on both sides, which means that the incontestable differences between modern and pre-modern societies must be located elsewhere. Drawing on Bruno Latour, we can describe this state of affairs as follows: The modern, according to its official Constitution, has never actually been modern because it has never been able to distinguish clearly between external reality and its own representations. This would allow us to continue to speak of modern and pre-modern, but only in the radically shifted sense that I have tacitly presumed throughout the essay. “Modern” is the purification process that renders invisible these practices of mixing. Modern in this sense would be de-coupled from the West, insofar as the ardent representatives of this ideology are currently dispersed throughout the entire globe, with presumably the majority of them living in the former “rest” of the world.

7. The New Presupposition for Alienity If the arguments presented thus far are correct, then the project of a symmetrical anthropology has identified the modern internal great divide of nature/culture as the Archimedean point of the external great divide of West/rest, recognizing this as the doubling of an error. Seen in this light, modern and pre-modern are identical in the sense that they both confuse cause and effect and that they both produce nature-culture hybrids. There is, in other words, no epistemological break here. This might appear at first glance to be the most radical version yet of appropriating the other. At the same time, however, the relative relativism of social-constructivism stands at odds with the methodological elimination of alienity. On the basis of this relative relativism, we can neither issue offers of appropriation nor pronounce prohibitions on othering. Within this framework, we must simply endure the tension between “it is so” and “it could also be different”. If we presume that there is not merely a single scientific truth but multiple scientific truths, then we have to take into account the possibility of multiple realities. In this way, we take alienity into account not as reality but as an irrefutable possibility. We recognize it as a true enigma that no science could ever resolve, an option that we can in principle no longer eliminate. 38

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Contrary to what some might like to suppose, the refutation of an epistemological break between Western science and all other forms of knowledge does not necessitate abandoning the distinction between science and protoscience. On the contrary, while we have determined that this distinction is not an epistemological one, we continue to recognize the significance of the development of science as a separate realm. Modern science has produced its own regime of truth (primarily for socio-political and legal reasons): systematic strategies of falsification, criteria for logical consistency, and therefore better prognostic capacities. However, science is not able to get behind the situational determinateness of all knowledge and will continue to produce hybrid actants, a number of which will regularly escape our control. In contrast, proto-sciences process everyday experiential knowledge unsystematically on a trial and error basis and possess much more powerful immunization strategies against falsification, which in turn diminishes their capacities for selfimprovement and prognosis. At the same time, the hybrid actants they produce are relatively harmless. The first gain provided by our detour through the enunciatory regime of modern science to strangeness in anthropology is that the question of alienity is de-coupled from cultural enigmas. Alienity as the indissolubly enigmatic is shifted into the center of the most effective truth generator we know, the modern sciences. Scholars of science can no longer explain the regime of truth of the modern natural sciences through references to underlying socio-cultural conditions—something that would re-introduce through the backdoor a (particularly weak) foundation with universal claims, just after having demonstrated the impossibility of such a foundation. In this sense, some enigmas remain truly enigmatic. This means not only, for example, that there is no scientific answer to questions about the meaning of life and death. It also means that techno-scientific solutions always give rise to new questions and enigmas, which perhaps become fewer in number but for this all the more acute and momentous. To the extent we are able decipher holes in the ozone layer and greenhouse gases, we are immediately confronted with new and more difficult enigmas, for example, the development of genetically manipulated organisms. The second gain—and for my purposes here the more significant one—is the recovery of the enigma for the discipline of anthropology. Only those who believe they possess a universally valid explanatory schema will regard everything that eludes this schema as irreconcilably strange, reducing it to something misguided and ultimately simply fantastic. However, if we do not raise such claims or if we agree to abandon them, we should have no problem in presuming the possibility of unfathomable strangeness. In this way, we may presume the possibility of an enigma in that which is strange and thereby offer it our recognition.

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References Berger, Peter L./Luckmann, Thomas (1966/1972): The Social Construction of Reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977): Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990): In Other Words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1991): Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bloor, David (1991): Knowledge and Social Imagery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Callon, Michel (1986): “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay”. In: Law, John (ed.): Power, Action and Belief, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 196-233. Callon, Michel/Latour, Bruno (1981): “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so”. In: Knorr-Cetina, Karin/Cicourel, Aaron V. (eds.): Advances in Social Theory and Methodology. Toward an integration of micro- and macrosociology, Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 277-303. Davidson, Donald (1980): Essays on Actions and Event, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davidson, Donald (2001): “Radical Interpretation” (1973). In: Davidson, Donald: Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Foucault, Michel (1971): The Order of Things, New York: Pantheon. Frazer, James George (1890/1994): The Golden Bough. A study in magic and religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1975): Truth and Method, New York: The Seabury Press. Geach, Peter T. (ed.) (1988): Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946-47: Notes by P.T. Geach, K.J. Shah, A.C. Jackson, London: Harvester. Habermas, Jürgen (1994): Postmetaphysical Thinking. Philosophical essays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin (1971): On the Way to Language, New York: Harper & Row. Husserl, Edmund (1936/1970): “Galileo’s Mathematization of Nature”. In: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kaufmann, Matthias (ed.) (2003): Wahn und Wirklichkeit – Multiple Realitäten, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.

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Knorr-Cetina, Karin (1981): The Manufacture of Knowledge: an essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Kramer, Fritz W. (1987/1993): The Red Fez: Art and spirit possession in Africa, London: Verso. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno (1993): We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (1997): Science in Action. How to follow scientists and engineers through society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (2004): Politics of Nature. How to bring the sciences into democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leach, Edmund (1976): Culture and Communication. The logic by which symbols are connected. An introduction to the use of structuralist analysis in social anthropology, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Lévinas, Emmanuel (1986): “The Trace of the Other”. In: Taylor, Mark C. (ed.), Deconstruction in Context, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 345-359. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien (1927/1965): The Soul of the Primitive, London: George Allen & Unwin. Luhmann, Niklas (1977): The Function of Religion, New York: Oxford University Press. Mersch, Dieter (1997): “Vom Anderen reden. Das Paradox der Alterität”. In: Brocker, Manfred/Nau, Heino (eds.), Ethnozentrismus. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des interkulturellen Dialogs, Darmstadt: Primus, 27-45. Putnam, Hilary (1998): Representation and Reality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quine, Willard van Orman (1960): Word and Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rottenburg, Richard (2002): Weit hergeholte Fakten. Eine Parabel der Entwicklungshilfe, Stuttgart: Lucius und Lucius. Schiffauer, Werner (1997): “Die Angst vor der Differenz. Zu neuen Strömungen in der Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie”. In: Schiffauer, Werner, Fremde in der Stadt, Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 157-171. Shimada, Shingo (2000): Die Erfindung Japans. Kulturelle Wechselwirkung und nationale Identitätskonstruktion, Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus. Waldenfels, Bernhard (1998): Der Stachel des Fremden, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922/1988): Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

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Heike Behrend

W ITCHCRAFT , E VIDENCE AND THE L OCALISATION OF THE R OMAN C ATHOLIC C HURCH IN W ESTERN U GANDA 1. Introduction When I came to Tooro in western Uganda in 1998, originally to do a study on the re-establishment of the kingdom,1 I was more than surprised to find people talking about abali wawantu, man-eaters or cannibals. Women and men from all social classes, in towns as well as in rural areas, complained that cannibals were killing and eating their relatives, friends and neighbours. These cannibals were said to be witches, because they first bewitched their victims so that they died. Then, after their burial, cannibals resurrected the dead, not so much to enslave them as zombies (see Ardener 1970) but to eat them, together with other cannibals at a sinister banquet. Thus, these cannibals were part of a radicalised witchcraft discourse. While witches only killed once, cannibals killed twice, doubling and prolongating the horror of death. Cannibals disappeared from Africanist anthropological discourse at the end of the 1970s; they had finally been discovered to be the stereotype of the Other. Europeans had accused Africans of being cannibals and likewise, Africans thought Europeans were man-eaters. Both had done so to construct their radical Other (Arens 1979). In Tooro, however, the cannibal had been resurrected. Cannibals, and to a certain extent also vampires, had become very real, not so much at the margins or outside of Tooro, but in the midst of the kingdom. While in the 1970s, man-eaters were still assumed to live confined in a certain place named Kijura in Mwenge district, since the 1980s people said that they had greatly multiplied and spread into other regions. In 1998, I was told that cannibals were everywhere; in some regions where they had become epidemic, a sort of internal terror (Lonsdale 1992: 355) reigned, a secret war,

1 The Kingdom of Tooro was founded around 1830 as a secession from the Kingdom of Bunyoro. In the 1870s it was integrated into Bunyoro again. It was Captain Lugard who reestablished it in the 1890s to weaken the power of King Kabalega of Bunyoro, who strongly resisted the colonisation of his kingdom. In 1967, in postcolonial times, Obote, the new president of the Republic of Uganda, dissolved all kingdoms. Only in 1993, under Yoweri Museveni were the kingdoms allowed to be reestablished, not as political but as cultural institutions.

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in which everybody could become one’s enemy and try to kill and eat him or her.2 I had not planned to do an ethnographic study on cannibals in Tooro. Yet, as an anthropologist, I had been trained to take up and respect the issues the people I was living with were concerned about. When more and more cannibal stories came up and even my research assistant told me that her little brother had been eaten up by a suspected cannibal, in this case her stepmother, I decided to find out more about the production of cannibals and their local history. I soon learned that a lay movement of the Catholic Church, the Uganda Martyrs Guild (UMG), was trying to deal with this situation of internal terror.3 While in pre-colonial Tooro it had been the duty of the king in times of internal terror to cleanse the country of witches and cannibals, since 1996 members of the UMG had begun to hunt witches and cannibals using the “super-powers” of Christianity. They attempted to put an end to the internal terror by identifying and healing witches and cannibals with the help of the Holy Spirit. While the local government and especially the police, itself an agent of terror, failed completely in dealing with the situation, the Catholic Church started using witch and cannibal hunts as instruments of political action, and as a dramatic discourse of discovery in the public sphere, in which moral order could be negotiated and reconstructed (Comaroff/Comaroff 1999: 293, 309). Hence, while on the one hand the UMG succeeded in finding scapegoats and thus contributed to the cleansing and healing of the country, on the other hand it affirmed and even spread the reality of witches and cannibals, thus reproducing the enemy it was fighting against. In trying to deal with, explain and terminate the crisis, it ended up participating in the very process of producing the crisis—a self-referential chain (Mbembe/Roitman 1995: 325). However, although the UMG did not put an end to the internal terror in Tooro, it nevertheless succeeded in containing the violence. In the following, I will describe the highly complicated processes of localisation of the Catholic Church in Tooro since the beginnings of the 1980s. During this time, the Catholic Church, a global institution, underwent radical changes in Tooro. It entered the public sphere and established a sort of popu2 The emergence of a situation of internal terror has to be seen in a context of economic depression, a guerrilla war by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), the decline of the local government, widespread corruption, struggles about land and the dramatic increase in the death rate due to AIDS. I have dealt in detail with the discussion of internal terror in Tooro in two articles, one article has already been published in German (Behrend 2004). Another article on the same subject in English is in press (Behrend 2005). 3 My ethnographic and historical research was kindly sponsored by the VWFoundation. I am grateful for their generous financial assistance. This article is a work in progress, part of a longer text that might hopefully become a book. I would also like to thank Richard Rottenburg for his critical remarks that helped me to substantially strengthen my arguments and Ron Kassimir, whose essential work on the Catholic Church in Tooro up to the end of the 1980s has strongly shaped this article.

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lar Catholicism that began, in radical opposition to “pagan” or “traditional” religious experts as well as to the local government, to invent a new Christian technique of truth production so as to detect evil. I will concentrate on the emergence of this new regime of truth production and try to sort out the complex processes of making and unmaking of difference, of inclusion and exclusion and of appropriation and rejection that led to its more or less successful establishment. I will analyse, above all, the opposition between two discursive regimes of knowledge and power—on the one hand, of the Catholic Church (i.e. the UMG), and, on the other hand, of the local government. Each of these regimes developed its specific practices of evidence production. While the “rational” government asked for material evidence to prove the existence of witches and cannibals, and so per definitionem could not handle the situation of internal terror, the UMG made use of “magic” techniques of the embodiment by the Holy Spirit to detect evil and thereby succeeded in reducing local people’s feelings of insecurity and vulnerability while at the same time stigmatising a few men and women as witches and cannibals. In a further step I will resolve the simple opposition between the “rational” regime of the local government and the “magic” of the UMG by interpreting both within the context of Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment (1969). As these philosophers of the Frankfurt School have shown, every act of enlightenment entails some concealment, some magic, while magical practices have their own aspects of demystification, of enlightenment. If we take magic to be a discursive product, a discursive rest that is produced by its other, rationality, then practices of exposure and scepticism are built into rites of magic while concealment and mystification always form a part of enlightenment (Taussig 2003).

2. The Catholic Church in Tooro In the last two decades Christianity—in the wider context of a “return of the religious” on a global scale (de Vries 2001: 3)—has come to find widespread acceptance, not only in many regions of Africa, but also, in particular, in Tooro in western Uganda. Yet, Christianity not only spread, it also underwent radical transformations. These have to be seen in the context of a more global development, the development of Christian “fundamentalism”4 that started as

4 In recent studies the indescriminate use of the term “fundamentalism” has been contested. It has been criticised that, first, the term is inescapably rooted in a specific Protestant experience, and second that the very term evokes the illusory restoration of a pure, unsullied and authentic form of religion cleansed of historical contingencies. Instead, rather than returning religion to its supposedly original form, “fundamentalism” is a respond to globalisation, the power of the market and new media (de Vries 2001:5f).

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early as the 1960s5 with a Pentecostalist turn in the Protestant and later a charismatic renewal in the Catholic Church. Beginning in the USA, the charismatic movement spread to Uganda and to Tooro, where it became localised and connected to already existing religious practices. In addition, the last two decades have produced a wide range of popular expressions with strong lay Catholic and sometimes clerical participation (Kassimir 1999: 249ff). Although the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council 1962-65 has favoured a theology of “inculturation” so as to encourage the Africanisation of the Church, the implementation of this new religious policy from the top down in Tooro up to the 1980s largely failed. Up to this time, the most pressing spiritual interests of many Catholics—healing and the protection from witchcraft—were not being realised (ibid.). While the Anglican as well as the Catholic Church had more or less a monopoly in Uganda until 1986, since the coming to power of Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement (NRM) this monopoly was shaken by various movements within as well as outside the established churches, sometimes inspired and financed by American fundamentalist Christian groups. The most dramatic was the Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena, a young woman in northern Uganda who in 1986, after converting to the Catholic Church, built up an army and started to fight the government of Yoweri Museveni (Behrend 1999). In addition, since 1986 there has been in various parts of Uganda a surge in Christian healing cults led, above all, by women and in apparitions of the Virgin Mary connected with miracle cures for AIDS and other diseases (Behrend 1997).

3. Charismatic Revival and the Satanization of Tradition In Tooro, the Catholic charismatic revival movement took on a new thrust in 1981 when a Holy Cross sister and brother from the USA came to Fort Portal and founded the first charismatic prayer group. In it, believers started to experience the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, deliverance from evil spirits and inner as well as physical healing. Against “the dead letters of the Bible”, they increasingly took recourse to practices that enabled them to feel and embody the power of God and, in particular, the Holy Spirit, and so to empower themselves. While the charismatic movement in Tooro attracted, above all, more well-educated people and younger clergymen, various lay organisations of the Catholic Church—the Legion Mary and the Uganda Martyrs Guild—absorbed poor people, mainly women, who in the above mentioned situation of internal terror were the ones who suffered most. While on the one hand the boundaries between Charismatic Catholicism and Pentecostal Protestantism in terms of their emphasis on healing and spiri5 It is possible, of course, to trace various “waves” of renewal back at least to the nineteenth century (and further).

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tual experience were of little importance (at least for the lay people), on the other hand, a radicalised structure of rejection was established vis-à-vis local tradition and, in particular, “traditional religion.” While the Christian God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and saints were perceived as unequivocal good, everything perceived as “traditional” was reformulated as “pagan”, “evil” or “satanic”. The shrines of the ancestors and the local spirit possession cults that in pre-colonial times were used for healing various afflictions were now defined as “satanic”, rejected and sometimes even destroyed, and “pagan” spirit mediums and “witch-doctors” were persecuted. Thus, an extreme dualism that the early missionaries in the nineteenth century had established was appropriated and activated by radical African Christians.

4. The Catholic Church and Witchcraft In 1894, at a time of war, hunger and epidemic, the king of Tooro asked the Anglican Church Council to send him missionaries to teach his people in the new religion. A year later the king was baptised and more or less forced his subjects to do the same, i.e. to convert to the Anglican Church. It is important to note that the king after his conversion started a rather violent witch hunt to cleanse his country, targeting, above all, those “pagan” subjects—healers, diviners and spirit mediums—who refused to convert. Thus, a rather violent persecution of “pagans” took place that in many aspects anticipated aspects of the “crusades” of the Catholic Church in the 1990s. When in 1896 the first Catholic missionary arrived, the king as well as numerous chiefs and their followers had already adopted the new (Anglican) religion. Thus, while the political elite converted to Protestantism, Catholicism became the religion of the poor and marginalised. During colonial times, many Catholics considered themselves discriminated against by an Anglican oligarchy and the British colonial administration that supported it (Kassimir 1991: 376). Yet in spite of the unfortunate circumstances at the beginning of the missionary endeavour, Catholics multiplied and by 1931, the numbers of Roman Catholic for the whole protectorate had overtaken those of the Protestants; by 1942 the gap had widened considerably. However, in the 1980s the Catholic Church started to lose more and more of its members to independent churches specialised on healing and the fight against witchcraft. While during colonial and postcolonial times, the established Christian churches together with the colonial and postcolonial state had attempted to deny the existence of witchcraft and strongly opposed the fight against witches, in Tooro, in a context of increasing competition between the established and the independent churches, the Catholic Church finally allowed the hunt of witches and cannibals in the 1990s. Whereas the colonial state as well as the early Christian missionaries in their reluctance to fight witchcraft and witches were suspected by local people to protect the evil forces and to be themselves witches and cannibals, the Catholic Church in Tooro now made 47

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use of the political potential of anti-witchcraft practices (see Green 2003: 140). Following the Inquisition and witch hunts in the fifteenth to the seventeenth century in Europe, the enlightened Catholic Church, after having resisted for a long time to take recourse to such practices in Africa, did not object when in the 1990s a lay movement of the Catholic Church, the mentioned Uganda Martyrs Guild, took up the practice of witch hunts, now called “crusades”. By doing so, the Catholic Church entered the political arena, challenging the notion that secular society, the modern nation state or the local kingdom can provide the moral fibre that unites national communities (Juergensmeyer 2000: 225). Like believers in fundamentalist Islam, Charismatic Catholics opposed the view that religion should be a matter of private interest and instead reclaimed the centre of public attention and authority. Their appearance as a discourse of social order took place in a dramatic fashion, i.e. violently (ibid.: 243). Through the witch hunts, the church appropriated an important aspect of pre-colonial and early colonial political responsibility: the king’s duty to cleanse the country of evil. Indeed, by means of its fight against evil in the public arena, the Catholic Church succeeded in regaining power and “souls” lost in the struggle with other established and independent churches. Furthermore, through the UMG’s witch hunts, the Catholic Church acknowledged the reality of witches and thereby transcended the divide the Church and the colonial state had created between those Africans believing in magic and witchcraft and those Westerners who do not while continuing to discriminate and exclude “pagans”. The opposition collapsed, in spite of colonial power and “rational” Christian missionaries flexing enlightenment muscle against primitive witchcraft, staging their own rites of scientific methods (Taussig 2003) and thereby producing the divide between those primitives believing in witchcraft and magic and those civilised who do not. Obviously, the gestures of the unmasking of the colonial state and missionaries to prove the nonexistence of witchcraft and magic themselves entailed the mix of faith and scepticism necessary to magic (ibid.; see Behrend 2003b).

5. The Uganda Martyrs Guild In Buganda, a kingdom in central Uganda, a number of young Catholics, Protestants und Muslims6, most of whom were working as pages at the royal court of King Mwanga were killed, beheaded, speared, hacked into pieces and burned in 1885 and 1886. The reasons for the persecutions of Christians and Moslems in Buganda are still much debated (Kassimir 1991). Since this time, the Catholic Church, in particular, has attempted to place the Catholic victims 6 Under King Mutesa, Mwanga’s father, some “pagans” became martyrs, as I was told, because they refused to convert to Islam, the religion the King favoured for some time.

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at the centre of a cult of martyrs,7 interpreting them as the followers or sons of older African martyrs such as Perpetua, Felicity and Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage. The Uganda Martyrs Guild was already founded in 1897 by Archbishop Henry Streicher, who trained people to help in the evangelisation process. In 1920, the Uganda Martyrs were beatified and in October 1964 canonised. The UMG evolved into an organisation for Catholic Action, which continued to have chapters in most districts and dioceses. Some of these chapters became strongly politicised and had varying degrees of influence on local branches of the Democratic Party that was formed (as the party of the Catholics) in the 1950s (Kassimir 1991: 378). Although an impressive shrine was built in Namugongo to remember the martyrs and to establish a cult centre, the Catholic Church was not very successful in this endeavour. This shrine as well as the one in Nakivubu and Katoosa only began to gain importance with the emergence of a new form of popular Catholicism at the end of the 1980s. Pilgrimages to these places began to take place regularly and occur today on a mass scale.

6. “Crusades” Under the guidance of an American priest from Texas and the president of the UMG, a former boxer, the UMG at the beginning of the 1990s started, as mentioned, to organise witch and cannibal hunts. These hunts were called “crusades” or “holy wars” and were directed against “pagans” as well as women and men from other Christian denominations,8 some of whom were identified as witches and cannibals. Thus, the UMG appropriated a discourse that connected religion and violence and transformed a war into a “holy war”. Like everywhere else in the world where these concepts are used, they also idealised violence in Tooro, declared war a just war and legitimised the stigmatisation of certain people. The first crusades were extremely violent. I was told that in Kabende an elderly Protestant lady was identified as a notorious cannibal. Yet, when she was caught by some members of the UMG, she turned into a black cat. The cat was beaten, and when they set it afire, the animal changed into the woman again, who was seriously injured and had to be brought into a hospital. She sued three members of the UMG—among them its president—and they were punished and imprisoned. Because more people complained, the Catholic Church forbade further crusades after this incident. For two years, members of the UMG were taught in workshops not only about the Bible but also, and 7 Ron Kassimir has shown in a brilliant article (1991) how the execution of Christian Baganda came to be represented and well known as the martyrdom of Catholic Ugandans. 8 One crusade I was allowed to participate in in August 2002 in Kyamiaga in Buhesi-subcounty was obviously an attempt by the UMG to regain “lost souls” from the Seventh-Day Adventists.

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above all, how to carry out non-violent witch and cannibal hunts. After these instructions, Guild members were allowed to continue crusades, which now followed a rather fixed pattern. Before the UMG initiated an “operation” or “crusade”, they announced their plans in monthly papers and on the radio. They sent letters to the local Council and to the police, and sometimes, when they feared fierce resistance, they asked the police to protect them. The day before the operation they fasted; the night was spent in church singing and praying until their bodies were filled with the Holy Spirit. In addition, the “weapons” to fight the enemy—bible, plastic bottles filled with holy water, rosaries and crucifixes— were “loaded” with the Holy Spirit so as to empower them and transform them into efficient instruments to fight evil. In the early morning they took off in lorries. As the president of the UMG explained to me, they had to be very careful because witches would set up traps to fight the UMG. After their arrival in the targeted villages, they walked from house to house, an “operation”, which was called “carpet bombing”. In their terminology they used the vocabulary of modern warfare. They moved in groups of twelve to twenty people, every group having a secretary who recorded what was said and done. When they reached a “satanic” house or an “evil” place, the Holy Spirit used their bodies as an indicator for the presence of evil. Then some especially gifted members of the UMG, often children, fell violently to the ground, trembling and shaking intensely until the evil person or thing had been detected. When all the satanic things had been collected—such as the pots of cannibals, pieces of cloth belonging to people who had died and been eaten, horns (mahembe) and all sorts of medicine—they were displayed outside so as to be seen by everybody and photographed, the photographs providing the proof of the veracity of the event. The pictures were circulated and put into albums that were shown to visitors as a sort of trophy or memoir of the UMG’s power and success. In addition, politicians were called to witness the event. To heal the identified cannibals and witches, besides praying and the laying hands on their heads, they were also made to vomit—to reverse the process of incorporation that had produced their greediness for human flesh. Part of the healing process was the witch’s or cannibal’s confession, in which the accused had to narrate in detail when, how and whom he/she had eaten. In addition, if a cannibal was identified they had to give the names of the cannibals he or she had been working with. Like during the Inquisition in Europe, in Tooro whole networks of people were exposed and then put under pressure to confess their satanic deeds. The confessions produced more detailed knowledge about witches and cannibals, leading to a further proliferation and differentiation of the cannibal discourse and gave additional proof to the reality of occult forces. When I visited the areas that had been the targets of the UMG’s first crusades, people told me that they had not realised how many cannibals were living in their villages before the UMG came and revealed evidence of the pres50

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ence of evil. To end a crusade, members of UMG offered night sessions of preaching and prayer, they gave answers to questions from the local population and the Catholic parish priest served the Holy Communion. Thus, in Tooro, more or less violent witch hunts provided a sense of security and empowerment to desperate communities and marginalised people while at the same time stigmatising and excluding a few women and men as scapegoats. At the same time, the new technique of dealing with evil that the UMG used encompassed the healing of the identified witches and cannibals, thereby reversing their exclusion and giving them the chance to be reintegrated into village life.

7. Discovering Witches and Cannibals The UMG made use of a new hybrid technique of revelation that mixed Christian techniques of ecstasy with local practices of spirit possession. As mentioned, those gifted with discernment—often children—when approaching a satanic object, a cooking pot of a cannibal or the medicines of a witch, started trembling violently or gently, falling to the ground, scratching the earth or crawling on their knees until the things hidden in the roof or in the bush had been found. Their bodies functioned as indicators of a satanic presence through the Holy Spirit. If the presence of evil was strong, their reaction was violent; if the presence of evil was weak, their reaction was more gently, just a little trembling of hands and arms. The Guild members’ bodies could be afflicted by the presence of satanic forces to such an extent that they themselves became sick and had to be healed by prayers and laying on of hands. They were vulnerable, yet, in the end, the Holy Spirit always triumphed. It had a hegemonic position, was the highest power and guaranteed absolute truth. While in the context of local (“pagan”) embandwa spirit possession, the truth the spirits mediated was only a relative truth that could always be contested by other spirits, in the social dramas that the UMG members performed and embodied, the Holy Spirit’s truth was seen as absolute. It had the position of a “super-power” that could not be contested. When I asked the mentioned American priest and others how they could discern the powers of the Holy Spirit from the powers of Satan, they answered that the Holy Spirit acted gently while Satan’s power caused violent reactions. In addition, to be filled with the Holy Spirit meant to be filled with joy, while to be invaded by the powers of Satan was suffering and pain. Furthermore, sometimes, the good or evil powers would introduce themselves and give their names and then the identification was seen to be rather easy. Yet, even then, one had to be careful, because “Satan knows many tricks!”, as a former “witch-doctor” who had repented explained to me. Thus, a rather simple, dualistic classification of good and evil “characteristics” had evolved that was used to identify the specific powers at work. 51

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Photo 1: Healing session of the UMG; September 2002

photograph by Heike Behrend

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Photo 2: A woman, member of the UMG, “filled” with the Holy Spirit; September 2002

photograph by Heike Behrend

Photo 3: Guildmembers pray over a sick young woman; September 2002

photograph by Heike Behrend

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8. Holy Spirit and “pagan” Spirits As the incomparable power of the Christian God and the Holy Spirit do not allow representation, the forms in which the Holy Spirit could embody itself were rather limited. While in the local “pagan” spirit possession cults, each spirit has its own personality and was characterised by its specific speech, voice, gesture, clothing, paraphernalia, music and scent (Beattie 1957; 1961), the Holy Spirit cannot be represented as a social person. Thus, it was, above all, its presence that had to be communicated by means of a soft trembling of the body and speaking in tongues. Yet there was another important difference that characterised possession by the Holy Spirit in contrast to possession by satanic spirits. While spirit possession by “pagan” spirits caused the spirit medium to completely lose its own consciousness so that after possession, the medium cannot remember what it did or said as the spirit (Beattie 1964: 132) and thus needs a person, who informs him or her about what happened during spirit possession, possession by the Holy Spirit, as it was performed by UMG members, is only partial and allows the possessed person to know what is happening. Whereas the presence of the “satanic” spirit is total and effaces the consciousness of the medium completely, the Holy Spirit allows a sort of co-existence of its own and its medium’s consciousness. When talking to some members of the UMG, they explained to me that they were only half “taken” by the Holy Spirit and thus knew what was going on. While in local (“pagan”) spirit possession there is a radical break between the person of the spirit and the one of the medium, possession by the Holy Spirit allowed, by contrast, a reflexiveness as well as a partial self-assuring that favoured the continuity of the Christian person. Thus, the Holy Spirit in this way certainly favoured the construction of a self-reliable person, yet in an ambiguous way, because the so constructed person was still open to the invasion of powers from the outside (Behrend 2003a: 95ff). While, on the one hand, members of the UMG took great care to differentiate themselves from pagan spirit possession cults, they, on the other hand, “spiritualised” the Uganda martyrs. Like pagan spirit mediums, members of the UMG chose or were chosen by one of the 22 martyrs, who became their personal patron, interceded for them and assisted in times of trouble. Like the pagan embandwa spirits, a personal, life-long relationship of mutual dependence and assistance was established between members of the UMG and their chosen martyrs. In addition, like embandwa spirits, the martyrs have become associated with certain professions and aspects of life that they are specialising in. Furthermore, a few members told me that their martyr sometimes took possession of them, filling their body. However, many other members denied this, realising that they were on dangerous ground, potentially appropriating what they were actually fighting against. Thus, the relationship between UMG members and their martyrs was partially modelled on the relation between medium and spirit in “pagan” embandwa cults. 54

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9. Catharsis and Healing In embandwa spirit possession, unknown spirits that took possession of a person were identified and sometimes also exorcised, but more often accommodated in the sense that an initiation into the spirit’s cult took place and so a life-long relationship between the spirit and its medium was established. Healing in the Guild instead meant exorcism. Satanic spirits were allowed to perform for a while, tell their story so that the Guild members could understand the hidden conflicts and the aetiology of the patient’s affliction. Yet, their presence was always followed by an exorcism that gave proof of the Holy Spirit’s superior power. Successful healing meant their final expulsion. From the Guild members’ perspective, the presence of a satanic spirit in the patient’s body was seen as a temporary invasion, as a temporary crisis that was suspended so as to re-establish the lost unity and continuity of the Christian person. While “pagan” healers when healing afflictions brought by witches would cut the body where the pain was located so as to release blood as well as the poisoning substances, in the UMG the surface of the body was left intact. Spirits and satanic substances had to leave the body through its orifices. Victims of satanic spirits vomited under the pressure of prayers and spraying of holy water, thereby getting rid of evil. In addition, the blood sacrifices of animals that pagan spirits often demanded were also abolished in the Christian context. It was Christ who had sacrificed himself and through this act ended blood sacrifices.

10. Cannibals and Cannibal Hunters Cannibals and witches were seen as only indirectly responsible for their evil deeds because the forces of Satan made them do what they did. And this is why they were given the chance to be healed. Ex-cannibals after having confessed and being cleansed went back into their villages. People would accept their being healed, although, I was told, a certain suspicion remained. Whenever misfortune befell a person or somebody became sick or died, it was, first of all, the (ex-)cannibal who was suspected. In this ambiguous position, many people who felt (potentially) hunted decided to join the hunters, the UMG. I was told by the UMG’s president that the Guild in 2002 had about 10.000 members while in the 1980s it were less than a hundred. In addition, he told me that to date, no active member of the Guild had been accused of being a cannibal or a witch by Guild members. Thus, it is not by chance that the UMG became the fastest growing lay organisation of the Catholic Church in Tooro. Yet, interestingly, there was one man who strongly resisted joining the UMG. He openly declared himself a cannibal; boasted with his deeds and revealed whom he had eaten. He, I was told, had hired a room opposite the po55

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lice station in a little place at the border to Bunyoro. He prided himself in having eaten the chief’s son who had died recently. Nobody dared to touch him, neither the chief, nor the police, nor the UMG. Everybody feared him too much.

11. Local Government and Witches As mentioned before, the new regime of evidence production the UMG established was not uncontested. Another regime, established by the British during colonial times, and adopted by the local postcolonial government countered the religious techniques of the UMG. This regime, claiming rationality for itself during colonial times, tended to deny the existence of witchcraft and therefore did not care to develop effective procedures to deal with it. Within this backround for officials of the postcolonial local government and the police, at least officially, the evidence the UMG produced with the help of the Holy Spirit could not be accepted. When frightened and angry villagers brought suspected cannibals to the police station, the police asked for “material” evidence that the villagers were not able to produce. Instead, rather often, police officers, fearing the rage of the villagers, took the suspect and sent him or her to the district capital to be interrogated there. And, of course, the suspect sooner or later was sent home from the capital because nothing could be proven. Back in the village, however, it happened that the suspect was killed9 by enraged and frightened people who—because nothing had been done to protect them—suspected the government and the police of being corrupt or even accomplices of witches and cannibals and therefore decided to take “justice” into their hands. Obviously, the local government was not able to deal with witches and cannibals; neither to protect villagers, who felt threatened, nor their adversaries, suspected witches and cannibals, who fled into police custody to be guarded from the people’s mob justice. While in other parts of Africa, for example in Cameroon (Geschiere 1994), the postcolonial state started (in a rather problematic way) to cooperate with religious experts, diviners and “traditional healers” in dealing with witchcraft, in Tooro “witch-doctors” and “traditional healers” were neither used in jurisdiction nor as agents of witch cleansing by the local government. Although the postcolonial state in Uganda has also become the “guardian of African traditions”, neither the king of Tooro nor the local government in Tooro took effective measures, and so, in a way, contributed substantially to the situation of uncertainty and fear. Indeed, there existed two oppositional discursive regimes of knowledge and power, the “rational” one of the state and the religious of the Church with little overlapping. Each of these regimes developed its own specific practices 9 I was told by a police officer that, for example, in Kijura, from January to August 2002 about five people had been lynched by enraged villagers.

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of evidence production. Although in opposition to one another, they both depended upon the other in that one side needed the other to articulate itself. And while the “rational” government per definitionem could not handle the problems related to witchcraft, the UMG succeeded, at least from the point of view of most local people I had the chance to talk to, in cleansing the country from evil.

12. Dialectic of Enlightenment Whereas the local government at least attempted to work within a regime of rationality and visibility and therefore insisted on the production of material evidence to fight witchcraft, it likewise obscured the fact that in relation to witchcraft, causality is to be discerned primarily in the spiritual realm. Thus the government’s procedure by the same act of claiming rationality for itself produced a new form of magic, the magic of material evidence. While the local government rejected the UMG’s procedures for detecting evil because they were not “rational”, local people, in contrast, regarded the UMG’s techniques of evidence production as a form of enlightenment, as revelations that allowed women and men to gain deeper insights into a normally secret, hidden world, into the machinations of evil powers. The Holy Spirit not only identified evil agents, but through testimonies and confessions people also acquired additional knowledge about the workings of witches and cannibals. In addition, part of the UMG’s enlightenment programme during crusades included, for example, the regular appearance of a gentleman nicknamed Dr. Bimji, a former “traditional” healer, diviner and embandwa spirit medium who had repented and joined the UMG and who then, in a public performance, disclosed the “tricks” and “betrayals” of “satanic” witch-doctors, his former colleagues. Like Christian missionaries before, he revealed the trickery and fraudulency of pagan, primitive magic. And by exposing other witchdoctors as fakes, he gave evidence that he possessed a secret more powerful than theirs. Indeed, he told me that he was aware of the attacks of his former colleagues who where trying to kill him for exposing their secrets. Especially at night, he stayed kneeling in front of the altar in his house, praying to God to help him fight his enemies. When his daughter died and his bicycle was stolen, he reinforced his attempts to generate power by adding ascetic practices and so to win over his adversaries. As Michael Taussig (2003) has shown, faith and scepticism coexist, may even require each other as the basis of magical efficacy. The success of performances like those of Dr. Bimji obviously lay not so much in concealing but in revealing trickery, in the skilled revelation of skilled concealment (ibid.). Yet, by unmasking the tricks and fraudulency of his former colleagues, he, at the same time, masked the maskings of the UMG, their tech-

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niques of trickery, revelation, miracles and show effects, which often strongly resembled those of their opponents.

References Ardener, Edwin (1970): “Witchcraft, Economics, and the Continuity of Belief”. In: Douglas, Mary (ed.), Witchcraft, Confessions and Accusations, London: Tavistock Publication. Adorno, Theodor/Horkheimer, Max (1969): Dialektik der Aufklärung, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. Arens, William (1979): The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropopaghy, New York: Oxford University Press. Beattie, John (1957): “Initiation into the Cwezi Spirit Possession Cult in Bunyoro”. In: African Studies 16/3, 150-161. Beattie, John (1961): “Group Aspects of the Nyoro Spirit Mediumship Cult”. In: Rodes-Livingston Journal 30, 9-38. Beattie, John (1964): “The Ghost Cult in Bunyoro”. In: Ethnology 3, 127151. Behrend, Heike (1997): “Das Wunder von Sembabule. Die kurze Geschichte eines Anti-AIDS-Kultes in Uganda”. In: Anthropos 92, 175-183. Behrend, Heike (1999): Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. War in Northern Uganda, Oxford: James Currey Publishers. Behrend, Heike (2003a): “Geisterstimmen in Afrika: Die Stimme als Medium der Fremdpräsenz”. In: Epping-Jäger, Cornelia/Linz, Erika (eds.), Medien/ Stimmen, Köln: Dumont, 85-99. Behrend, Heike (2003b): “Photo-Magic. Photographies in Practices of Healing and Harming in Kenya and Uganda”. In: Journal of Religion in Africa, special issue on Media and Religion in Africa 33/2, 129-145. Behrend, Heike (2004): “‘Satan gekreuzigt’. Interner Terror und Katharsis in Tooro, Westuganda”. In: Kramer, Fritz/Lüdtke, Alf (eds.), Historische Anthropologie 12/2, 211-227. Behrend, Heike (2005): “Catholics and Cannibals: Terror and Healing in Tooro, Western Uganda”. In: Bollig, Michael/Rao, Aparna/Boeck, Monika (eds.), The Practice of War (in print). Comaroff, Jean/Comaroff, John (1999): “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony”. In: American Ethnologist 26/2, 279-303. Geschiere, Peter (1994): “The Dark Side of Modern Kinship. Domesticating Personal Violence: Witchcraft, Courts and Confessions in Cameroon”. In: Africa 64/3, 323-341. Green, Maia (2003): Priests, Witches and Power. Popular Christianity after Mission in Tanzania, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Juergensmeyer, Mark (2000): Terror in the Mind of God. The Global Rise of Religious Violence, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kassimir, Ron (1991): “Complex Martyrs: Symbols of Catholic Church Formation and Political Differentiation in Uganda”. In: African Affairs 90, 357-382. Kassimir, Ron (1999): “The Politics of Popular Catholicism in Uganda”. In: Spear, Thomas/Kimambo, Isaria N. (eds.), East African expressions of Christianity, Oxford, 249-274. Lonsdale, John (1992): “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau”. In: Berman, Bruce/Lonsdale, John (eds.), Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya and Africa, London: James Currey Publishers. Mbembe, Achille/Roitman, Janet (1995): “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis”. In: Public Culture 7, 323-352. de Vries, Hent (2001): “In Medias Res. Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies”. In: de Vries, Hent/Weber, Samuel (eds.), Religion and Media, Stanford: Standford University Press, 3-42. Taussig, Michael (2003): “Viscerality, Faith and Scepticism. Another Theory of Magic”. In: Meyer, Birgit/Pels, Peter (eds.), Magic and Modernity, Stanford: Standford University Press, 272-306.

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C RITICAL N OTE . I S A FRICAN P HILOSOPHY D IFFERENT ? In this paper I will apply the notion of the making and unmaking of differences to discussions on the existence of an African philosophy which is—as I want to show—an identity discourse. My proposal is that Africans should look in other directions for the emergence of genuine African philosophy since the cultural elements exhibited to be the basis of African identity are neither specifically African nor are they the self-images of the Africans themselves; rather, they are the images produced by European discourses. I. It is a mere truism to contend that the African intellectual history centers on a search and struggle for an African identity. This search characterizes a huge number of contributions, from art to literature, from the efforts to promote independent African states and authentic African cultures to the question of existence of an African philosophy. It is not our task here to answer the question whether there is an African philosophy or not, but to ask how the problem of an African identity historically came into existence. What are the components of the African identity? Why is this understanding of African identity so prominent in philosophy in Africa? Despite the importance some African cultures and kingdoms might have had in African pre-colonial history in general, Africa was born as a result of slavery and colonialism. Before these two events one cannot speak of Africa. This does not mean that Africans hadn’t seen daylight before Europeans arrived on the continent. Neither does it mean that Africans did not have cultures. It only means that Africans became aware of their common fate under colonial rule and in the face of Europe. This awareness first took the form of black consciousness, the very starting point of what I called elsewhere the Pan-African idea (Sosoe 1989; 1999). The consciousness of belonging to the same race, of being blacks wherever they come from, constituted the bounds that brought people of African origin together in the vast Pan-African movement (Dubois 1919). Its radical wing amounts to what has been termed in the literature “Black Zionism” (Essien-Udom 1962). Although any attempt to define the Pan-African movement will inevitably face many difficulties, it is at least possible to find common denominators. (1) By the Pan-African idea one means all the intellectual and political movements gathering Africans and Afro-Americans, including Car61

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ibbeans acknowledging the same common African origin and recognizing their blackness as something which matters. (2) Pan-Africanism designates further that cluster of ideas aiming at the unity, cultural independence and modernization of black Africa demanding the end of white or European supremacy. (3) Last but not least, Pan-Africanism refers to all the movements militating for the building of a strong political community for all Africans in the whole world. Conceived in this way, Pan-Africanism necessarily gave rise to a lot of problems of which the geographical extension was the major one. From the African continent to Europe and to America, far beyond the borders of the continent of origin, Pan-Africanism could only be based on the color of the black skin and on the will of the peoples of and from Africa to take their fate in their own hands. Their social and political differences were hidden by this fact. In this sense Pan-Africanism was a pan-negro movement of liberation. The characterization given here pertains more to the movement led by Crummel, Blyden, Dubois, Padmore and to English speaking African leaders than to the French speaking intellectuals like Cesaire, Gontran-Damas and Senghor, the founders and leaders of the Negritude movement. However, even in the Negritude movement we have the same ethno-racial and liberation components. II. Saying that African philosophy is an identity discourse means that the contributions classified under this label are mainly concerned with problems of identity in Africa and hence with claims of difference. Whether we understand this as “the claim for humanity” of the African as Eboussi Boulaga has expressed it explicitly (Boulaga 1977; see also Towa 1979), or as the claim that Africans have their own and different kind of rationality (Lalèyê 1975; Nkrumah 1964: 1-4), African philosophers are mostly concerned with philosophizing on the meaning of their job. One can say that it belongs to philosophy to formulate problems and look for rational answers. But till today, most African philosophers are not primarily looking for rational answers in general. From Tempels (1959) to Okolo and to all the so called ethnophilosophers and even those who have tried to criticize ethnophilosophy like Hountondji and Wiredu (1980) the object of philosophical debates is on African identity. This object is shared by theologians and scholars of other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (see Metogo 1985; Bimwenyi-Kwesi 1981). We do not mean that all philosophical debates in Africa have to be identified with ethnophilosophy. Many authors even try to argue against the current. But they do not or cannot escape the object of the debate which is a quest for identity and for a specific African rationality as the following plea shows: “Notre voeu le plus ardent est l’avènement d’une nouvelle generation de philosophes sachant interroger de l’intérieur des disciplines ethnologiques. La pensée africaine qui est une pensée savante recèle une philosophie de l’univers et une concep-

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For N’daw, thus, African philosophy is different in kind. This is the key point I want to object to. I do not see why philosophy in Africa should be based on ethnography and should be looking back into the Negro past to invent philosophy and rediscover a lost identity. As Appiah crudely puts it; “I have never seen any particular point requiring European and American philosophers—qua philosophers—to study the pre-Socratic: their work is a mixture of early “science”, poetry, and myth, and if it is important for modern philosophy at all it is important because it creates the world of texts in which Plato began—or should we say—took the first faltering steps toward the business of systematically reflecting on and arguing about the concepts of folk philosophy, and partly because it has been the subject of sustained attention from philosophers in the Western tradition. […] No analogous argument exists for the study of ancient Egyptian thought in contemporary Africa: there is no founding texts, there is no direct or continuous tradition” (Appiah 1992: 101-102).

Another problem lies in the fact that one speaks about African philosophy in general as if all Africans have the same unanimous ideas and these ethnoracial and metaphysical (non empirical) ideas seem to be identical with ethnographic accounts. Yet, one is allowed to ask: Do Africans have a specific type of rationality? Can anthropology reveal a specific kind of rationality underlying African traditional philosophy which has not been found in other cultures or in the history of other cultures? Since the contention that Africans have a specific type of rationality presupposes that Africans distinguish themselves from non-Africans, who then are the others in reference to whom Africans claim their difference? Even if the claim of an African identity supposes many other identities or cultures, the culture which Africans want to distinguish their culture from is undoubtedly the Western culture and its categories. The claim to a specific African rationality functions as the answer to European hegemony. It is the Western hegemony which constitutes the source of African consciousness and the project of African philosophy. Africans have felt the necessity to undertake a philosophical discourse in order to affirm their otherness. That is why the hypothetical unity of African thought claimed in African philosophy asserts itself in the face of the hypothetical unity of Western culture. The supposed homogeneity of the first called for—and is conditioned by—the supposed homogeneity of the second. But as soon as one reflects on what is considered here as Western rationality as opposed to African rationality, one will discover many types of rationalities in the Western culture. What is taken as Western rationality is the modern scientific and technical rationality. In other words, in the Western culture the scientific and technical culture is only one type, coexisting with other types of rationalities. Certainly, it is the dominant 63

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one, which colonizes the life-world (Lebenswelt) as Habermas would say, nevertheless it may not be taken as the sole type of rationality. Ethnophilosophy contends that African philosophy is to be found in tales, myths, proverbs, divination practices, witchcraft, songs, the relations of man to nature, discourses about life and death, the belief in gods or God, and so on. Needless to say, these elements are also found in the Western world in which they constitute part of human life. From literature to jurisprudence and anthropology we will find a lot of examples (Scarre 1987; Ginzburg 1983; Larner 1983, 1984) nobody will call Western philosophy or typical Western thought or the constitutive elements of Western identity. Before interpreting these same elements as the founding elements of African philosophy, ethnophilosophy has to deny that we find them, in other cultures or in their history, as the African philosopher Elungu (1987) did. If we are right, than African thought opposes an hypothetical African rationality to a particular type of Western rationality, to technical and scientific discourse and does not take into account that in Western cultures there are other types of discourse which should not be identified with it. African philosophy operates on the reduction of Western culture to one specific type of rationality. Instead, one would have to compare ethnographies of Western practices and cosmologies with African ones. One would have to compare European collective representations with African collective representations. And before speaking of difference one would have to look back into the cultural history of Europe to see if European history does not display a full range of elements which are common. What ethnophilosophy takes to be specific to Africa can be found in Western history. Hence, the claimed identity is a false consciousness of oneself. It asserts a specific identity on the basis of universal elements. On this basis, the making of the African identity is doomed to fail. (Appiah 1992). But there is still another sense in which the making of African identity by ethnophilosophy is unacceptable. As we have said before, the claim of a specific African philosophy is grounded in African cosmologies which in turn are based on ethnographic descriptions. Most of these ethnographies are produced not by African but by European scholars. What is mirrored by these ethnographies is the way Europeans have seen Africans or mirrored themselves in African cultures. In this sense ethnophilosophy—which purports to define the authentic identity of the African—reproduces a foreign image to describe oneself. Summarizing, one could say that ethnophilosophy avoids answering three fundamental questions. (1) Are there, in Western culture, other types of rationality coexisting with scientific and technical rationality similar to what ethnophilosophy believes to be a specific African rationality or philosophy? (2) Is what ethnophilosophy considers as Western rationality ontologically so radically different from that which is called African rationality such that we cannot find traces of it in Western culture? (3) Is the cultural difference mentioned by ethnophilosophy something other than a mere stage in the evolution 64

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of cultures in general? If ethnophilosophy does not want to rest on a false and naive idea of African identity, it has to answer these questions. The answer to the first question is, of course, positive. If by rationality we mean every coherent procedure we use to explain phenomena in the world and the methods we use to account for the world and to justify human action, then there must be more than scientific rationality in the Western world. And indeed, the available anthropology of Western cultures reveals that scientific rationality is only one aspect of Western culture. The second question can be re-formulated as follows: In which way does the underlying rationality of the African identity differ from that of the Western cultures? Proving the existence of a specific African rationality demands that we use an argumentative discourse. Ethnophilosophy refuses to do that because any attempt at a systematic justification leads to a meta-discourse which is classified as a case of alien, Western rationality which cannot grasp the true African thought. It thus has to rely on an intuitive assertion of African rationality refusing to argue further. But silence is neither African nor a specific kind of rationality. The answer to the third question could be taken as alternative to the identity-affirming silence. One could refer to universal components of human cultures and show that what the ethnophilosopher believes to be African identity is not specifically African but could be found in the history of many other cultures and is part of an evolution of human culture in general. III. Modern thought in black Africa can be reduced to a search for identity. Generations of scholars have spent their time looking for it. Since Africans cannot easily situate themselves in a philosophical tradition they try to confer to traditional ways of mundane reasoning the status of philosophical discourse (Boulaga 1977 mainly the Preface; Elungu 1984; Hountondji 1977; Appiah 1992 mainly chapter 5). Yet, since the forms of African mundane reasoning are in fact the products of Western scientific discourse we are dealing with a tragic constellation here. If there is something terrible with colonialism or cultural imperialism it is less the creation of inequalities between the colonizers and the indigenous people. It is rather the ongoing affirmation of one’s own identity and the fate of being condemned to spell out one’s difference, a Sisyphus’ task left to Africans and other colonized peoples. Their identity discourse has replaced the old colonial prisons which deprived Africans of their freedom. Today the search for identity has become the diversion which prevents serious consideration of the problems facing modern Africa, the nightmare making it impossible to find Africa’s way out of its chronic underdevelopment. Identity has become that search for cultural freedom which burns down the remaining faith in a real political freedom.

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References Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1992): In my father’s house. Africa in the philosophy of culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bimwenyi-Kwesi, Oscar (1981): Discours théologique négro-africain. Problèmes de fondements, Paris: Présence Africaine. Boulaga, Fabien Eboussi (1977): La crise du Muntu, Paris: L’Harmattan. Dubois, A.W. (1919): Memorandum à Monsieur Diagne et à d’autres members du congrès panafricain de Paris. Elungu, Elungu Pene (1984): L' éveil philosophique africain, Paris: L’Harmattan. Elungu, Elungu Pene (1987): Tradition africaine et rationalité moderne, Paris: L’Harmattan. Essien-Udom, E.U. (1962): Black nationalism. A search for an identity in America, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ginzburg, Carlo (1983): The night battles: witchcraft and agrarian cults in 16th centuries, New York: Penguin Books. Hountondji, Paulin (1977): Sur la philosophie africaine, Paris: François Maspéro. Lalèyê, Issaika Prosper (1975): La philosophie? Pourquoi en Afrique?, Bern, Frankfurt/Main: Herbert Lang. Larner, Christiana (1983): Enemies of God: The witch-hunt in Scotland, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Larner, Christiana (1984): Witchcraft and religion: the politics of popular belief, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Metogo, Eloi Messi (1985): Théologie africaine et ethnophilosophie, Paris: L’Harmattan. N`daw, Alassane (1983): La pensée africaine: Recherches sur les fondements de la pensée négro- africaine, Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions africaines. Nkrumah, Kwame (1964): Consciencism: philosophy and ideology for decolonisation, London: Panaf Books. Scarre, Geoffrey (1987): Witchcraft and magic in the 16th and the 17th century Europe, London: Macmillan. Sosoe, Lukas (1989): “Identité: entre l’evolution et la difference culturelles?”. In: Sosoe, Lukas (ed.), Identité: evolution ou différence?, Fribourg, Suisse: Editions universitaires. Sosoe, Lukas (1999): “Identités complexes et democratization: le cas des pays de l’Afrique noire”. In: Mesure, Sylvie/Kymlicka, Will (eds.), Comprendre les identités culturelles, Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris. Tempels, Placide (1959): Bantu philosophy, Paris: Présence Africaine. Towa, Marcien (1979): L’Idée d’une philosophie négroafricaine, Yaoundé: Editions CLE. Wiredu, Kwasi (1980): “How not to compare African thought with Western thought”. In: Wright, Richard (ed.), African philosophy. An introduction, Washington: Univ. Pr. of America, 166-184. 66

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P HILOSOPHY , Q UEER T HEORIES , AND THE O VERCOMING OF I DENTITY 1. Preliminary Remarks As a western philosopher working in the field of intercultural communication, I am interested in finding out whether and how it is possible to argue for an “intercultural philosophy”. My perspective is one of considering all cultural products, including philosophical concepts, as the usually unexpected or “emergent” outcome of the interactions between the individual and his environment (including other individuals). This implies that a consistent notion of intercultural philosophy should be based on that of an “intercultural individual”, still to be deeply investigated through a rethinking of “individual identity”. And this is the main reason why I believe that a rethinking of the notion of “difference” is also needed, given that interculturalism presupposes from the outset a radical confrontation with the “other” as someone different from the “self”. This article is devoted to the notions of “identity” and “difference”, “self” and “other”, in order to show that they are cultural constructs, which need to be critically addressed if we are to gain an effective attitude toward intercultural issues. The starting point of my analysis is constituted by the recognition that the relationship between such terms is usually understood as a dichotomy in western philosophical tradition, in the sense that the notion of “other” and “difference” seem to almost never be thought of if not referring to the “positive” pole constituted by those of “self” and “identity”, in that they point to a state of “being”, whereas “other” and “difference” indicate the state of “becoming”. So being things, a philosopher should assume that identity is the purpose of difference, in the sense that what is different—the chaos of becoming—should aspire to identity—the order of being. Now, I find that the dichotomy identity/difference is of little or no use in trying to develop an intercultural philosophy, because of the assumed superiority of the notion of identity over that of difference, that is to say of the notion of being over that of becoming. My contribution aims rather to show that (western) philosophers should rethink the traditional notion of identity to the ground, in order to be able to build up a convincing and useful definition of difference. To anticipate my thesis: if differences are to be given a central role in contemporary philosophy that is challenged by the fact of interculturalism, philosophers must be ready to overcome the notion of identity. They should 67

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namely acknowledge that only differences exist since identity is but a byproduct of the reflexive activity of thinking, aiming to counterbalance the instability and uncertainty of “becoming” by referring to the stability and certainty of “being”. I will try to tentatively articulate my argumentation into the following sections: 1) an analysis of the notion of identity and its assumed supremacy over that of difference in western philosophical tradition; 2) an attempt to deconstruct the notion of identity moving from sexual/gender identity as presented in the works of Queer theorists; and 3) a brief conclusion in which some hints are also given as to the differences sexual/gender identity shows crossculturally.

2. Identity as a Philosophical Problem In western philosophy a strict connection has been established between the notions of “subject”, “self” and “identity” at least since the time of Enlightenment. What philosophers such as René Descartes and Immanuel Kant have in common, for all their different positions, is the idea that each human being should be considered at the same time as a representative of his species, with which he shares some essential features from the cognitive viewpoint, and as an uniquely shaped entity different from all other human beings—that is as an individual. The contradictory character of this idea is evident in the notion of “subject”, in that—as Nick Mansfield points out—the philosophical subject is “both an object of analysis and the ground of truth and knowledge” (Mansfield 2000: 4). In other terms, the subject is at the same time “subject to or of something” (ibid: 3), that is to say that he is at the same time a subject and an object. The understanding of the subject as “subject of something” partly overlaps with those of “self” and “identity”, in the sense that the possibility for the subject to interact with the outside world seems to rest upon that to conceive himself as a stable entity, holding clearly identifiable characters that univocally define him at any given moment as this subject. To be sure, this possibility depends also on the fact that the subject is to be defined in terms of a shared cognitive structure giving birth to predictable patterns of thought and behavior. It is in this sense that we can picture the subject as an object (a subject to) about which we can gain sufficient knowledge. In its turn, the subject as subject of must be a self and hold an identity if he is to operate within his environment, that is to interact with objects and other selves. In this way, self and identity become what allows to distinguish between subjects—between human beings as individuals—preserving their uniqueness as particular knowing and acting beings. But also in this case there is a difference between the two notions, for only the term “self” properly indicates the uniqueness of each subject as a human person, while identity can also hint to shared features between humans. If identity is understood as personal identity, 68

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encompassing all specific characters that make an individual like he is, identity and self may overlap. But identity can also indicate some particular features of the subject-self that he recognizes as present in other individuals, that is as shared characters beyond the assumed uniqueness of the self. In this case the notion indicates also the possibility of building up intersubjective identities beyond individual differences. The difference between the notions of self and identity can be also schematized in the following terms. “Self” is the most adequate term to indicate the uniqueness of the human person because it refers directly to the experience a given “individual” has of himself as someone that “cannot be further divided”, all of his features being constitutive. At this end they must be perceived as a self-sufficient and self-referential whole, whose parts are all concurring to shape the self’s configuration at any given moment. However, this implies that an individual can only know his own “self” by intuition, because if he tries to think about himself he is compelled to select only some features from the whole of the “self” in order to define it, that is to reduce it to something his cognitive structure can understand. This is the reason why the socalled “true self” is unthinkable and unspeakable, for all the efforts the various psychoanalytic schools have been making so far. Each time we namely try to definitely collocate the whole of our “self” within mental frameworks and/or to articulate it in linguistic terms we shift automatically to the reductionist notion of “identity”. The major difference between self and identity is that the notion of self indicate the whole of our subjectivity as it is uniquely shaped at any given moment, whereas the notion of identity indicates the outcome of our reducing our own “self” to something thinkable and communicable, by means of selecting some of its features and removing all others. In short, I contend that identity is a form of simplifying the self both in order to communicate it to others— including ourselves when we decide to consciously reflect upon our subjectivity, that is to consider ourselves as the objects of our thinking—, and in order to interact with the environment, including other “selves”. The operation of identifying one’s own self requires choosing—that is selecting—some of its features on the basis of their assumed relevance, at the same time excluding all the remaining ones, at the aim to allow the self fit to the actual context in which it is situated. The notion of identity has thus a functional role, in that it is built up to react to the contextual stimuli and/or expectations by means of choosing what features of the “self” are the most adequate to successfully orientate and operate within it. So beings things, my second contention is that identity is a strategic tool at the aim to cope with the different roles and functions we are called to perform within our environment. To make an example: I began my contribution by stating that I am “a western philosopher working in the field of intercultural communication”. In that very moment I was reducing my own “self” by means of selecting all the features that I personally believe, and my cultural context accustomed me to recognize, as constitutive of “a philosopher”. So I identified myself as Flavia 69

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Monceri, a philosopher, and in so doing I also started to perform the role I am used to linking to the notion of “philosopher” both on the basis of how I think a philosopher should behave and of what I imagine your expectations are when interacting with a philosopher. Of course this is not the only identity I perform in front of you. There are surely a lot, including the seemingly undisputable identification of myself as Flavia Monceri, a woman, that is the sexual/gender identity about which I will speak later. Now, what is particularly interesting in the process I outlined so far is the absence of an open concern with difference in trying to build up the notions of subject, self, and identity, the fact notwithstanding that their philosophical construction in the modern era would not have been possible without considering difference at least as their “dark-side”, their “shadow-concept”, so to say. How is it namely possible to claim that a subject does exist which is to be considered as a stable entity, without fixing a borderline between it and all other subjects in terms of what must be included in, and excluded from, this notion? The fundamental dichotomy subject/object does imply a reference to difference if not because we must be able to distinguish what definitely separates the two entities, each built up by selecting features that are mutually exclusive. Put differently, subject and object must be recognized as clearly different entities in order to be conceived as real things cohabiting the same space-time. In the case of self and identity the problem is much more evident. How can we elaborate the notion of a “self” without referring to the notion of an “other” clearly perceivable and recognizable as such because it is shaped in an at least partially different manner? And what does holding an identity mean if not assuming that a set of characters are present in some selves, but absent from some others? Such questions lead me to the core of identity as a philosophical problem: in the very moment in which philosophers attempted to stabilize the flux of becoming inventing the umbrella terms of subject, self and identity in order to assure to human persons the character of being—that is a definite structure and collocation in the outside world—they were also compelled to remove the problem of difference, pushing it out of the realm of philosophical reflection as a fringe-issue, being part just of the realm of ephemerality they intended to overcome. Difference gradually became the negative pole of identity, something human beings not only should not aim to, but that they were also compelled to remove from their visual angle in order to discover their true self and to exclusively rely upon stable patterns of identification in the attempt to successfully interact with each other. Rather than stressing and expressing its “diversity”, finding its own identity is the goal of the self, by means of focusing on the features it has in common with other selves: so building up one’s own identity ends up by overlapping with a process of identification with others. Individual differences were gradually excluded from the realm of identity because of their destabilizing potential, in that they posed again and again the problem of composing the conflict between becoming and being. Difference, however, is 70

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more original than identity, just as becoming is more original than being, as the relationship between self and identity shows. The “self” cannot be defined once and for all because it is inescapably situated in the flux of becoming, and has to cope with the infinite differences it finds not only in surrounding objects and subjects, but also within itself, for example in terms of its “irrational” or “emotional” or “contradictory” responses to even the same stimuli, depending on the situation. So the self has no fix identity, until it does not try to marginalize differences in order to reduce the complexity of the inner and outer world. The self constructs its own identity in the very moment it tries to confer some meaning to its otherwise senseless experience, by means of drawing one or more artificial lines connecting selected “data”, “information”, “facts” and “events”, etc. in a selfreferential system—the “I”—useful to create the illusion of a totality consistently acting and reacting in the world. Beyond this individual “need for identity”, there is also a need for “identification”, the need namely to reduce the self to some of its constitutive features as a tool to differentiate it from an assumed other with which an interaction is unavoidable. This leads to my third contention about identity: it is not an end in itself, a process ending in the “coming out” of the “true self”, but only a strategic tool to successfully play the roles we are expected or assigned to perform in any given situation, that is in order to interact with others. In this sense, it can be stated that identity is a means to pose or collocate the self within relational contexts. The experience of being confronted with others is what urges us to define our identity, in order to individuate the people who are “like us” and “different from us”, that is to distinguish between “us” and “them”. In short, building up an identity means stereotyping the Self, drawing a borderline between what is included and what is excluded, what is similar and what is different from it. It is a means of categorizing, and for all its usefulness in terms of elaborating successful surviving strategies as individuals and social beings, the fact remains that it is at the cost of removing differences and becoming from our cognitive horizon. Of course, stating that the myriads of identities human beings hold have an artificial character would be a truism, as well as maintaining that their construction is a cultural process to which all members of the in-group collaborate both co-authoring and transmitting it to the newcomers. It is also nothing new to state that cultural, political, and social identities are built up at the aim to distinguish “us” from “them”, that is to define what features are to be included in and excluded from the relating identity, in order to recognize what and who is “identical” or at least “similar” to us. The need for identification has namely the practical purpose to assure recognition and mutual support to the in-group members, and to defend them from the attacks by outsiders, that is from people “different from us”. All this notwithstanding, it is not yet pacifically accepted that this “constructivist” argumentation applies to all forms of identity, even the ones apparently based upon matter-of-fact features.

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In my attempt to overcome the notion of identity and restate the centrality of difference and diversity, I searched for a borderline case in the belief that its philosophical deconstruction would allow me to definitely affirm the artificial character of whatever type of identity. I found this exemplary case in the notion of “sexual/gender identity”, being at the same time the most assumedly “private” form of identity and the most seemingly undisputable one in terms of its individuation and certainty by the part of the outside world. I must immediately add that I use the expression “sexual/gender identity” throughout this article because I find that sex and gender are too much inextricably intertwined and interdependent to definitely distinguish their borders, and that the following argumentation can be equally applied to both sex and gender understood as social and cultural constructs. Beyond that, it should not be forgotten that philosophers usually avoid to overtly confronting with this kind of identity not only for a sort of “embarrassment”, but also because they seem convinced that the issue has little or nothing to do with philosophical thinking— an asexual activity, as everybody knows. On the contrary, I find that sexual/gender identity should become a central topic of philosophy, not only for the self-evident fact that the sexual/gender identity of philosophers do interfere in their thinking activity, but also because a deeper reflection on this topic could offer a useful approach to the issue of “difference” and “diversity”. As for now, however, a philosopher interested in such issue must mainly rely upon the body of work of other research fields, such as Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Studies and Queer Studies, in addition to Women’s, Gender and Feminist Studies. In this contribution I will focus on Queer Studies and Theory in the belief that they offer to date the most useful theoretical positions for a philosophical deconstruction of identity. Anyway, before briefly discussing such positions, I would like to explain why I contend that sexual/gender identity should be considered as a philosophical problem.

3. Recovering Differences through “Sexual/Gender Identity” As I previously said, the main role I am performing here is that of “a philosopher”, and that coincides with saying that in this very moment I essentially identify as such. Anyway, what you probably more immediately perceived was the impression given to you by my feminine name, that gave you the image of a “woman” performing a philosopher, because the first identity we are used to assigning to people we encounter is the sexual/gender one. By saying this I mean that the first mental framework in which we collocate and categorize other selves is that based on the distinction between the “male” and “female” individuals of our species. This automatic distinction sets in motion a variety of related mental frameworks by means of which we adjust speech, behavior and evaluation criteria to the physical individual we are interacting 72

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with, according to the one or the other label. In short, the fact that you “read” the individual in front of you as a “woman philosopher” also concur to determine your set of expectations about her, and even your reactions to what she is saying (or writing). On the other hand, I am also used to perceiving myself as a “woman philosopher” and expected to be aware of such identity and of the related patterns of behavior. What is more important, I am expected to fit the role by adopting the “proper” patterns of behavior I have learned to be the most adequate to perform it, as it is the case for all forms of identity. The problem with this specific form of identity is that it is considered as given by and since birth because it depends on the anatomical configuration of our body that establish once and for all what we are to be for all of our life. The presence or absence of some external features of the body—how we are shaped as physical objects—individuate us in the eyes of our neighbors as one or the other pole, and from that point on they will behave toward us according to the relating mental frameworks, at the same time educating us to accordingly feel, identify and act/react. Thus we all become familiar with the idea that our sexual/gender identity is rooted in nature: you are either male or female, masculine or feminine, a man or a woman for all the differences in sexual preferences or gender roles you can detect in history, cross-culturally and in your life-experience. Now, I claim that from a theoretical viewpoint this last statement is fallacious, because it is based on mistaken presuppositions. The external shape of a body is surely a fact that is perceived as such. But the assignment of an identity to this external shape is no longer based upon matter-of-fact evaluations, rather depending on reducing and stereotyping it by means of building up a set of information based on the more diffuse patterns of behavior the individuals equipped with such shape show in their interactions. Moreover, this process is reinforced on the one hand by establishing that this set of information constitutes the “norm” (and by extension, alas, the “normality"), and on the other hand by imposing it upon the individuals who show a tendency to deviate from it—that is to accept, feel good with, and positively evaluate and acting out their own “diversity”. Put differently, at birth the shape of your body—your anatomy—makes you a “male” or a “female”, this fact being immediately confirmed by assigning to you a manly or womanly “name”. Then, you are educated in such a way that you are accustomed to accept this assigned identity being also ready to accept the “normal” set of related behaviors (including sexual preferences) and to remove all “differences” inside you in order to fit such assigned identity. In other terms you are educated to become a “man” or a “woman” accordingly to what is expected from you, without indulging in your eventual “diversity” if not as a “fantasy”. In this sense it can be stated that even sexual/gender identity is a social and cultural construct just like all other types of identity. And though I will not consider the question, it is also worth noting that the “natural” shape of the body is not always enough to justify the assignment of a sexual/gender identity, for example in the face of “biological er73

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rors”, as we usually define them, as it is the case with “the many individuals who arrive in the world with sexual anatomy that fails to be easily distinguished as male or female”, that is individuals who “are labeled ‘intersexuals’ or ‘hermaphrodites’ by modern medical discourse” (Chase 2003: 31; also Kessler 2002). In the last decades of the 20th century, contesting the “natural” dichotomy male/female and the various outcomes of its binary logic (the heterosexual/homosexual distinction, gender roles, etc.) was the task of various intellectual, academic, and political movements ranging from feminist associations and scholars to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) liberation movements, and to Queer Nation and Queer Theory. Among all these movements, whose historical development, also in terms of conceptions and interconnections, is obviously impossible for me to reconstruct here, my intellectual preference goes without doubt to Queer theory for its radical attack to the notion of identity. Although Queer theorists’ positions are deeply indebted with the body of work provided by Women’s Studies and (GLBT) Studies, and although there is a two-way relationship between these interdisciplinary fields, there are some substantial differences between these apparently similar approaches. The first difference is that Queer theory is less committed to a political project than other approaches are, because it is mainly concerned with “individual identity”. Queer theorists are more interested in investigating particular “sexual and gender practices such as sadomasochism, transvestitism and hermaphroditism that cannot be reduced to the categories of either homosexuality or heterosexuality” (Corber/Valocchi 2003: 1), and in so doing they doubt the usefulness of categories that have been very important, and still seem to be, for example for Gay and Lesbian Studies. However, the major difference between Queer Studies and the mentioned traditions is their radical refusal to refer to an identity-based thought. The novelty introduced by Feminist Studies, Women’s studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies consisted in pointing out that gender and sexual identity were not so monolithic as we were used to thinking. Identity was rather to be conceived as a historical, social, and cultural construct based upon the banning of differences and the refusal to acknowledge the fact that they should be “recognized” as such. The social, political and cultural recognition of women and homosexuals was therefore a way to recover the centrality of difference in the making of identity. Anyway, in so doing differences were not given a status as such, but only at the extent to which they were able to coagulate into new forms of stable identities based on clearly recognizable and widespread enough differences, so to say by way of detaching them from already existing identities. To identify as a woman, a gay or a lesbian meant and means at the same time stating to be different from a man, a heterosexual man or woman and to hold a different but clearly definite form of identity comprising all people possessing the adequate features. But what about all other possible deviations from the new 74

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norm by the part of people who do not fit or refuse to identify exclusively with one or the other “established” identity? The rising of Queer theory is partly a response to this unsolved problem, and particularly to that of thinking difference without ending up by collapsing into new monolithic forms of shared identity. The critique to the traditional notions of “subject”, “self” and “identity” by the part of such thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and especially Michel Foucault allowed “queer theorists” like Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis, and David Halperin to deconstruct to the ground also the claims of Gay and Lesbian Studies to be the only legitimated “guardians of difference”. The centrality of differences in the unfolding of the individual’s sexual/gender identity, the experience of different or multiple sexual/gender identities through life, in a word the “right” to be different by means of refusing to join a given identity once and for all and being open to the possibility of changing and performing a full range of sexual/gender identities at will are the core features of Queer theory. From the theoretical viewpoint, the engagement of Queer theorists in differences leads surely to admit that actually “there is no ‘queer theory’ in the singular, only many different voices and sometimes overlapping, sometime divergent perspectives that can be loosely called ‘queer theories’” (Hall 2003: 5; see also e.g. Jagose 1996; Turner 2000; Sullivan 2003). Thus, it can be stated that the main purpose of Queer theories is the attempt to literally “queer”—to make it “strange” or “odd”—the way we usually construct theories, and the “knowledge” we assumedly acquire from them, in a fashion very similar to Nietzschean perspectivism: refusing the possibility to find the truth about sexuality and gender, and affirming instead the need “for continued discussion, for diversity in perspective and articulation, and for challenging and disruptive speech, even that which challenges and disrupts queer claims themselves” (Hall 2003: 6). So what might “identify” Queer theories as a research field is precisely their interdisciplinary and difficult-to-conceptualize character, in the sense of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have called the logic of rhizomatics as opposed to the traditional logic of arborescence typical of Western thought. The metaphor of arborescence is the tree and its logic is based on the belief that there is an essential truth and meaning springing from its invisible roots. Therefore “everything in a tree system relies for its value on the meaning of other elements in the structure”, but “this value is inevitably distributed into a hierarchy, which subordinates the value of an entity to another, regardless of the function of that entity in any given relationship or situation” (Mansfield 2000: 141). The metaphor of the rhizome refers instead to “a type of stem that expands underground horizontally, sending down roots and pushing up shoots that arise and proliferate not from a single core or trunk, but from a network which expands endlessly from any of its points” (ibid: 143).

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Thus, “becoming” is its “crucial theme”, since “in contrast to arborescent models, the rizhome does not seek to outline permanent structures as they exist across time and place. Instead, it sees the life of things in terms of an ever-changing and ever-renewed movement out of fixed forms into new possibilities” (ibid: 145).

As concerns the notion of identity, Queer theories try to deconstruct the binary oppositions (male/female, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual) implicit in the discourse concerning sexuality and gender as it unfolded so far, mainly because all of these oppositions always entail a value judgment according to which one pole is given priority over the other. To put it in the terms I used in the first part of my contribution, it could be said that it is because they always refer to the fundamental dichotomies self/other and identity/difference. Moreover, according to Queer theorists even notions such as “woman”, “homosexual”, “gay” or “lesbian” are but “nouns” or “labels” by means of which we try to “bridle” the free unfolding of an individual sexual/gender identity, at the same time refusing cultural, social, and political recognition to further possible forms of “diversity”. To sum up this point with William B. Turner: “‘Queer’ became useful for the theories and politics of sexual minorities during the late 1980s and 1990s not only because it is easier to say than ‘lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgender’ but also because the proliferation of different groups who demand inclusion in the movement demonstrates the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of binary identity categories. What is the opposite of transgender? Heterosexual? Does a preoperative male-to-female transgender person date women or men in order to be heterosexual? Does s/he then switch after surgery? What if this person is married? What if this person is a priest? Insofar as we stuff each other into binary categories anyway, the process is historical and political; we cannot understand these categories apart from their past and their change over time” (Turner 2000: 34).

Of course argumentations like this have led to various criticism, about which I cannot speak here, by the part of GLBT theorists, and especially feminist and lesbian scholars (see e.g. McLaughlin 2003, esp. ch. 6). The attack to the binary logic underlying the notion of identity is what leads Queer theorists to focus on borderline or marginalized sexual practices, especially those which, like sadomasochism (S/M), have been since long not only generally labeled as “perverse” or “aberrant” but also ostracized for their being “sexual games” involving the performance, and therefore reproduction, of traditional forms of power relationships based upon “patriarchy”, “capitalism” and “fascism”. This is the reason why one should be skeptical concerning the possibility that S/M scenes “are effective in undermining or challenging the normative force of racism, misogyny or pedophilia these practices ‘iterate’” (Mason-Grant 2004: 135). However, just the case of S/M practices seems to me to best indicate the sense in which queer theorists speak about the impossibility to define sexual/gender identity once and for all—that is about its actual non-existence—beyond stressing its “performative” character in the line of the well-known Judith Butler’s positions (Butler 1990, 1993). Accord76

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ing to Pat Califia, “some feminists still find S/M roles disturbing because they believe they are derived from genuinely oppressive situation”, accusing sadomasochistic practices of “being fascistic because of the symbolism employed to create an S/M ambiance” (Califia 2000: 174). By so doing, however, they forget that “no symbol has a single meaning. Meaning is derived from the context in which it is used”, while “it is also a mistake to assume that the historical oppressor is always the top in a S/M encounter” (ibid: 174). Consensual S/M is an expression of a queer form of sexual/gender identity in that it “is a game in which the participants create their ‘selves’ at will” (Sullivan 2003: 155), at the same time subverting established cultural, social, and political power relationships since the given possibility to choose and reverse roles provides “an opportunity for individuals to inhabit positions of ‘privilege’ from which they are, in everyday life, excluded” (ibid: 161). In short, “S/M eroticism focuses on forbidden feelings or actions and searches for a way to obtain pleasure from them. It is the quintessence of nonreproductive sex” (Califia 2000: 174), and this is why it is in fact a subversive form of sexual practice. This seems to be apparent also considering the way in which S/M relate to the fact that “our society strives to make masculinity in men and femininity in women appear natural and biologically determined” (ibid: 176) for example by means of fetish costumes. They namely “violate this rule by being too theatrical and deliberate”, and “since fetish costumes may also be used to transform the gender of the wearer, they are a further violation of sexist standards for sex-specific dress and conduct” (ibid: 176). The issue is surely complex, and worth being separately treated, but we could perhaps agree with Michel Foucault when he reminds, moving from the case of S/M practices, that the core of the problem of identity is that “if we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation […]. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule” (Foucault 1997: 166).

4. Conclusions In this article I have been considering the notions of identity and difference within the western cultural and intellectual tradition, since my aim was to show the problematic aspects of their construction. However, the fact should also be considered that the most immediate meaning of the term identity as it resulted in the course of western history is by no means universal, as crosscultural research has abundantly demonstrated (e.g. Denny 1997). In this sense an intercultural approach to the notion of identity would be surely useful also in order to deconstruct the universalistic claims to a globally widespread binary polarization of sexual/gender identity. If it is namely true that for 77

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example in Asia “western gay/lesbian styles and terminology have often been appropriated as strategies to resist local heteronormative strictures and carve out new local spaces” (Jackson 2001: 6), it must be added that “these appropriations have not reflected a wholesale recreation of Western sexual cultures in Asian contexts, but instead suggest a selective and strategic use of foreign forms to create new ways of being Asian and homosexual” (ibid: 6; see also e.g. Gopinath 2003; Boellstorff 2003; Summerhawk/McMahill/McDonald (eds.) 1998).

From a methodological point of view, this implies that “a key challenge is to incorporate an awareness of the specificity of historical Asian forms of gender/sex difference”, to the extent that “the expansion of Western-based knowledge to incorporate historical and contemporary forms of Asian erotic diversity will decentre many aspects of Eurocentric theory, forcing us to see Western eroticisms not as the model but as one set of historically specific forms beside many others” (Jackson 2001: 7).

Eurocentrism and Orientalism are in fact still at work in shaping the patterns of academic research devoted to “the other”, and this is evident for example in the facts that “despite ‘queer studies’ emphasis on multiplicity and diversity, there is still a tendency to be enchanted by the three letters ‘gay’ and to see in them a reflection of sameness where we should be open to the possibility of finding difference” (ibid: 9)

to the extent that “the global queering discussion, in part, appears to have been based on a wish to find ‘clones’ of Western-type identities in the rest of the world” (ibid: 10). Anyway, since also sexual and gender identities are cultural constructs, it can be pacifically stated that it is more likely for us to find differences and variance than it is to find universally widespread similarities in features and patterns of development. This applies particularly to the idea that sexual/gender identities should be necessarily conceived in terms of a binary logic to which they must fit in order to be recognized as such. The sexual/gender dichotomies culturally and historically established in the West appear namely to be only one possibility amongst others we can detect both in world history and in contemporary societies. Examples of such “thirdgender”, “transgender”, “out-of-gender” or “no-gender” identities includes the Hijras of India (Nanda 1989; 1994), the Berdache among North American Indians (Williams 1986), and the Kathoey of Thailand (Totman 2003), along with many others (see Roscoe 1990; Besnier 1994; Herdt (ed.) 1994; Ramet (ed.) 1996). An unbiased cross-cultural research in the field of sexual/gender identities can surely help us to uncover the coexistence of differences that do not converge towards a given model we still largely perceive in western academic 78

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thinking as universally ubiquitous. The most important side-effect of such “discover” might eventually be the diffusion of an awareness that the contemporary attack to the notion of identity by the part of Queer theories, amongst others, is not an abstruse exercise of deconstructing traditional and wellestablished patterns of thought having no link with “the real world”. It is rather a way to recover the centrality of differences and diversity that always existed and still exist, the imposition notwithstanding of a binary logic through the lens of which we have been used to seeing and reading just that “real world”. From a philosophical standpoint, the most important contribution provided by Queer theories from within the western tradition of thought is the overcoming of identity by means of recovering the centrality of what I will call the “difference inside”. Stating that sexual/gender identity is a life-long process never reaching its final point, because it has no one, means at the same time collocating the individual with all its differences at the center of our theoretical horizon. Queer theories stress the fact that we can no longer avoid to recognize that identity is but a result of the reconstructing process through which we try to reduce the complexity of our “selves” by means of definitely collocating them within ready-to-use mental frameworks. Though this operation seems unavoidable, due to our cognitive structure, we should at the same time remain aware of the fact that it is a matter of elaborating a strategic tool to orientate in our environment, being in no a way the ultimate picture of an assumed “true self”, silently urging each of us from within to let it be “discovered” and (socially) “recognized”. The main useful outcome of an overcoming of identity in favor of a recover of differences and diversity consists in the possibility for us to shift from one identity to another by acting out the differences we perceive within us, instead of removing them in the attempt to discover and stabilize our “true self” once and for all. The perspectivistic character of our reconstruction of the inner and outer world implies that we are unable to gain a perfect knowledge of ourselves and the environment. But this does not mean that we are unable to widen our visual angle by means of confronting with differences. Hence, overcoming one’s own assigned, “discovered” or constructed identity means also to become able to cope with the differences we experience as part of our “self”, and to insert them in more and more complex patterns of reference in which differences and “contradictions” loose their assumed disruptive or destructive potential. In other terms, we should start to learn to be different from ourselves, instead of searching for a stable identity. This would also allow us to improve our ability to interact in a new and more effective way with people we variously define as “Others”. As a matter of fact, the recognition of the differences coexisting within us might also allow us to understand the differences we perceive in the “Other” not as the expression of the identity he holds, but of that same differences we might experience everyday as one of the possibilities of our “self”. Beyond that, overcoming the fear of experiencing diversity inside and outside us might lead us 79

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to achieve the ability to better cope with the fact that we are “becoming beings”, whose assumed stability depends only on the need for elaborating successful strategies to operate in and adapt to our environment. In this sense, from my philosophical perspective interculturalism just points to the same scenario prospected by queer theorists, in that they both stress the need to become able to cope with radical difference without resorting to the traditional notion of identity. There is of course much to do on this way, and I do think it will be impossible to elaborate a definite and consistent notion of “interculturalism”, let alone a Theory of intercultural communication. But there is surely something we can do as individuals inserted in the flux of becoming: to try to become “transculturing selves” (Monceri 2003) by means of an everlasting process of recognizing differences both within and without us, fearless of loosing an identity we would never be able either to ultimately provide ourselves or completely identify with.

References Besnier, N. (1994): “Polynesian gender liminality through time and space”. In: G. Herdt (ed.), Third sex, third gender: Beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history, New York: Zone Books, 285-328. Boellstorff, T. (2003): “The Perfect Path: Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia”. In: R.J. Corber/S. Valocchi (eds.), Queer Studies. An Interdisciplinary Reader, Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 218-237. Bullough, B./Bullough, V.L./Elias, J. (eds.) (1997): Gender Blending, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Butler, J. (1990): Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993): Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive limits of “Sex”, New York/London: Routledge. Califia, P. (2000): Public Sex. The Culture of Radical Sex, San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press. Chase, C. (2003): “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of intersex political Activism”. In: R.J. Corber/S. Valocchi (eds.), Queer Studies. An Interdisciplinary Reader, Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 31-46. Corber, R.J./Valocchi, S. (2003): “Introduction”. In: R.J. Corber/S. Valocchi (eds.), Queer Studies. An Interdisciplinary Reader, Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 1-21. Corber, R.J./Valocchi, S. (eds.) (2003): Queer Studies. An Interdisciplinary Reader, Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell. Deleuze, G./Guattari, F. (1987): A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denny, D. (1997): “Transgender: Some Historical, Cross-cultural, and Contemporary Models and Methods of Coping and Treatment”. In: B. Bul80

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lough/V.L. Bullough/J. Elias (eds.), Gender Blending, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 33-48. Foucault, M. (1997): Ethics Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. by P. Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Gopinath, G. (2003): “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion”. In: R.J. Corber/S. Valocchi (eds.), Queer Studies. An Interdisciplinary Reader, Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 206-218. Hall, D.E. (2003): Queer Theories, Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Herdt, G. (ed.) (1994): Third sex, third gender: Beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history, New York: Zone Books. Jackson, P.A. (2001): “Pre-Gay, Post-Queer: Thai Perspectives on Proliferating Gender/Sex Diversity in Asia”. In: G. Sullivan/P.A. Jackson, Gay and Lesbian Asia. Culture, Identity, Community, New York/London/Oxford: Harrington Park Press, 1-27. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Homosexuality 40 (3/4). Jagose, A. (1996): Queer Theory. An Introduction, New York: New York University Press. Kessler, S.J. (2002): Lessons from the Intersexed, New Brunswick, NJ/London: Rutgers University Press. Mansfield, N. (2000): Subjectivity. Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway, New York: New York University Press. Mason-Grant, J. (2004): Pornography embodied. From Speech to Sexual Practice, Lanham/Boulder/New York/Toronto/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. McLaughlin, J. (2003): Feminist Social and Political Theory. Contemporary Debates and Dialogues, Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Monceri, F. (2003): “The Transculturing Self: A Philosophical Approach”. In: LAIC—Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication 3 (2), 108114. Nanda, S. (1989): Neither man nor woman: The Hijras of India, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Nanda, S. (1994): “Hijras: An alternative sex and gender role in India”. In: G. Herdt (ed.), Third sex, third gender: Beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history, New York: Zone Books, 373-418. Ramet, S. (ed.) (1996): Gender Reversals & Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, London/New York: Routledge. Roscoe, W. (1990): The Zuni man-woman, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Sullivan, G./Jackson, P.A. (eds.) (2001): Gay and Lesbian Asia. Culture, Identity, Community, New York/London/Oxford: Harrington Park Press. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Homosexuality 40 (3/4). Sullivan, N. (2003): A Critical introduction to Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 81

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Summerhawk, B./McMahill, C./McDonald, D. (eds.) (1998): Queer Japan. Personal Stories of Japanese Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, Norwich, VT: New Victoria Publishers. Totman, R. (2003): The Third Sex. “Kathoey”—Thailand’s Ladyboys, London: Souvenir Press. Turner, W.B. (2000): A Genealogy of Queer Theory, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Williams, W.L. (1986): The spirit and the flesh: Sexual diversity in American Indian culture, Boston: Beacon Press.

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C ULTURAL D IFFERENCES AND THE P ROBLEM OF T RANSLATION 1. Introduction—Alterity as a Starting Point In the debates on cultural differences in the 1990s, several authors began to talk about “the space in-between” (cf. Bachmann-Medick 1994; Bhabha 1994; Fuchs 1997; Shimada 1994). This concept seems to be an attempt to describe a fluid phenomenon existing somewhere between cultures. It shows the need for a new theoretical concept of culture and society, one that corresponds to the radical change in the world order. “In-between” also characterizes my personal and academic situation. I come originally from Japan, and have now lived more than thirty years in Germany. Professionally, I got my training in German sociology working in the Institute of Social Anthropology. As a consequence, my academic writing is in-between—in the interstice between sociology and anthropology—and this is why I am faced with fathoming both the common ground and the differences between the two disciplines. This paper attempts to assess the theoretical consequences of my position in this very in-between. Nowadays, we experience the complexity of cultural differences in everyday life. Media transmit images and events from remote parts of the world, and talking with neighbors and friends about their trips to places like the Caribbean or Bali is by no means out of the ordinary. Traveling to distant parts of the world has become part of our daily lives. Riding the bus on the way to work, we are exposed to many different languages that we don’t understand. In this respect, the cultural Other seems omnipresent, but this may be a contradiction. Gone are the days when the Other was still “the wanderer who comes today and decides to stay tomorrow” as Georg Simmel put it in his classical study (Simmel 1983: 509). Meanwhile, the image of the Other has become more complex and more dynamic. The host society (i.e., more generally speaking, the “we” facing an Other) can no longer define the Other solely from its own perspective. Strangers find their own voices, ready to articulate their demands. As a consequence, the semantics of the Other settles gradually at the interface of diverse perspectives where the interconnectedness and reciprocality of the Self and the Other become increasingly visible. The actual perspective is a result of past mutual projections of the Other as a member of another culture, projections we apparently find difficult to abandon. In fact, our perception of another culture was 83

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fixed long before we actually encountered it. Further complexity is added when projections from the contextuality of the Self onto the Other are adopted by the other culture to present itself and to establish an identity. This has led, in many places on the earth, to a rise of culturalistic discourse on the Self, based on culturally relativistic attributions by western intellectuals. As a result, culture has become a political issue.1 At this point, I will briefly outline my approach to cultural differences from the perspective of the Other. I start from the assumption that the Other is a relational construct, with its semantics defined by the actual circumstances of communication. It is in the brief phase, when communication constitutes itself and the communicating parties negotiate their relationship on a relational level, that they establish either intimacy or alterity; this process may subsequently be reaffirmed or corrected. I oppose ontologizing approaches to cultural differences; rather I am intrigued by the actual moments in life that manifest the Other in its actual contextuality.

2. The Ambivalence of the Other Shifts in the relationship between the culturality of the Self and the Other affect both sociology and anthropology. Sociologists anticipating a gradual slackening of cultural significance in modern western societies have been proven wrong, as other cultures exert more and more influence on western societies. This development is reflected in the ongoing debate on “multicultural society”,2 and can no longer be overlooked by sociology. On the other hand, traditional tribal societies outside Europe, the standard subjects of anthropology, are gradually disappearing. So the two disciplines, both drawing their academic legitimation from studying the Other, are presently going through a crisis caused by changing social alterities. However, while this seems selfevident for anthropology, one might wonder to what extent sociology as the science of modern society actually deals with the phenomenon of the Other. To answer this question, it is important to remember that two of the founding fathers of sociology, Georg Simmel and Alfred Schütz, explicitly tackled the subject and established a discourse of the Other. Simmel focuses on the general problematic nature of space, elaborating on the host society’s perspective of the Other. He refers to the classical figure of the Jew as a salesman mediating between different worlds. Schütz (1971), for his part, approached the topic from the migrant’s subjective perspective, offering important insights into the problems connected with understanding the Other. These early 1 Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilizations was the most prominent expression of this trend. Although its contents were academically seen as extremely problematic, it had a deep impact on the political reality (Huntington 1993, 1996). 2 The debate in the field of social philosophy mostly deals with Canadian society (Kymlicka 1997; Taylor 1992; Walzer 1994; cf. Shimada 2004).

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attempts to problematize the Other produced a specific research track, embedded in the larger context of social sciences, thus establishing the Other as a central theme apart from the general questions of the discipline. This means that the Other has been explicitly problematized (e.g. within the context of migration studies or development sociology, as the stranger inside the own culture), but these research tracks have not been linked with the general perspectives of social theories and, hence, have created a theoretical problem. In the early days of sociological theory, the problem of modern society is exclusively viewed in reference to the Other. In the process of modernization, familiar references lose their relevance so that sociality is more and more interpreted as a relationship between strangers. Along the same lines, another classical sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, calls modern society a society built by strangers, as opposed to “community” (Tönnies 1979). In other words, functional differentiation turns everyone into a stranger. Alois Hahn talks in this context about “the generalization of alterity”, with the members of a society “integrated as carriers of functions into different systems based on the division of labor” (Hahn 1994: 162). Hahn addresses the Other as a general problem of modern society. Every individual—one of the main categories of modern society—is characterized by some kind of alterity according to this definition. Given this, the Other is no longer a special status, but a general feature of modern humanity, although this does not mean that the special status of the Other would disappear completely. There is a line clearly drawn between modern and traditional society, which makes it possible to classify certain populations as the Other and to perceive modern society as the Self, albeit made up by strangers. This explains the complex ambiguity surrounding the Other. The Other, in its ambivalence, has constituted and continues to constitute modern consciousness in several respects. While the modern process of socialization is characterized by an awareness of otherness, it also constitutes external Others and makes us blind to alterity as an internal quality. Moreover, modern society projects, even demands, the annihilation of the Other by establishing a universalistic social theory. At this point, three categories of the Other can be distinguished: •

The internal Others, referring to alterity inside modern society. Of these, they can be divided as follows: – Ordinary members of society who are connected through market and public sphere. – People who are demarcated from civil society, like delinquents, madmen or diseased.3

3 Michel Foucault elaborated this demarcation process in the European modernization (Foucault 1972, 1975).

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• •

The intra-western Others, referring to modern human beings outside the context of their own society is rooted in the nation-state. (In Simmel’s and Schütz’s writings, the Others largely fall into this category.) The external Others who are not part of modern western civilization.

Simmel and Schütz elude such complex ambiguity in that they deliberately limit their focus of attention to the Others in the second category, while establishing the Others in terms of a particular population group. In order to narrow their view, the two authors neglect distant cultures and focus on nearby strangers instead. Simmel resorts to the Jews for a paradigm, while Schütz expressly confines himself to issues of migration between modern (western) societies. In this respect, they share a genuinely sociological perspective, reflected in the assignment of tasks that are divided between sociology and anthropology. Even more serious in this respect is the problem of defining the Others whose situation holds special status for both authors. By virtue of ambivalence, the Others epitomize the exception beyond daily life, unsettling the established frame of reference of the host society. Based on the authors’ theoretical concerns, this constellation is easily comprehensible, but it causes a problem because it ignores the fact that alterity also exists within the host society. Society is defined in contrast to the Others, as if understanding did not present a problem within the host society itself. In this sense, Schütz refers to an indisputable code of meaning (Sinnwelt), internalized and shared by all members of society. This aspect deserves special attention, because this very error is repeated over and over in our contemporary discourse on interculturality. We are made to believe that understanding is performed effortlessly within a culture whereas intercultural interaction inevitably leads to difficulties. Seen this way, the difference between Self and Other turns out to be onedimensional and much too obvious, an a priori defined factor. Current discourse in the context of cultural studies on globalization, postcolonialism and the crisis of representation demonstrates how such stereotyping and defining of the Other is becoming increasingly problematic. Our critical reflection reveals, on the part of our own sciences, a deep involvement in the process of othering the Other which serves hegemonic power. Criticism of this kind is a particularly sensitive spot for anthropologists. It was this definition of cultural difference that originally led to the division of sociology and anthropology into two different disciplines, which, in return, confirmed the status quo through research. Looking more closely at the treatment of the otherness in the early stages of anthropology and sociology, we come upon an ambivalent double relation to alterity. On the one hand, the process of modernization is perceived as exemplifying alienation, which makes us wonder how society as such can be possible at all. But from the perspective common at the time, the modernization process was restricted to the occident, thus creating a barrier between occident and orient, the west and the rest, and consequently, the differing disciplines of sociology and anthropology. The ambivalence of alterity is ex86

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pressed in the fact that modern Europe, having abandoned the intimacy of a “community”, presumes to establish a modern society on the newly evolved alterity. One presumes to discover in other parts of the world precisely the situation one has left behind, and claims that universally the Other will gradually vanish in the process of modernization. By means of this theoretical operation, and this is the crucial point, the Other is deprived of alterity, so that one discovers nothing but the familiar in other parts of the world. When Max Weber called Chinese culture a magic garden, he spoke of a phase that the occident had long ago outgrown. A common self-criticism in anthropology is that, by doing research, we can’t see or grasp anything really alien; i.e., that anthropology, by its theoretical nature, fails to comprehend the Other. Whatever merit, this discipline remains debatable (cf. Stagl 1985). At the very least, anthropological research, in its complementary relationship to sociology, must be credited with establishing a clear-cut dividing line between modern European society and all other cultural traditions. The definition of alterity in modernity differs entirely from any other definitions in any other cultures. At the same time, this construct creates an imagined homogenous modern society contrasting with all other societies. Modern society, established and sustained by strangers, is kept together solely by virtue of this internal cultural homogenization. This perspective of modernity denies any vertical difference within society, suggesting universal values for social order, such as a democratic constitution and the dignity of the human being. Modern alterity within Europe was doubly compensated by the construction of a collective identity. On the one hand, western identity was established to be tantamount to modernity; on the other hand, the concept of the nation became the foundation of collective identification. Membership in a society based on the nation-state compensated for alterity among members. This was closely connected to the idea that every society based on the nation-state is endowed with a self-contained culture offering a frame of meaning for all members to share. National unity was proclaimed; shared culture was the medium, regardless of whether the national unity was an ethnic culture as in Germany, or political and value-oriented as in France. In any case, national identification has always been superimposed by the idea of modern western society, which has established the significance of the external Other to this day.

3. The Problem of Understanding The problem of understanding arises when alterity is universalized in modern societies. Hence, there is a close connection between the concept of understanding and the concept of the Other. This means that all acts of understanding involve some elements of alterity, although this might be glossed over in a particular situation by certain emotional components like friendship. Still, we 87

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must remember that there is no such thing as understanding in a literal sense. To believe that we understand another person is always a mere assumption. The mutual assumption of understanding the other person underlies any circumstance of communication. In this context, Schütz points out that “for our purposes it may suffice to recognize that also the You is endowed with consciousness, that it is stable and its stream of experience is shaped by the same prototype as mine” (Schütz 1974: 138). This is, paradoxically, supported by an act of intersubjective ignorance. We take for granted that understanding as such is possible, although we can never be entirely sure what our communication partner really thinks (Hahn 1994: 145). In this sense, the concept of understanding is delusive. It refers to an ideal and blinds us to its own brittle foundation. In other words, the illusion of mutual understanding has its origin in non-understanding, while it is in everyday life that we put mutual assumptions of the possibility of understanding to the test and create successful communication. In order to achieve our purposes and carry out our plans, we rely on the experiential level. In this context, familiarity as the opposite of alterity implies that we may assume, without realizing it, the feasiblity of understanding in a particular communication situation. Schütz points out that familiarity in this sense is rooted in time spent together, with shared memories as the foundation of social intimacy (cf. Sommer 1990: 140). It should be emphasized that any act of understanding contains some elements of one’s own perspective projected onto the Other. No matter how well we know our communication partner, we will always have our own ideas about them, which will be put to the test while communicating. One might say that true communication is sustained by a mutual willingness to continually revise and re-model one’s image of the partner throughout the communication process. Communication problems arise when we reduce our partner to a stereotype and believe that we can understand them “completely”? this way. We will see later that this concept of projection plays an important role in the context of translation. The concepts of complete understanding and total alterity provide us with a gradual spectrum. At one end, we can place understanding and, at the other, total alterity. The two poles are concepts that do not exist in reality. The idea of understanding somebody else completely and the idea of absolute inaccessability are working hypotheses that help us approach the problem of otherness. In an attempt to understand the Other, we move between extremes without ever touching either pole. Presently, let us draw a line somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, thereby distinguishing two different ideal acts of understanding. Complete understanding

ĺ|ĸ

Total alterity

Toward the left, approaching complete understanding, we can situate acts of understanding that take place in a mutually shared framework. Toward the right, there is no such framework. This corresponds to the common distinction 88

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between intracultural and intercultural communication, in which intercultural communication is defined as a situation in which both parties discard their assumptions of the feasibilty of understanding, or expect them to be disproved in the course of a conversation. For the most part, daily life relies on the assumption that all parties involved share a mutual frame of reference and, therefore, are not likely to get into trouble. The mutual frame of reference offers directives if, contrary to expectations, mutual understanding fails to develop. The pitfall lies in the promise that we can actually achieve complete understanding. Our daily routines tend to make our tentative assumptions look like established facts. When we withdraw into such a naturalized frame of reference, we feel that the Other poses a threat to us because he shows us, by virtue of his mere existence, the fleeting and fragile nature of our world of meaning. Reflecting on the communication process becomes problematic the moment we attribute a mutually shared frame of reference to a culture of origin unified by the nation-state. The accepted idea of intercultural communication, caught in the pitfall of this common misunderstanding, takes the difference between frames of reference in different cultures as an absolute. It is the association of collective identity and society based on the nation-state (as described above) that produces this common mistake. The modern concept of the nation-state, based on the cultural homogenity of its members, aims, as a basic principle, at eliminating the Other. This can be traced to the ideological assumption that a society based on the concept of the nation-state provides or should provide a mutually shared frame of reference. It is precisely this assumption that constitutes a society within which alterity predominates. Therefore, a society based on the concept of the nation-state must be constituted in terms of an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983).4 This existential character of social interaction for the nation-state is the background of the fact that we posit an exaggerated emphasis on the cultural framework of the circumstances of communication. In this context, Joachim Matthes critically points out that the concept of nation-state that arose in Western Europe still dominates the debate of intercultural communication in general (Matthes 1999). However, the academic debates about interculturality and multiculturalism extensively remain Eurocentric, and multicultural phenomena in other parts of the world are hardly considered. The diagram introduced above helps us to put culturalistic reflection in perspective. Understanding versus alterity presents a general problem, with the question of interculturality playing only a secondary role. Problems due to the absence of a mutually shared frame of reference can arise in any communication situation, regardless of the cultural background of the parties in4 Of course, this process did not only take place on an ideological level. This needs to be underscored. The formation of nations is always sustained by standardizing the knowledge of the members of a society, a process that is facilitated by schools, universities and similar institutions.

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volved, precisely because it is the heterogenity of the frames of meaning that constitutes modern society. Every individual has ties to different frames of reference, so if we postulate a universally shared frame of reference, it makes sense, if at all, only in certain circumstances; e.g., in a communication situation with two members of the same family. In other words, understanding can present a problem in any situation, while this fact may often be concealed by the ideology of a merely imagined community.5 We should, therefore, due to functional differentiation, expect various frames of reference to co-exist in modern society. An everyday act of communication requires the ability to move from one frame of reference to another. Using different languages and situating one’s self differently in one’s family and in the professional area has become part of the banality of modern life. In this sense, we all rely on our ability to mediate between different reference systems as a basic skill of communication. Due to the multicultural makeup of their populations, societies in other parts of the world display an even wider array of reference systems. This leads us from the problem of understanding to the intermediation between different reference systems.

4. Cultural Differences and Translation Translation is the term we use for the mediation between different systems of reference. I will look here at the model we apply to the mediation between different languages, translation being commonly understood as an act of mediating between two national languages; e.g., English and Chinese. Here again, we discover the same constellation we encountered when analyzing the Other. It was the very emergence of different national languages that made us aware of our need for translation. Thus, the concepts of translation and cultural differences are inseparably linked. This makes us recall the ambivalence of the Other once again. Modernity both constructs and razes cultural differences at the same time. We did not think in terms of cultural differences before we started to assume a homogenous idea of mankind, only in order to subdivide it into different cultures that we can compare with each other (cf. Baecker 2003: 12f). It is precisely this perspective on differences that makes translation necessary and, at the same time, possible. First of all, the concept of translation suggests a universal reference system, which, albeit hidden, underlies all languages in the world. Different languages are, according to this assumption, merely different ways of expressing a universal meaning shared by all. Serving as tertium comparationis, it guarantees the correctness of a translation, all the while taking for granted that the identity of the original meaning remains identical in spite of the change of context. Bilingual dictionaries support this principle in that they offer an equivalent for almost every word in the other 5 This does not deny the fact that problems of understanding may be amplified when members of different cultures communicate.

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language. But the assumption of unaltered meaning is just as treacherous as the concept of complete understanding. Secondly, the assumption that two expressions in two languages are completely equivalent proves to be an illusion. As an example, Walter Benjamin opposes the German word “Brot” to the French word “pain” (Benjamin 1991). Recent research confirms that it is impossible to render meaning unchanged from one context to another (cf. Vermeer 2002). Any words, any sentences, any texts change their meaning when translated. There is no such thing as a universal structure of meaning underlying all languages, guaranteeing the appropriateness of translation. Despite the momentum of this observation, the idea of equivalency has remained constitutive for the concept of translation. Like the phenomenon of understanding, the concept of translation is based on the assumption that the original meaning will remain more or less unchanged in its new context. The success of any linguistic act of translating can be assured only if we imply the immutability of its meaning, while in effect the accurateness of a translation can probably be verified only pragmatically. By dint of constructing analogies, we can compare several activities and events in their original context with those in the target contexts. In successful translations, we discover similarities and differences that might help us to deepen our understanding of Self and Other. Still, it must be underscored that nothing guarantees the congruency between the original meaning and the translation in the sense that one could expect meanings to be symmetrical or even identical. In western societies, translation was neglected for a long time because, abiding by the principle of equivalence, it was seen as a mere tool for understanding. In this view, translation cannot possibly be anything other than a makeshift surrogate for the original, a copy of the original moved to a different context. Hence, the connotation of second-rateness associated with translation. Let me reverse this perspective and draw your attention to the fact that it is translation that constitutes communication, by creating a make-believe world of the “as if”. Similar to the act of understanding, translation relies on our ignorance of the untranslatable elements of meaning. Hence, communication can happen only because we act on the assumption that translation is possible. I will demonstrate this using the concept of individual biography as an example. Without the adoption of concepts, theories and institutions from the West since the second half of the 19th century, there would be no notion of individual biography in Japanese society (cf. Kinmonth 1981; Shimada 2000: 77-117). With the objective of establishing a new society based on the concept of the nation-state, the introduction and dissemination of the concept of the modern individual, acting independently and rationally, was considered inevitable by the leading intellectuals. For this reason, numerous works of social science were translated into Japanese from western languages.6 The transla6 For school classes in ethics (shûshin) ten different translations of Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science were published between 1873 and 1881, and The

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tion of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859) by Nakamura Masanao (1832-1892) was published in 1870 as Seigoku risshi hen; it became a bestseller at the time, and influenced most new readers and books on moral science.7 The description of Benjamin Franklin’s life in Self Help took on a paradigmatic character for the Japanese society of the Meiji-Era. If biographies of famous Western personalities served as models of modern individuality, the publishing of the genealogy of the emperor conveyed the course of national history. Its origin was seen in mythology in the myth Nihonshoki and it was sought after along clearly linear lines.8 By officially proclaiming the birth of the Japanese nation, the idea arose of the Japanese people as a homogeneous unity throughout history. Continuity was considered to be guaranteed in “Tenno’s 10.000 year-old reign” which, in addition, was used to suggest Japan’s superiority over other nations. The official proclamation of Japan’s origin is interlocked with the acceptance of the Western idea of progress. With the adoption of the social theories taught by August Comte, John Stewart Mill and, above all, Herbert Spencer, it became possible to outline Japan as a society embedded in a clearly defined nation-state. Individual biographies were intertwined in this common destiny so that each individual could personally contribute to the nation’s history. In support of Benedict Anderson’s view, the concept of nation as an imagined community had become real and presented a perspective for the future. Consequently, adopting time in a historical sense made it possible to position the Others in this newly created world order. In this concept, Western societies turned to the goal of development, whereas other Asian societies like China and Korea remained far behind Japan. This empirical example demonstrates once more that the problem of the Other has its origin in an ambivalent mixture of selfness and otherness. Confronted with Western civilization, the Japanese intellectuals began to adopt technologies, institutions, and different theories. It was a very extensive process of translations through which the illusion of understanding could be maintained. With translated—partly misunderstood—concepts and theories, the image of Western civilization as the Other was constituted and projected. Simultaneously, the image of the Self was constituted through translational adoption of Western concepts and theories on both a personal level and a collective level. For this double-faced process, the hermeneutic question of whether the Japanese intellectuals understood the “true” meaning of Western First Reader of the School and Family Series by M. Wilson was translated for elementary schools in 1873 (Shôgaku dokuhon) and widely used (Nakamura 1970: 47-70). 7 In this book, the lives of Edward Jenner (1749-1823), James Watt (1735-1819), Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), and David Livingstone (1813-1873) served as examples. 8 As Benedict Anderson pointed out, the linear concept of national history is deeply linked with the imagination of the national unity (Anderson 1983).

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theories remains secondary. The important fact is that new codes of meaning were produced and began to influence the social reality. This is a never-ending process of culture. This theoretical perspective on the problem of the Other draws our attention to the very idea of translatability, which lies crossways between the different frames of reference. Instead of analyzing existent worlds of meaning or cultures, research from this angle commits itself to examining the process of relationality. This process generates an ever-changing relationship between Self and Other which continues to be negotiated by the parties involved. The concept of translation allows for exact analysis of the process by which the Other and the Self interact and constitute the phenomenon of cultural difference by mutual appropriation of each other. In the course of this process, the two do not maintain their identity. They keep changing, creating and recreating their images of the Self and the Other. It is important to remember that image and reality of the Other can diverge. Our image of the Other is a figment, encouraged by our own cultural perspective and made up of our cultural projections. Still, there are several conceivable cases of relation between projection and translation; one possibility is that the existing image of the Other strengthens through translation, but it also possible that a translated text modifies and even shocks the relation to the Other. In this sense, translation and projection are closely connected. Translation makes us believe that we understand the Other. As with the phenomenon of understanding, we inevitably project from our own contextuality when we translate. Translating, without fail, creates the image of the Other from the perspective of one’s own culture. In direct acts of communication, we never stop presenting and negotiating projected images of the Other in the hope of aligning mutual projections, even though the reality of the Other remains ultimately unfathomable. This is applicable to communication in general.

5. Conclusion Considering all of the above, we can draw several conclusions to the problem of cultural differences. Most importantly, I have tried to show that the exceedingly strong emphasis on cultural differences that characterizes the current debate is problematic, because different codes of meaning are thought of as closed cultural unities disconnected from each other. As a result of this perspective, the relationships among different codes of meaning are not taken into consideration. This concept of homogenous culture becomes ideological glue for modern society in the frame of nation-state, and has disastrous consequences for communication theory; i.e., communication within one culture seems unproblematic, while communication across cultural borders seems risky. The problem of understanding is a fundamental character of modern society, and it should be elevated once again to a general theoretical theme of so93

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ciological and anthropological studies. Certainly, Alfred Schütz offers some important approaches for further development of this theme, but his fundamental differentiation between Western modernity and the rest of the world is now in question. That is to say that the status of a stranger can no longer be limited to immigrants within western society. This paper shows how the Schützerian approaches must be modified and widened to meet contemporary requirements. Two points are paramount: 1) that concepts of codes of meaning, and frames of references, must be seen as dynamic processes building the borderlines of meaning in relationship to each other, and 2) that the theory/status of the stranger to be developed in future studies must take into account the impenetrable variety of different alterities we are faced with today. 3) The way to see the code of meaning as a dynamic process enables us to relieve the problem of understanding. Because the hermeneutic in German tradition is still burdened with the idea that one could win the “true sense” with it’s methods. With this paper, I take the position that understanding is to be grasped only as a pragmatic condition and as a result of social interactions. Hermeneutics in this sense accompanies the production of meanings by social interactions analyzing how they are generated through several translations. We call this way of procedure relational hermeneutics because relationships among different codes of meanings are its main subject.

References Anderson, Benedict (1983): Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso Editions. Bachmann-Medick, Doris (1994): “Multikultur oder kulturelle Differenz? Neue Konzepte von Weltliteratur und Übersetzung in postkolonialer Perspektive”. In: Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 68, 4, 585-612. Baecker, Dirk (2003): Wozu Kultur?, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994): The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter (1991): “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”. In: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, 1, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 9-21. Foucault, Michel (1972): Naissance de la Clinique, Paris: Editions Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (1975): Surveiller et punir. La naissance de la prison, Paris: Editions Gallimard. Fuchs, Martin (1997): “Übersetzen und Übersetzt-Werden: Plädoyer für einen interaktionsanalytische Reflexion”. In: Doris Bachmann-Medick (ed.), Übersetzung als Repräsentation fremder Kulturen, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 308-328. Hahn, Alois (1994): “Die soziale Konstruktion des Fremden”. In: Walter M. Sprondel (ed.), Die Objektivität der Ordnungen und ihre kommunikative

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Konstruktion. Für Thomas Luckmann, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 140166. Huntington, Samuel P. (1993): The third wave: democaratization in the late twentieth century, Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996): The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Kinmonth, Earl H. (1981): The self-made man in Meiji Japanese thought: from Samurai to salary man, Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Pr. Kymlicka, Will (1997): States, Nations and Cultures, Assen: Van Gorcum & Comp. Matthes, Joachim (1999): “Interkulturelle Kompetenz. Ein Konzept, sein Kontext und sein Potential”. In: Zeitschrift für Philosophie 47, 3, 411-426. Nakamura, Keigo (1970): Kyôkasho monogatari—Kokka to kyôkasho to minshû (The History of Teaching Books—the State, Books and Nation), Tokyo. Schütz, Alfred (1971): “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology”. In: Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 91-105. Schütz, Alfred (1974): Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie, Franfkurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Shimada, Shingo (1994): Grenzgänge—Fremdgänge. Japan und Europa im Kulturvergleich, Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus. Shimada, Shingo (2000): Die Erfindung Japans. Kulturelle Wechselwirkung und nationale Identitätskonstruktion, Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus. Shimada, Shingo (2004): “Politik zwischen Differenz und Anerkennung: Multikulturalismus und das Problem der Menschenrechte”. In: Jaeger, Friedrich/Rüsen, Jörn (ed.), Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften, vol. III, Themen und Tendenzen, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 474-488. Simmel, Georg (1983): Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Sommer, Manfred (1990): Lebenswelt und Zeitbewusstsein, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Stagl, Justin (1985): “Die Beschreibung des Fremden in der Wissenschaft”. In: Hans Peter Duerr (ed.), Der Wissenschaftler und das Irrationale. Beiträge aus Ethnologie und Anthropologie 2, vol. II, Frankfurt/Main: Syndikat, 96-117. Taylor, Charls (1992): Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tönnies, Ferdinand (1979): Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Vermeer, Hans J. (2002): “Erst die Unmöglichkeit des Übersetzens macht das Übersetzen möglich”. In: Joachim Renn/Jürgen Straub/Shingo Shimada (eds.), Übersetzung als Medium des Kulturverstehens und sozialer Integration, Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 125-143. Walzer, Michael (1994): Thick and Thin. Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. 95

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C OMING B ACK TO O NE ’ S O WN : W HAT H APPENS TO T RADITION IN N EO -T RADITIONALIST M OVEMENTS ? I. In 20th century sociological thought, the opposition between modern and traditional societies played a very important role. Modernity was associated with progress, a continuous fight against nature to exploit its resources and a permanent endeavour to ameliorate people’s living conditions that could only be achieved by technological, economical and social change. Tradition, however, was regarded as a stubborn resistance against each form of development, a superstitious holding on to what one’s forefathers did. While being modern seemed to be a hallmark of Western societies, all the societies of the so-called Third World were categorized as traditional. And just as the British author Rudyard Kipling once talked of colonialism as “the white man’s burden”, Western development agencies took it as their duty to free the former colonized societies from the trap of tradition. In principle, however, the opposition between modernity and tradition was nothing else but a kind of self-definition of neo-colonial Western culture that provided it with a feeling of superiority and, at the same time, legitimated the ongoing oppression and exploitation of the rest of the world. Tradition, in the classical sociological sense of the term, was defined to be “something handed down unchanged from the past that remains relatively invariant from generation to generation. Thus, to call something a ‘tradition’ is to assert continuity with the past” (Dominguez 1986: 594). But is it really true that tradition does not change and that it stays always the same? Anthropological research has proved how spurious this classical definition actually is. I want to show this by two examples. The first one is a classical one, often cited in anthropological literature. The Tiv people of Nigeria own long genealogies of their forbears, reaching back twelve and more generations into the historical past. In their everyday life, these genealogies play a most important role. They are strongly connected to rights on land, to rights on people and to mutual obligations. After the British colonial regime had established its administration in Nigeria, the genealogical relations were broadly discussed in court cases when the legal entitlement of a group of people towards another one was on dispute. To put order in these affairs, British administrators wrote down the long genealogies as a means to settle future disputes. Forty years later, Laura and Paul Bohannan carried out ethnographic research among the 97

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Tiv (Bohannon 1952). On the base of the information Tiv people gave them, they also tried to reconstruct the old genealogical relationships. However, the lists the two anthropologists could write down differed from the lists the administrators had gathered almost half a century ago. Some of the genealogical lines were now completely missing, while others had gained more importance. Laura and Paul Bohannan’s Tiv informants blamed the British administration for their incorrect records, while the administrators themselves were convinced that the written testimony of their predecessors was out of any doubt. However, “what neither party realized was that in any society of this kind changes take place which require a constant readjustment in the genealogies if they are to continue to carry out their function as mnemonics of social relationships” (Goody/Watt 1968: 32). Tiv society had changed during the half century that lay between the two records. Some genealogical lines had disappeared, while others had produced a bigger offspring. Since Tiv people’s whole social organisation, access to land included, is based on and legitimised by kinship relations, this part of tradition had to be revised in accordance with the historical changes that had gone on. Compared to the written and chronologically ordered historical records that play such an important role in Western society, oral tradition has a big advantage. Since the events of the past are handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation and since human memory is the only medium to store them, history is never as fixed as in literate societies. What has become insignificant for the present can be forgotten, and the past can be reshaped to the needs of living people. Would it be of any use to the present situation to remember a genealogical line that died out many decades ago? It would rather put an element of irritation into the order of a society for which genealogical links “act as ‘charters’ of present social institutions” (Goody/Watt 1968: 33). The second example I want to cite is drawn out of my own ethnographic field work in a small village in the East of the Indonesian island Flores. There, I spent a lot of my time in gathering the myths and folktales the Lamaholotspeaking population of this region is so rich in. For this purpose, I had not only to learn the vernacular, but I had also to gain some knowledge of the ritual language in which the holy legends of the past were composed. People themselves regard them to be the “words of the ancestors”. It is a very venerable kind of language full of metaphors and archaic words that are not used in everyday speech. Younger people do not understand them. Only the old men do who have the privilege to recite the myths during the big common rituals that accompany the yearly agrarian cycle (Kohl 1998: 70-72). One of the most beautiful and poetic myths I was told referred to the origin of the elephant tusks that, still today, are used as bride-wealth (Kohl 1989). The myth tells the story of a young man who did not want to marry a girl of his village. To search his future wife, he undertakes a long and dangerous journey that brings him to the end of the world, “where the trees grow out with their tops from the earth and the giant crocodile is guarding the trunk of the sky” (Kohl 1989: 160). There, he actually meets the girl he had dreamed of, beautiful, diligent 98

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and skilled in all the virtues of a good housewife. Immediately, he falls in love with her and she brings him to her parents’ home where she hides him in a hole in the floor. But the beautiful girl’s parents, the elephant with the seven tusks and the horse with the two necks, are monstrous man-eaters. When her father comes home, he smells the young man’s flesh and wants to devour him. The girl helps him to escape. Together, they flee to the young man’s sailing boat anchored near the coast, hunted by the elephant with the seven tusks. In describing the appearance of the boy’s bloodthirsty father-in-law, the narrator used many archaic expressions out of the rich vocabulary of the ritual language. When I wrote the story down, my friend and informant could translate almost all of them. There was only one word the meaning of which he did not know. On my tape, it sounded like prahoto. Since this word seemed to be very important, we asked the narrator to explain it to us. But he himself, too, did not know its meaning. He advised us to ask some other ritual experts. Eventually, we found one who could give us an answer. Prahoto, so he told us, is the Dutch word for truck. The Dutch had established their colonial regime in Flores at the end of the 19th century. First trucks came to the island some twenty years later. Whoever it was who had introduced the word in the seemingly centuries old traditional tale, obviously he was so impressed by these roaring monsters that he used the word prahoto as a metaphor to characterise the terrifying man eating father-in-law of the myth. The origin of the word fell into oblivion after the Dutch had been chased away. For younger people, prahoto is now one of the “words of the ancestors”. I could add much more examples from all over the world, but I think that the two I cited will suffice to illustrate my thesis. It would be useless to differentiate between pristine or “true” and false or “invented” traditions, because traditions are always in a flow. I will not deny that each tradition has a historical core that is continuously handed down from one generation to the next, but each generation adapts this core to its specific conditions of life. This means that all “the elements in cultural heritage which ceases to have a contemporary relevance tend to be soon forgotten or transformed” (Goody/Watt 1968: 34). Some are dropped, while others change their meaning. At the same time, new elements are integrated into the corpus of traditional knowledge, practices and beliefs. This is done, however, in a way that makes them look older than they really are. Since the corpus of traditional beliefs provides a culture’s worldview, tradition-bound societies tend to ignore historical changes. To them, “the world has always been what it is now” (ibid.: 34). To fulfil its twofold function of giving a satisfying and holistic view of the world and of legitimizing the existing status quo, the distribution of rights and duties as well as the relations of power, tradition is always adapting itself to new historical situations. This process, however, stays unconscious to the people themselves. The unconsciousness of the change to which tradition is continuously subjected can even be regarded as the condition of its survival. Tradition pretends to be static and unchangeable, preserving the customs and manners of the cultural

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past. Actually, however, it transforms the past according to the needs of the present.

II. To live, act and think as the forefathers did seems to be the dominating ideology of non-literate societies that gives security and a feeling of self-esteem. If a culture comes into contact with hitherto unknown other cultures, the scope of tradition is enlarged and new elements are included into the genealogies of the ethnic group’s own ancestors, a process we can observe in many colonized societies. The colonizers, too, behaved in a very similar way, at least in the beginning of European colonial expansion. After Columbus had discovered America, Western scholars tried to integrate the peoples of the New World into the long genealogies of the Old Testament. Some theologians took them as the descendants of Ham, the second son of Noah, while others identified them with the ten lost tribes of Israel (Hodgen 1964: 254-263). Eventually, however, the epistemological horizon of the Bible was too narrow to cope with all the new geographical discoveries. It could not satisfy the need for explaining everything because it had lost its flexibility by having been written down. Therefore, this old “traditional” worldview was successively given up and replaced by new forms of explanation. From these and other examples out of the history of Western thinking we can conclude that the biggest danger for a lived tradition consists in being written down. As soon as this happens, groups of experts have to arise that take on the task of readjusting and reinterpreting the now literate tradition according to the new facts. In non-literate societies, the collective as a whole did this. This changed, however, in the era of colonialism. Administrators as the cited British ones in West Africa and Christian missionaries began to document the traditional corpus of manners and customs, of ritual practices and religious beliefs systems of non-literate societies. Since the end of the 19th century, anthropologists joined them. They were deeply convinced that all “traditional societies” were doomed to die out on account of the influence of Western civilisation and they took it as their duty to save their traditions as a part of the heritage of humanity. Most of them shared the romantic view that each culture’s essence is based on beliefs and values reaching back to an immemorial past. A paradoxical situation arose. Driven by the good will to conserve tradition for future generations, administrators, missionaries and anthropologists froze tradition in their written records to the status quo in which it was found. Tiv people who rejected the genealogical lists written down half a century ago were absolutely right, because by having been written down, the flexibility and adaptability of tradition to historical changes were put to an end. It is true that tradition was always jeopardized by outward powers as well as by inward economical, social and cultural transformation, but by being fixed forever, it was not only objectified for administrative and scholarly pur100

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poses, but also went through a process of reification. Tradition stopped being the very effective connecting thread of social life as which it formerly had fulfilled so many important functions. Instead of this, it transformed into the imagination of a better past. At the same time, a cultural transfer took place. All the aspects of traditional culture which European and American scholars had collected and studied in Non-Western societies were stored in ethnological museums and archives, published in books and documentary films. By this way a big treasure of mankind’s cultural heritage was created that was not only used for scientific studies. Avant-garde artists used the traditional art of Africa and Oceania as a source of inspiration, so-called primitivism became a popular topic in European literature (Torgovnick 1990), and even the producers of Hollywood films discovered how the corpus of human traditions could be exploited for the purposes of the entertainment industry.

III. Theoreticians of globalization as the Swedish sociologist Ulf Hannerz (Hannerz 1996), the American political scientist Benjamin Barber (Barber 1995) or the Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai ( Appadurai 1998) have analysed the dialectic interplay between the global and the local that nowadays has become one of the most dominant features of intercultural relations. On the one hand, consumer capitalism is conquering the world. Its products are transgressing the borders between the cultures, and with them, Western lifestyle, values and attitudes are spreading over the whole globe. On the other hand, there is a big resistance against this form of economic and cultural “McDonaldisation”, although the attitude against Westernization is a very ambiguous one. Some useful elements consumer capitalism has produced are taken over and adapted to local purposes, while others are rejected. Especially relativism, secularism, equal rights for women, sexual freedom and other liberal ideas are seen by many as a threat to their own cultural heritage and values. As a reaction against globalization, we can observe not only almost everywhere in the Non-Western world, but also in some radical Christian denominations in the United States and in Europe a revival of tradition that is often strongly connected to religious fundamentalism. Islam has produced, without any doubt, the most successful counter–movement against the effects of cultural “McDonaldisation”. This was possible because of two factors: First, like Christianity, Islam is a proselytising religion with universal tendencies. Its fight against liberalism and capitalism that arose, according to Max Weber, out of the bosom of Protestantism, is a continuation of its long struggle with its Christian rival. Second, and this may be even more important, Islamic cultures are based on more intact traditions than most others in the world, because some Muslim countries as Afghanistan, Iran or Turkey were never sub-

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jugated by European colonial powers while to others, colonial occupation was only a short historical interlude. Yet neo-traditionalism that expresses itself in most Muslim nations as religious fundamentalism is not limited to these countries alone. We find it in South-Asia among Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists, in Mongolia and Siberia among the adherents of the long oppressed shamanist religions, in Greenland and Canada among the Inuits, in the United States among the Native Americans, in South-America among the descendants of the oppressed Indian population and the former African slaves, in Australia among the Aborigines, in New Zealand among the Maoris, in far-away South Pacific islands as Fiji, Tonga, Samoa or New Caledonia and in many parts of Africa as well. The fundamental existential problem of modern capitalist society, living in an anonymous crowd in which the single person is alienated from its primordial social ties and continuously searching for something he or she can really identify with, was strongly reinforced by the effects of globalisation. Today, it can be found not only in Western mass consumer societies, but also almost everywhere on the globe. According to my view, this feeling of alienation is one of the reasons for the desire to find one’s own cultural roots. Afro-Americans undertake pilgrimages to Ghana to search for their cultural heritage in the land where their ancestors came from, and the autochthonous inhabitants of the United States, who call themselves Native Americans today, try to reconstruct their cultural identity by the written descriptions early travellers and anthropologists made of the customs and manners of the American Indians. The longing for the buried memories of one’s own cultural past seems to be especially strong among ethnic groups living in nation states dominated by a white population majority of British origin as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Yet in the former Russian occupied Asian countries and in all the other former colonies I cited we can observe very similar processes. To regain the lost pre-colonial cultural past, however, is rather difficult. The main problem consists in the fact that the today ethnic minorities that grow out of former non-literate societies must take as their “traditions” what Western missionaries, administrators and anthropologists have written down on the life of their forefathers at a given moment of history. As I remarked in my introduction, it would be wrong to mistake these fixed and reified “traditions” for what tradition really is. And this is not all. Some of the written records may be reliable, but others are swamped by the biases and stereotypes of the foreign observers who did not succeed to come to the cores of a culture alien to them. I want to give only two examples on how contemporary neo-traditionalists were duped by the feigned authenticity of European sources on their historical past. The leaders of the neo-traditionalist Maoritanga-movement in New Zealand are convinced that their ancestors settled the island by a “Great Fleet” of seven canoes that came from the mythic homeland of Hawaiki in about 1350 AD. This idea is a very important part of their ethnic self-image, proving that their ancestors who crossed the South Pacific were as courageous and skilled 102

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navigators as the British. The American anthropologist Allan Hanson (1997), however, could furnish the proof that the story of the legend of the “Great Fleet” was invented by a 19th century missionary who was an adherent of the diffusionist theory according to which Maori descended from the prehistoric Aryans of Central Asia: While their ancestors travelled to the East to colonize Polynesia, the other branch went westward to settle in Europe. In accordance with modern scientific standards, this migration theory is not tenable. Nevertheless it has become such an important part of the Maoris’ image of their own glorious past that Allan Hanson’s proof was fervently rejected by Maoritanga leaders. They took it as an attack against their own holy tradition (Hanson 1997). As I mentioned above, the written records on tradition which missionaries, administrators and anthropologists brought home as a kind of trophies from their stays in non–literate societies were to become a source of inspiration not only for art and literature, but also for the Western entertainment industry. Adventure films, so popular in the fifties, produced an image of African and Near East culture that stood in the tradition of what Edward Said once called orientalism. Another popular genre of Hollywood that transforms the early ethnographic records into the realm of exotic imagination are the so-called Frontier films. They produce a very ambiguous image of the autochthonous population of North America, oscillating between abhorrence when they are drawn as cruel primitives, and desire, when they are idealised as noble savages living in harmony with their natural environment. This stereotyped image has nothing to do with the Native Americans’ true cultural traditions; only their costumes and some of their rituals are taken out of reliable ethnographic reports. If you know these films from early youth and if you should ever have the opportunity to attend at one of the powwows in one of the Native Americans reservations, you surely will have a déjà vu. The participants of these ritual festivities not only dance, sing and drum like the actors of a Hollywood film, but they are also costumed in exact the same “traditional” way. Since the beginning of their independence movement in the late sixties, the powwows have become an important marker of national Panindian identity. This is expressed by the custom that usually all of the participants are dressed like the Prairie–Indian made so popular by the Hollywood horse-operas, although their feather headdress was originally quite uncommon among most other groups of the autochthonous American population. Nevertheless, they also identify themselves with the courageous Sioux and Cheyenne warriors that defeated Colonel Custer at Little Big Horn, a heroic deed so often seen at the movies. By choosing this element out of the large corpus of reified traditions, Native Americans take over one of the stereotypes white men produced on them to use it for their own purpose to idealize a lost and glorious past. It would be easy to cite more examples of this kind: the Mother-Earth-religion of Native Americans that is also an invention of a 19th century (Gill 1987), the revival of the Hula dance in Hawaii that accords so well to the European imagination of free love in the South Sea or the identification of Australian Aborigines 103

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with the spirituality of a natural religion attached to them by the apostles of the New Age movement.

IV. It is true that we cannot decide between true and pristine traditions and how they became modified, in some cases also falsified in the course of history. We cannot do this because we do not dispose of really reliable historical sources. Besides of this, I have some serious doubts about such an idea. On the contrary, we can be sure that tradition has never been something static, handed down unchanged from generation to generation. I do not want to deny that there are some historical formed modes of thought that differ from culture to culture and determine how people cope with the challenges of their natural and social environment. The corpus of tradition, however, was always in a flow which is also indicated by the etymology of the word. Tradition stems from Latin tradere that has the meanings of “hand over”, “bequeath” and “entrust somebody with something”. Possibly, tradere is also the etymological root of the English word “trade”. In each case, in Latin the word is used do denote an action or a process, but not a state of affairs. Despite the illusion in which tradition-bound societies live, tradition becomes a stable entity only if it is written down at a certain moment of history and fixed forever. The protagonists of contemporary neo-traditionalist movements share this illusion. Christian fundamentalist groups, for instance, want to re-establish the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which they believe to have existed in pre-modern times (Hardt/Negri 2000: 148f). Islamic fundamentalists are eager, in a similar way, to restore the “pure Islam” how it was before it was swamped by the bad influences of Western modernity. Both groups refer to written sources that are only a clipping of past times, but that give them the imagination that before modernity came it had always and everywhere been as “then”. Historians of religion know, however, that Christianity and Islam are syncretistic religions into which many elements of older local belief systems were mingled up. The other cited neo-traditional movements are behaving in a very similar way. Coping with traditions even more spoiled and swamped by foreign influences than the Christian and the Islamic one, they pick out the elements they can use for building an identity of their own, and they neglect all the others that are less apt to construct the image of an idealised past on which their future can be based. Actually, by inventing such a patchwork tradition, they create something new. Yet, at the same time, they are traditional too in the processoriented sense of the word by reshaping and readjusting the past to the needs of the present. Thus, on a metaphorical level, neo-traditionalist movements are eventually coming back to one’s own. They do what tradition always has done.

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References Appadurai, Arjun (1998): Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barber, Benjamin R. (1995): Jihad vs. McWorld. How Globalism and Tribalism are Shaping the World, New York: Ballantine Books. Bohannan, Laura (1952): “A Genealogical Charter”. In: Africa 22, 301-315. Dominguez, Virginia (1986): “The Marketing of Heritage”, In: American Ethnologist 13, 546-555. Gill, Sam D. (1987): Mother Earth. An American Story, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Goody, Jack/Watt, Ian (1968): “The Consequences of Literacy”. In: Jack Goody (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannerz, Ulf (1996): Transnational Conncetions. Culture, People, Places (Comedia), London: Routledge. Hanson, Allan (1997): “Empirical Anthropology, Postmodernism and the Invention of Tradition”. In: Marie Mauzé (ed.), Present is Past. Some Uses of Tradition in Native Societies, Lanham: University Press of America, 195-214. Hardt, Michael/Negri, Antonio (2000): Empire, Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press. Hodgen, Margaret T. (1964): Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kohl, Karl-Heinz (1989): “Der Elefant mit den sieben Stoßzähnen. Heiratsregeln im Lewolema-Gebiet und ihre Begründung im Mythos”. In: Zinser, Hartmut/Friedrich Stentzler/Karl-Heinz Kohl (eds.), Foedera naturai. Festschrift Klaus Heinrich zum 60. Geburtstag, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 157-168. Kohl, Karl-Heinz (1998): Der Tod der Reisjungfrau. Mythen, Kulte und Allianzen in einer ostindonesischen Lokalkultur, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Torgovnick, Marianne (1990): Gone Primitive. Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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H OW D IFFERENT ? R E -E XAMINING THE P ROCESS OF C REOLIZATION 1. Introduction In the burgeoning literature on globalization, the words “syncretism”, “hybridity” and “creolization” have emerged as evocative terms for capturing the cultural mixtures that arise in the current age. We are all familiar with these sorts of cultural interpenetrations. People eat Chicken Tikka Massala in England and use the expression “innit” out of semantic context.1 North American Christians incorporate yoga and reiki into their repertoires of spiritual practice (Klassen 2005), and small-town dwellers in Nigeria are totally familiar with films from Hollywood and Bollywood, as well as martial arts releases from Hong Kong and Taiwan (Hannerz 1987). People everywhere fashion themselves and their local social worlds with a pastiche of exogenous, globally dispersed ideas in what Vijay Prashad terms “polyculturalism”—or, more evocatively, “Kung Fusion” (Prashad 2001: xii, 148). Prashad’s work exemplifies the post-1980s dissatisfaction with the idea of cultures as relatively pure, integrated, and bounded entities. Studies of cultural mixture have accordingly become one of the main ways of critiquing and exploding the traditional culture concept. There has been considerable focus, in particular, on migrants and diaspora-dwellers. Homi Bhabha has asserted that such people who live in the interstices between cultures offer “evidence of a more transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities” (Bhabha 1994: 5). These communities exemplify his celebrated “third space”, which is not reducible to, or intelligible in terms of the “original” cultural traditions from which it emerged; rather “this third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives […]” (Bhabha 1990: 211). As Salman Rushdie put it, in defending his Satanic Verses, “Melange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world” (Rushdie 1990: 4). As Thomas Hylland Eriksen (n.d.) has pointed out, Darwin assumed that species arose by branching off, and developing in isolation for long periods, not by mixing. Hybridization led to sterility, not to the formation of new species. Social anthropologists today tend to make the opposite assumption about cultures, namely that even the most apparently isolated groups absorbed out1 An influence from Indian English? Recent sample: “I’m from Cyprus, innit”.

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side influences. Syncretisms have occurred all the way back to an “originary syncretism”, as Jean-Loup Amselle phrased it (Amselle 1998: 1, 161). And, as Rosalind Shaw and I contended in the “Introduction” to our volume Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism (Shaw/Stewart 1994: 7), if all religious traditions are syncretic then the criterion of purity cannot be invoked to criticize them as inauthentic. Social groups still can, however, stake claims to authenticity and uniqueness on the basis of their distinctive mixed-ness. Attention to hybridity does not, thus, finally undermine difference so much as replace an old model of difference based on autonomy and isolation with a new version of difference based on borrowing and eclecticism (Hannerz 1987: 555; Clifford 1988: 17). Mixture is the new difference. In addition to drawing upon local and regional sources, a great many societies are exposed to roughly the same body of globally circulating commodities and cultural forms. The result is that global cultures may be different, but they also overlap one another. This is the basic idea of Ulf Hannerz’s paper “The World in Creolization” (Hannerz 1987). In adopting creolization here Hannerz drew upon the linguistic notion of the creole continuum of dialects in places like Guyana or Jamaica. Such continua span in overlapping mesolects from standard English spoken by certain educated or elite segments of the population, usually in cities, to full-blown creole spoken in the rural hinterland. This topic of creole or post-creole continua was widely debated in creole linguistics in the 1960s and 70s and to a lesser degree it still remains a topic. Hannerz’s principal ideas are the following: 1) In what he terms the “global ecumene” all cultures are increasingly exposed to each other so the possibilities for borrowing are great, but who will borrow from whom is a matter of centre-periphery power relations (Nigeria will borrow more from the US than vice versa); 2) Creolization may proceed through the media (newspapers, books, films, music) or via the actual presence of people from other places (Stockholm, for example, is doubly creolizing for this reason, see Hannerz 1996a); 3) In peripheral societies (such as Nigeria) creolization will be realized internally on a creole continuum with elites in the capital city absorbing exogenous global influences to the highest degree and people in remote villages being the least influenced. In this latter example, Hannerz makes a good point about the implicit “sociology” in the creole idea (Hannerz 1996b: 68)—a reason to prefer it over syncretism. Despite Hannerz’s cautious efforts at proposing creolization as a model of global flows, distributions and accommodations, the term seems to have flattened out into a general synonym of “hybridity”, the equivalent of “mixture”—itself, a grossly under-explored term (to which I shall return). Granted the gathering conviction of the importance of studying mixture for understanding culture, it is not surprising that the potentially fruitful concept of “creolization” should be pressed into service in this narrow way. A prominent example would be the following formulation by Pnina Werbner in the Introduction to her edited volume, Debating Cultural Hybridity (Werbner 1997: 8): “We need to ask not why creolization occurs, but why actors in a negotiated 108

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field of meaning constantly attempt to deny and defy these processes of hybridization.” Or, one could cite this passage from the Introduction to a 1995 edited volume on literature, Penser la créolité: “La créolité redéfinie comme tout espace de métissage ou de mixité … est, en ce sens, notre avenir” (Cottenet-Hage 1995: 20). The creole idea has become more pungent epigram than analytical concept: “We are all Caribbeans now, in our urban archipelagos” (Clifford 1988: 173). Already in 1992, at the end of his volume Cultural Complexity, Hannerz himself, referring to the creolization idea, recognized that, “linguistic sources of inspiration have not always served cultural analysis well, and whenever one takes an intellectual ride on a metaphor, it is essential that one knows where to get off” (Hannerz 1992: 264). In what follows, I want to take a different ride on a different metaphor, but one which nonetheless derives from the concept of creolization. If one examines the complexity of the historical development of the various strands of meaning of creolization, then one sees that there is much more to the idea than just mixing. And there are other, perhaps more suggestive, models to be drawn upon than the linguistic continuum example used by Hannerz. Today linguists debate the degree and type of grammatical “restructuring” that must occur for a language to count as a creole rather than, say, a pidgin or a dialect of the colonial European language. What might be the cultural equivalents of relexification, or of lexical items becoming grammatical items, or of phrases being re-analysed, or of the optimization of grammar or lexicon (Neumann-Holzschuh/Schneider 2000)? Historians and anthropologists working on the formation of African-American societies in the New World have tangled a little bit with these sorts of ideas originating from linguistics, but it is an area of present disagreement, open to further intervention (Price 2001, Palmié nd. b, Yelvington 2001). For one thing, social historians do not claim to understand the social milieu in which creole languages arose. This requires reconstructing plantation living conditions and the social organization of slaves, and their sphere of interaction with the colonial European language. Just how fast creole languages were formed is another question currently disputed by linguists. Some, such as Derek Bickerton, say within one generation, others over much longer time periods. Robert Chaudenson has offered a full-scale model, in which he asserts that French creoles did not even develop from pidgins, but rather more directly from French (Chauderson 2001: 305). So the very ideas of “pidgin” and “creole” that have been taken for granted in linguistics since the 1950s are currently being re-thought. Peter Mühlhäusler, for example, has proposed sinking the terms “pidgin” and “creole” into the background of “linguistic ecology” (Mühlhäusler 1995: 245). And finally, historians of the early Americas have lately documented how people in the colonial homelands conceived the difference between themselves and those born in far away colonies in the Americas, and vice versa.

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In the main part of this paper I would like to draw out and develop this last example as a model to be understood and then heuristically applied to contemporary developments. There are, as I have just contended, other models and strands of the creole concept that could be applied to understand a variety of current social phenomena. I do not exclude these other possibilities, but rather point to their potential fruitfulness by pursuing this one test case where creolization yields something other than just mixture or the linguistic continuum. In examining the early colonial period I am using the past, or contemporary historical representations of it, as a heuristic for identifying new frames of analysis in anthropology, new ethnographic objects of study, and specific topics for actual research. Theory has generally come into anthropology from modern linguistics or philosophy, not through the study of the past. Perhaps it could be deemed to be conservative to adopt ideas from the past. I am proposing, rather, that the past offers unexpected analytical categories that might be applicable today. The stuff of real life is often stranger than fiction, so perhaps we ought to be combing the historical record more often; it could be just as inspirational to original thought as reading Derrida.

2. Creolization and “Race” Creolization can give us a different metaphor to ride if we situate the development of the term in the history of ideas about “race”. The word “creole” first arose in Portuguese (crioulo) sometime in the sixteenth century, but was first attested in Spanish in 1590 with the meaning of “Spaniard born in the New World”.2 By the early 1600s it is also attested in a Peruvian source with the meaning of “Black born in the New World”. It came to mean any plant, animal or person born in the New World but of Old World progenitors. The concept did not originally indicate mixture. From the earliest colonial period down to today in various parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, “creole” has often designated a person of “pure” Old World parentage (Stephens 1983, 1999). Lest this point slip by, I quote from Friederici’s Amerikanistisches Wörterbuch, where he glosses one long-term meaning of creole as: “Die Kinder reinblütiger europäischer Eltern, die in Amerika geboren sind” (Fried-

2 José de Acosta’s, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) presents the word spelled “crollo” (OED, s.v. “creole”, Stephens 1983: 30). The Portuguese term “crioulo” is related to cria, meaning “infant, nursling, sapling” but also “a person without family, without material means, e.g criada—a domestic servant” (Houaiss s.v. cria; cp. Portuguese criadouro, nursery [for infants, plants]). It contains overtones of domesticating, nursing. Linguists generally account for the -oulo ending as a diminutive suffix so crioulo is taken to mean “a child of slaves brought up in the master’s house” (Arrom 1951: 175).

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erici 1947: 220).3 How different this is from the sense of mixture attaching to the word today. “Creole” was an oppositional term; it distinguished Blacks born into slavery in the Americas from African-born slaves transported to the New World and known variously as Guinea Blacks, Saltwater Blacks or bozales/boçais in Spanish and Portuguese.4 Applied to Europeans, “creole” distinguished those locally born from those born in the Old World, who in Spanish were sometimes referred to as peninsulares (i.e hailing from Iberia), and in Portuguese as renóis (from the Realm) or marinheiros (sailors; Vale de Almeida nd). With the cessation of slave importation in the early 19th century the opposition of creole to bozal ceased to be relevant. So the terms criollo/crioulo began to hold more significance for contrasting types of European-descended people. Yet increased intermarriage among blacks, whites and Indians made pure descendants less common over time. Certainly the rise of independence movements in Latin America and other places, often led by “creoles” (whether selfdenominated or so labelled by colonial authorities), required forging a unified national identity as “local” as opposed to the European, colonial power. So various nation-building strategies embraced and valourized mestizaje. As Simón Bolívar (himself possibly of Afro-Hispanic descent) pronounced at Angostura in 1819, after the tide in the battle for the independence of Gran Colombia had turned his way, “We are not Europeans, we are not Indians, but a mixed species of aborigines and Spaniards” (Palmié nd.a). The term criollo became compatible and overlapping with mestizo. Not only had intermarriage proceeded apace during the eighteenth century, but claiming to be purely Spanish while revolting against Spain would have been incoherent as a strategy. “Creole” came to designate someone who was local in birth and allegiance, a tack that was also quite useful for expropriating land from Indians, as Cañizares-Esguerra has argued (nd). In post-colonial Mexico and perhaps in other places, criollo carried, and apparently still does carry, overtones of eliteness in contrast to mestizo (Helg 1990; Arrom 1951: 173). The foregoing shows how historical contingencies have fractured and inflected the meaning of creole so that it means different and contradictory things all around the Caribbean area. In Haiti, which won independence early and expelled the white population, créole could only refer to black people, while on Martinique, which remained within the French orbit, the same word referred to white people, as it did in Louisiana. In Martinique, according to Chaudenson, creoles are those who cannot claim the term “white” following the “one drop” rule (Chauderson 2001: 6). In other words, even the most minimal amount of black ancestry renders one categorically “black” (see 3 In his 1862 history of the United States, J.M. Ludlow wrote that, “There are Creole whites, creole negroes, creole horses, etc; and creole whites are of all persons the most anxious to be deemed of pure white blood” (OED, s.v. “creole”). 4 According to Chaudenson (2001), bozal meant “muzzle”, a reference to the inability of newly arrived slaves to speak the local language in the New World. Stephens (1983: 29) glosses it as “fresh, green, inexperienced”.

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Domninguez 1986). It is evident that the historical development of “creole” as an identity in the postcolonial period is quite complex, and I cannot pursue it further here. Indeed I have already proceeded ahead of my main historical focus. What is interesting for my purposes is the opposition between metropolitans and creoles in the early colonial period (16th-17th centuries). If a Spanish couple had one child born to them in Spain, and a second child born in Ecuador (i.e. New Spain), this second child would be marked out as creole. What was the importance of this distinction? How could the one child, who shared the same parents be different from its sibling? The distinction certainly was not a neutral one. Creoles were thought to be indolent, disease ridden, lascivious—in short, their re-location to such a different climate zone had caused them to become physically denatured and morally degenerate. Notice again, here, that this transformation arose in the process of environmental adaptation, and not, in the first instance, on account of intermarriage, or genetic mixing, with blacks or Indians. The environmental explanation for human difference that was produced at this time already had a long pedigree in the West beginning with the Hippocratic treatise on Airs, Waters and Places dated to around 430 B.C. (Jouanna 1996: 82). In this text, composed slightly after Herodotus’ account of the Persian Wars, the author drew attention to the effect of climate upon peoples by contrasting Asians and Europeans. In the author’s view the lack of variation in the Asian climate caused the people to be cowardly, mentally flabby, unwarlike and subject to tyranny (chap. 12). By contrast, in Europe climate varies seasonally and this stimulates people to be mentally sharper, more courageous and inclined to democratic forms of polity. This environmental determinism was illustrated by an account of the Scythians, a people who lived north of the Black Sea. The author asserted that the cold, moist climate not only induced a lack of sexual desire in Scythian men, but that they became completely impotent and ultimately transgendered.5 Athens, needless to say, had the perfect climate for fostering an attractive and intelligent population. In time, Vitruvius made exactly the same claims for Rome at the height of the Empire (Sassi 2001: 113-127). As the age of exploration got underway in the early 16th century, this classical environmental approach to difference still existed, although it had perhaps been sidelined by the main Christian explanations for human difference. On the one hand, there was the view that all people, no matter how physically different, were created by God, lived under divine protection, and were potential brethren in Christ. On the other hand, there was the harsher European Christian view (not endorsed by the Catholic Church) that darker-skinned people, especially African and New World Indians, bore the curse of Ham, 5 “The cavities of their bodies are extremely moist, especially the belly, since, in a country of such a nature and under such climatic conditions, the bowels cannot be dry. All the men are fat and hairless and likewise all the women, and the two sexes resemble one another” (chap. 19, see also chap. 22; Pigeaud 1983: 51).

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Noah’s middle son, who committed the sin of looking upon his father’s naked body (Hannaford 1996: 91; Chaplin 2002: 159).6 Some saw the dark skin of these people as the symbol of their inferiority, a demonic darkness related to evil, sin and the Devil. The ancient environmental approach was potentially blasphemous because, if pushed hard enough, it could imply the emergence of entirely new forms of being (species), and this ran counter to the idea that the present variety of life forms on earth were all created by God and eternally fixed.7 With the re-discovery of Greco-Roman philosophy and science during the Renaissance, the environmental strand of thought was reinvigorated and drawn upon in the first secular accounts of human origins (e.g. Bodin 1565, see Hannaford 1996: 156). Environmental determinism continued to gain strength in the seventeenth century: Montesquieu substituted the Ottomans for the Hippocratic Scythians in his Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu 1748; Arnold 1996: 21); Buffon apparently contemplated the experiment of bringing some Senegalese to Denmark to see how long it would take them to turn white, and Edward Long, in his 1774 History of Jamaica, stated without equivocation that just as Englishmen who settled in China or Africa became Chinese or African, so settlers in Jamaica were undergoing permanent physical alteration (Long cited in Chaplin 1997: 242). My contention is that ancient ideas of environmental determinism came strongly to the fore in the early colonial period, contributed to the formation of popular thought about creoles, and lingered around into the 19th century. Certainly Lamarckism and Darwinism were largely compatible with Hippocratic and Aristotelian thought about environmental influences. Predictably, New World creoles reacted against allegations of their degeneracy. In the English colonies of North America settlers argued that they were not becoming like Indians. They maintained that their bodies and constitutions remained thoroughly English (Chaplin 1997). In arguing against the environmental determinists and advocating the indelibility of their physical and character traits, they came close to advocating a full-blown classical racism such as developed in the 19th century. It is significant that during this early colonial period the English colonists never adopted the word “creole” to refer to themselves, nor did those in the metropole apply this label to them. This was perhaps because “creole” indicated to the Protestant English mind a degree of local adaptation that only Portuguese and Spanish would engage in (Chaplin nd.). At the same time, ability to avoid the term reflected the degree to which the English colonists had resisted a discourse about their own degeneration 6 Genesis 9.22ff. Upon awakening from his drunken slumber Noah, according to the OT text, cursed Ham’s son, Canaan. This curse was popularly affixed to Ham in medieval Christianity in the context of rising prejudice against Jews, Muslims and Africans, since Ham’s progeny became the inhabitants of Palestine, North Africa and Ethiopia. 7 Bodin denied this possibility but discussed how the same environmental effects could produce different results. The sun caused wax to melt, but clay to harden (cited in Cañizares-Esguerra 1999: 60).

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(Chaplin nd.). In the run-up to revolution they began to call themselves “Americans”—this, rather than “creole”, was their term of self-identification as New World “locals”; and it really came to the fore only after independence. In Latin America, discussions over the deleterious effects of New World residence proceeded further and into more elaborate detail. From the 1590s to the mid-seventeenth century various humanists and clerics published claims that the skies, the stars and the climate of New Spain were “inferior” to those of Europe, and that they induced “inconstancy, lasciviousness, and lies, vices characteristic of the Indians and which the constellations make characteristic of Spaniards who are born and bred there”.8 Latin American creoles unsurprisingly took umbrage and replied that the skin colour of blacks and Indians was the result of the curse of Ham and European-descended people would not become black (Salinas 1630 cited in Cañizares-Esguerra 1999: 33). The Spanish émigré doctor, Juan de Cárdenas, writing in Mexico in 1591, detailed the many physical differences between creoles and peninsulares. The creoles apparently aged sooner, went grey faster, suffered menstrual cramps and had more stomach problems than the peninsulares. Cárdenas explained these conditions, and any changes in appearance or complexion among Creoles, by casting them as “accidental” rather than “essential” changes—a distinction introduced by Aristotle and famously drawn upon by Aquinas in his theology of the Eucharist. The essential qualities of Creoles, Cárdenas maintained, would always be those of the European. In acquiring some accidental traits in the New World the creoles had, according to Cárdenas, only improved their mental qualities; creoles were more intelligent than Spaniards, if, perhaps, physically weaker (Cañizares-Esguerra 1999: 63). The historian Jorge CañizaresEsguerra considers these formulations in terms of accidents and essences, to be the first instance of European race theory a century and a half before the more influential classical formulations.

3. How Different? I turn back now to the question posed in my title. I have been focusing on how erstwhile fellow countrymen, even one’s own children, could become different from oneself if they were born in, or lived for a long enough period of time in, the New World. The difference was conceived to come about through adaptation, acclimatization and indigenization. This could involve mixture in the sense of intermarriage, but that was incidental to the prime understanding of how creolization worked. As Benedict Anderson recognized, in a chapter of his book Imagined Communities entitled “Creole Pioneers”, the process of creolization raised questions about the sorts of allegiance that fellow countrymen might have in 8 Quotations drawn from Giovanni Botero, Relationi Universali (1596) and Juan de la Puente (1612) as cited in Cañizares-Esguerra (1999: 46).

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diaspora. Their bodies changed, and so did their political consciousness.9 Although labelling American colonials such as Benjamin Franklin “creoles” was erroneous, Anderson did, productively identify creolization as an early motivating force behind nationalism. It worked by splintering a pre-existing political unity; through creolization the self became other. This is a process still very much alive today in the postcolonial world where so many people reside far from their original homelands. National identities and loyalties are constantly being stretched, contradicted, re-embraced or rejected altogether (Anderson 1994).10 My personal experience as an American who has resided outside of the United States, largely in Britain, over the past twenty-five years has no doubt contributed to my interest in creolization. In particular, it has led to identifying homeland-diaspora recriminations about physical, cultural, moral and political change—or suspicions of change—as an area of interest. After a few years away, my distinctive American accent had largely disappeared and I realized that people in the States did not assume that I was American. Upon learning that I was, indeed, American, but had somehow altered or lost my accent, I had the sense—particularly in California—of being viewed as inauthentic and treated with suspicion if not derision. In an American publication of a work written in England I used the word “courgette” and, even though I varied it with the word “zucchini”, an American critic lambasted my introduction of alien vocabulary. When passing US Immigration I said as little as possible for fear that my accent would cause me to be detained for further identity checks. In general terms, I had reversed the direction of an earlier creolization by moving from the New to the Old World, thereby retracing the journey my great grandparents made when they departed from Eastern Europe a century ago. With respect to my country of origin, this was pretty serious creolization. Like so many people, nowadays, I am a dual national. This is a small, personal story but the same factors are negotiated in many places and so many ways today. The question of “how different”? - How greatly, and in what ways, can someone who was once one of us, become different from us? - admits worthwhile ethnographic exploration inspired by the history of creolization in the early colonial period. In order to pursue such research, one must be prepared to consider situations as involving creolization even when the people concerned do not use the terms creole and creolization. “Creolization” becomes a theoretical rather than just an ethnographic concept. A history (of early colonization) has thus potentially suggested a research agenda entailing the study of what people in “homelands” say about their compatriots who live abroad, and what people in diaspora say and feel about

9 Ann Stoler (1992) studies these issues of creolization and allegiance in Dutch Indonesia, where it was recommended that children of Dutch colonials be sent back to Holland for schooling to counteract creolization. 10 Anderson recognized the relevance of colonial creolization as a heuristic for thinking about contemporary transnationalism in his 1994 article, “Exodus”.

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returning to the homeland and getting along with their co-nationals after long periods away. Postcolonial British residents of Africa and India find it hard to contemplate re-locating to Britain for a whole list of reasons (space, climate, lack of “help”). West Indians who have spent thirty and forty years working in the UK return to the Caribbean, but stand out on account of their accents, clothes, attitudes and the sorts of houses they build - particularly their metal balconies (Horst 2004). In Grenada they call them JCBs—Just Come Backs. The locals vandalise their property and ridicule them (Davies 1999). Similarly, many Turks raised in Germany are not versed in Turkish norms, sexual mores, or codes for expressing social respect. They are not accepted as wholly Turks by their compatriots in Turkey, but rather as somewhat Germanized. Increasingly many of them are beginning to view Turkey as a vacation spot, and they approach their putative homeland with German notions of time, work and leisure (Mandel 1990: 162). This is a good example of creolization as a falling out of synchrony with the homeland; creolization as temporal re-structuring. In the 1970s and 80s large public debates in Japan surrounded the children of international executives who attended schools in foreign countries, even for as little as three months. They were considered to have absorbed dangerous foreign influences, to have lost Japaneseness and therefore to encounter difficulty re-entering Japanese society. Their condition was medicalized and labelled “non-adaptation syndrome” (futekio shojo) and they were sent to special schools once back in Japan where the educational objective was variously described as “Japanisation”, “re-dyeing” or “the stripping of foreignness” (Goodman 1994). Similar schools or programmes exist in many countries, not least in Germany, where creolized Aussiedler, some of whom have lost German linguistic and cultural competence, are taught the acrolectal homeland forms (Senders 2002). Such schools furnish excellent opportunities for ethnographic research into what a society deems its cultural standards to be. In tackling the problem from this angle, one does not need to formulate a list of what might be essential cultural attributes, or even be convinced that there is such a thing as culture. One may simply study how people in the social field negotiate cultural competence, or its lack, in practice. Consider the following vignette from Paul Stoller’s Embodying Colonial Memories which draws on research carried out among the Songhay in Niger (Stoller 1995). At one point during his fieldwork an eminent Songhay noble came to stay with him at the compound he was renting. This visitor lived in France where he had trained in medicine and currently held a highly qualified position in the field of Nursing. One day a local man came to the door and asked to see the anasaara—the “foreigner”. That would be me, Stoller volunteered. But no, he was looking for the visitor. If a Songhay learns a European language or lives in Europe then he is considered to be European. Being classed as a foreigner by his childhood friends caused this Songhay émigré anxiety and he tried to prove to his erstwhile co-villagers that he was perfectly local. Along with his friends he would drink unpurified water from the Niger 116

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River, rather than be seen not to drink along with the others, or to set himself apart by drinking bottled water. As a health care professional he knew the dangers of drinking this water, yet he did not wish to compromise his claim to be a real Songhay. “I’ll drink the same water as my brothers”, he said (Stoller 1995: 153). The result was that he spent much of his time sick with dysentery. Stoller’s visitor had physically creolized, and no amount of rhetorical denial, or appropriate cultural performance, could mask that. This example illustrates that creolization also involves actual physical and bodily changes, just as it did in the early period of colonization when so many settlers, slaves and Indians died of diseases for which their bodies had no preparation. Creolizing meant acclimatizing, acquiring immunities against the diseases swirling around in the far flung colonies, many of them in the inhospitable torrid zone. Examples would be yellow fever, Chagas disease or even neurasthenia. The American physician George Beard defined this last illness as a New World ailment in his 1881 book, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences. Tropical medicine would then elaborate it as “tropical neurasthenia”, the symptoms of which were physical exhaustion, headaches and incipient madness (Arnold 1996: 153ff). Descriptions of tropical neurasthenia from the early twentieth century literature resonate with Cárdenas’ 1591 inquiry into the Creole body in Mexico. We are, I think, in the presence of a three hundred year long stereotype that was constantly renewed through the negotiation between ideological suppositions about creoles, and empirical observations of creole bodies.

4. Copyrighting Creolization I do not follow Sidney Mintz, who has asserted that the term creolization cannot be applied as a theoretical term beyond the Caribbean area because of the actual and painful histories of disease and slavery, which characterized the process in this area (Mintz 1996).11 I am proposing metaphorical, theoretical, and analytically fruitful extensions of a concept which did have real historical specificity, but also lots of real historical tributaries. Simply put, “creole” and “creolization” have meant lots of different things at different times and in different places. Like all natural language there is no way to control or police the meaning of this term. We cannot freeze and give copyright claims to the Caribbean. Which century in the Caribbean would we choose? In the seventeenth it meant purity of descent, while in the twentieth it meant mixture and complex rhizomatics—the mangrove of possibilities spoken about by the founders of the créolité movement in Martinique (Gallagher nd). The word and the 11 Aisha Khan (2001) has, in fact, argued that the Caribbean area itself does not live up to the postcolonial assumptions of creole culture as open and fluidly absorbing cultural influences. Caribbean societies can be exclusionary (of East Indians, Chinese).

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concept existed at equally early stages in Latin America and in Portuguese colonies and in vastly separated areas such as the Indian Ocean. The term “creole” has itself creolized, which is what happens to all productive words with long histories. As the German creole linguist Hugo Schuchardt showed in his critique of the Stammbaum model in Comparative Philology, one cannot assume sound changes to be a matter of regular internal development; they are often determined by exogenous influences or dictated by the particular (in)abilities of new speech communities to which a language spreads. This is why it somewhat misses the point to contest those who apply creolization to refer to apparently very superficial, incidental and ephemeral “mixtures” such as drinking a coke, watching a film, or hearing a song on the radio. The next year one may listen to different music or drink a local juice, and the effects of last season’s choices might be forgotten altogether. Certainly last season’s choices would not have radically altered one’s immunity to certain diseases, or given one a new native language. All sorts of things can count as mixture. Mixture is a current of meaning within creolization, but it is astonishing how little interrogated this concept is. If I look at someone and register their image on my cornea, have they mixed with me? Do they remain mixed up with me if I retain a memory? Above I drew attention to the relative duration of mixtures. When a creole language or cultural mixture forms, should it be thought of as crystallizing into a whole system that then becomes more resistant to subsequent imports, as if it had a fence around it? Or do we think of it as just having “gelled” such that if new liquid is added it could potentially be absorbed under the right conditions and thereby the gelatin could keep expanding? When languages combine one can see this on several levels— grammar, lexicon, phonology. Is it possible to be similarly more analytical in considering cultural mixtures? And how easy is it for mixtures to resolve back into their constituent pieces? Once one learned creole in Jamaica it was not possible to go back to speaking one’s original African language, whereas at the pidgin stage it would be possible simultaneously to speak one or the other of the languages in contact. In this regard we might recast Hannerz’s world in creolization as a world in pidginization since Nigerians retain their indigenous culture and do not forget or lose it as they engage with global flows.12 My purpose here has been to show that an understanding of creolization in the early colonial period, but also as an identity in nation-building, and as a concept in linguistics still offers many models for understanding contemporary phenomena. These models suggest alternative ways of understanding people who once belonged unproblematically to a particular group but then came to diverge from it. The dynamics involved go beyond mixing, but also subsume mixing. The new models I propose create a plural, expanded theory of creolization; they take their place alongside earlier models such as 12 Jacqueline Knörr personal communication on “pidginization” vs. “creolization”. See Knörr 1995 and her Habilitationsschrift: Orang Betawi, Orang Jakarta, Orang Indonesia.

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“mixing” or the “creole continuum” without erasing them. The model most centrally elaborated here is suggested by issues arising in the early period of colonizing the New World. This historical example gave us a basic structural situation of a homeland and a diaspora where contestation occurred over issues of cultural competence and shared conscience, character and body type. People could diverge from each other by adaptation to a new climate, or falling out of time with each other’s cultural repertoires. These were matters for debate, anxiety and the direct and indirect articulation of normative views of cultural form or national attributes. Much of the twentieth-century study of diaspora and migrant communities was conducted from the point of view of the receiving countries, in order to ask the question of whether migrants could be absorbed, or to what degree they belonged to or identified with the host country. Only later, with the elaboration of terms such as “diaspora” and “transnational communities” did we give more attention to their attachments to their homelands. What needs further to be factored in is how people in the homelands feel about their expatriated countrymen. And vice versa. Are they still like us? Can they return and live here without problem? My goal is not to label people in these situations as “creoles” when they do not do so themselves, but rather to use “creolization” as a rubric, or category of analysis—as a sort of net in which we can catch and compare a variety of contemporary global phenomena that have not been identified for comparison. The idea of creolization is a spur that might lead us into the texture of these two-way debates over cultural belonging and competence. The body, subjectivity and feelings of belonging are strongly implicated in these situations and in these dialogues. There is trouble in the third space, and we need to study the uncertainties and anxieties that beset it.

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Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge (nd.): Creole Discourse in Colonial Spanish America, ms. Chaplin, Joyce (1997): “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies”. In: William and Mary Quarterly 54, 229-52. Chaplin, Joyce (2002): “Race”. In: M. Braddick/D. Armitage (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, London: Palgrave, 154-172. Chaplin, Joyce (nd.): Creoles in British America: From Denial to Acceptance, ms. Chaudenson, Robert (2001): Creolization of Language and Culture, (revised with S. Mufwene), London: Routledge. Clifford, James (1988): The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cottenet-Hage, Madeleine (1995): “Introduction”. In: M. Condé/M. CottenetHage, Penser la créolité, Paris: Karthala. Davies, Hunter (1999): “Back to the Future”. In: The Guardian (UK daily newspaper) 27 February. Dominguez, Virginia (1986): White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland (nd.): Creolization in Anthropological Theory and in Mauritius, ms. Friederici, Georg (1947): Amerikanistisches Wörterbuch, Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter & Co. Gallagher, Mary (nd.): The ‘Créolité’ Movement: Paradoxes of a French Caribbean Orthodoxy, ms. Goodman, Roger (1994): Kikokushijo Research: Shifting Paradigms and the Problem of Social Scientific Research, ms. (published in Japanese). Hannaford, Ivan (1996): Race: The History of an Idea in the West, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hannerz, Ulf (1987): “The World in Creolisation”. In: Africa 57, 546-559. Hannerz, Ulf (1992): Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press. Hannerz, Ulf (1996a): “Stockholm: Doubly Creolizing”. In: Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, New York: Routledge, 150-159. Hannerz, Ulf (1996b): “Kokoschka’s Revenge: Or, the Social Organization of Creolization”. In: Ulf Hannerz , Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, New York: Routledge, 65-78. Helg, Aline (1990): “Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies and Popular Reaction”. In: R. Graham (ed.), The Idea of Race in Latin America, R. Austin: University of Texas Press, 37-61. Hippocrates (1983): “Airs, Waters and Places” (English trans., J. Chadwick/W.N. Mann). In: G.E.R. Lloyd (ed.), Hippocratic Writings, London: Penguin, 148-169.

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Hippocrates (1996): Airs, eaux, lieux (Greek text, French trans. by J. Jouanna), Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Horst, Heather (2004): ‘Back a Yaad’: Constructions of Home among Jamaica’s Returned Migrant Community, Ph.D. thesis, University College London. Houaiss, António (ed.) (2001): Dicionário Houaiss da lingua portuguesa, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Objectiva. Jouanna, J. (1996): “Notice”. In: J. Jouanna (ed.), Airs, eaux, lieux, Paris: Les Belles Lettres (Budé), 7-184. Khan, Aisha (2001): “Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol”. In: Cultural Anthropology 16, 271-302. Klassen, Pamela (2005): “Ritual Appropriation and Appropriate Ritual: Christian Healing and Adaptations of Asian Religion”. In: History and Anthropology 16 (Eric Hirsch/Charles Stewart (eds.), Special Issue: Ethnographies of Historicity), 377-391. Knörr, Jacqueline (1995): Kreolisierung versus Pidginisierung als Kategorien kultureller Differenzierung: Varianten neoafrikanischer Identität und Interethnik in Freetown/Sierra Leone, Münster/Hamburg: Lit Verlag. Mandel, Ruth (1990): “Shifting Centers and Emergent Identities: Turkey and Germany in the Lives of Turkish Gastarbeiter”. In: D. Eickelman/J. Piscatori (eds.), Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination, New York: Routledge, 153-71. Mintz, Sidney (1996): “Enduring Substances, Trying Theories”. In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, 289-311. Mintz, Sidney (1998): “The Localisation of Anthropological Practice”. In: Critique of Anthropology 18, 117-33. Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat de (1748): De l’esprit des loix, ou, Du rapport que les loix doivent avoir avec la constitution de chaque gouvernement, les moeurs, le climat, la religion, le commerce, &c. microform : a quoi l’auteur a ajoute : des recherches nouvelles sur les loix romaines touchant les successions, sur les loix Francoises, & sur les loix feodales, Geneve: Barrillot. Mühlhäusler, Peter (1995): “Pidgins, Creoles and Linguistic Ecologies”. In: Philip P. Baker (ed.), From Contact to Creole and Beyond, London: University of Westminster Press, 235-250. Neumann-Holzschuh, Ingrid/Schneider, Edgar (2000): Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed.com from 2004, Oxford University Press. Palmié, Stephan (nd.a): The “C-Word” Again, ms. Palmié, Stephan (nd.b): Anthropology in Creolization: Is There a Model in the Muddle?, ms. Pigeaud, Jackie (1983): “Remarques sur l’inné et l’acquis dans le Corpus Hippocratique”. In: F. Lasserre/P. Mudry (eds.), Formes de pensée dans la collection Hippocratique, Geneve: Droz, 41-55. 121

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Prashad, Vijay (2001): Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, Boston: Beacon. Price, Richard (2001): “The Miracle of Creolization”. In: New West Indian Guide 75, 35-64. Rushdie, Salman (1990): In Good Faith, London: Granta. Sassi, Maria Michaela (2001): The Science of Man in Ancient Greece, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Senders, Stefan (2002): “Ius Sanguinis or Ius Mimesis? Rethinking ‘Ethnic German’ Repatriation”. In: D. Rock/S. Wolff (eds.), Coming Home to Germany?: The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic, Oxford: Berghahn, 87-101. Shaw, Rosalind/Stewart, Charles (1994): “Introduction: Problematizing Syncretism”. In: Charles Stewart/Rosalind Shaw (eds.), Syncretism/AntiSyncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, London: Routledge, 1-26. Stephens, Thomas M. (1983): “Creole, Créole, Criollo, Crioulo: The Shadings of a Term”. In: SECOL Review 7, 28-39. Stephens, Thomas M. (1999): Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology, Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Stoler, Ann Laura (1992): “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identity and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia”. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, 514-551. Stoller, Paul (1995): Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and the Hauka in West Africa, New York: Routledge. Vale de Almeida, Miguel (nd.): From Miscegenation to Creole Identity: Portuguese Colonialism, Brazil, Cape Verde, ms. Werbner, Pnina (1997): “Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity”. In: Pnina Werbner/T. Modood (eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity: MultiCultural Identitities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, London: Zed, 1-26. Yelvington, Kevin (2001): “The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Dimension”. In: Annual Reviews in Anthropology 30, 227-260.

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S TRANGERS IN THE N IGHT : T HE M AKING AND U NMAKING OF D IFFERENCES FROM THE P ERSPECTIVE OF AN A NTHROPOLOGY OF THE N IGHT 1. Night and Day as an “Absolute Difference” The present paper addresses one of the greatest and most essential of all differences: that between night and day. In making this statement, I am not seeking to attribute greater importance to my subject or even to my paper in itself than is warranted. But I do wish to highlight the often neglected fact that the difference between night and day was and is for many if not all human beings –anytime and anywhere, even after the invention of electricity—one of the most crucial kinds of difference they experience and which structures their lives. In order to give some additional weight to this claim, it must suffice to begin with to remind you that, according to Hegel, the night comes first and is the absolute. Light, he argues, is younger than the night, and when it eventually comes forth from the night, this event produces an “absolute difference”.1 I can do no more than to indicate themes and pathways in the anthropology of the night, and, then only by way of special consideration of, and emphasis on, the conference theme.2 In a nutshell, my question is: What can we learn about the making and unmaking of differences, if we examine this problem from the perspective of an anthropology of the night?

1 “Das Absolute ist die Nacht und das Licht ist jünger als sie, und der Unterschied beider, sowie das Heraustreten des Lichts aus der Nacht eine absolute Differenz […].” Hegel, quoted from Bronfen 1998: 153. 2 Anthropological investigations of the night are not as plentiful as one might expect, considering the enormous significance of the night for human existence. Certainly a lot of information can be gained from studies in which nocturnal phenomena are discussed in connection with other topics, such as club culture in New York, the social history of urban illuminations, exorcism in Sri Lanka, representations of the night in Western art, Durga puja in India, sleep patterns in Japan, political dreaming in the Carolingian empire, and so on. But there have hardly been any attempts more generally, comparatively and cross-culturally, to venture into an “anthropology of the night” per se. Some exceptions are Alvarez 1995, Schnepel and Ben-Ari 2005, Bronfen (ed.) 1993, Ekirch 2005, Melbin 1987, Seitter 1999 and Verdon 2002.

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2. The “Real Night” Before I enter into the realms of “culture” and “society”—that is, before I concern myself directly with socio-cultural encounters with and dimensions of the night—I would like to remain with the topic of what one might call the “real night” or the “natural night” for a little while longer. At first sight, the eternal shift from night to day and from day to night has nothing to do with human agency or social construction; it is nothing but the result of the fact that our planet “Earth” rotates regularly around a shining star called the “Sun”, and also around itself. It is only because of this planetary coincidence that the night exists at all. Not all “real nights” are the same. Generally, people almost everywhere distinguish between “dark” nights or “thick” nights, as the Maori would say, and “light” or star-lit nights. This difference and others result mainly from the varying monthly phases of the moon and from the yearly course of the sun, as well as from the weather and from where in the world one experiences nighttime. The movements of the sun and its planet earth also lead to some “special real nights”, which basically amount to six and which have to be distinguished from “ordinary real nights”. To start with the first two, there are full moon and new moon nights. Then there are the longest and the shortest nights of the year, known to us as midwinter and midsummer night. And we have the nights which are close to the equinoxes (“Tag- und Nachtgleiche”) in spring and winter. These latter four kinds of the night also mark significant temporal changes in the solar year and are more often than not linked to changes in the natural seasons of plant and animal life. Then there are those “special real nights” which are singled out to fill the time gap between the solar and the lunar year. In our time-reckoning these are those twelve nights which are celebrated between “Christmas Eve” and “Epiphany”, the famous “twelfth night”.3 Furthermore, there are three different natural structural units in the night as such, namely dusk, the “deepest night”, and dawn, though one must acknowledge that in tropical and sub-tropical countries dusk and dawn may be very short, and that the “deepest night” is not necessarily everywhere considered to come at 12 o’clock or midnight.

3. The “Other Night” 3.1 The Night as a Socio-Cultural Matter So far I have tried to speak of the “real night” only. In other words, the description of the natural, astrologically explainable planetary difference be3 Depending on the calendar, this number does not always and everywhere need to be twelve, and the “extra nights” are not necessarily located at the end of the year of the Roman calendar. See Reimbold 1970: 174-179.

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tween day and night so far has been kept separate from what human beings have made out of it. But elements of society and culture, or human evaluations of and dealings with the night, invariably creep in as soon as we start digging more deeply into the matter. It is therefore time to look more closely at what could be called, with Blanchot (1955), the “other night”4. At issue, then, in what follows are socio-cultural constructions, religious evaluations, philosophical conceptualisations, mytho-poetical speculations, literary expressions, ritual representations, popular celebrations, scientific explanations and artistic representations of the night, and, last but not least, behavioural patterns as well as the individual and collective interactions of human beings in and through the night. I might have started right here, because examining the socio-cultural dimensions of things is the proper business of an anthropologist. But there are various reasons for not simply ignoring or forgetting the material and factual basis of what it is that is actually being encountered, dealt with and eventually transformed by humans. First of all, it might be appropriate in these times of theories celebrating human agency and social construction to remind ourselves that there are certain things and phenomena which are pure and simple essences, not just inventions, imaginations and constructions. Secondly, it is only through an understanding of the “real night” that we can try to understand the socio-culturally embedded and constructed “other night”, or, more precisely: it is only by acknowledging the interplay and tension between “real” and “other nights”, and the transformation of the former into the latter, that an anthropological understanding of “other nights” can be approached. 3.2 Human Evaluations of the Night If one examines cross-culturally the various human evaluations and representations of the night, generally it appears to have a rather “bad press”. Wherever and whenever one investigates the matter, it invariably appears that not only the night, but also many of those traits and elements which are intimately associated with the night, appear quasi-naturally as negative, while components of the day are usually seen in a rather positive “light”. Associated with the oppositional pair of night and day, there are, more often than not, the following kinds of dualisms: • • • • •

darkness versus light cold versus warmth chaos versus cosmic order the unpredictable versus the foreseeable the obscure versus the manageable

4 My concept of the “other night” however, is much more basic than Blanchot’s. I simply take it as a convenient term to distinguish the “social night” from the natural, physical or “real night”. For a discussion of Blanchot’s concept of the “other night”, see Bronfen 1998: 157-8.

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• • • • • • • •

the hidden versus the transparent evil forces versus good ones nightmares and fear in sleep versus reason and optimism in waking deception and illusion versus truth and wisdom danger versus safety nature versus culture pollution versus purity death versus life, and so on.5

These differentiations between and, more importantly, these differential evaluations of two sides—one nocturnal, the other diurnal in character—are based to a certain degree on natural or factual characteristics of the night; for even the most die-hard constructionist must admit that at night we see less and that it generally tends to become colder when the sun has gone down. But there is no immediate and apparent reason why the night should be associated with evil or death. Even the fact that it grows colder after sunset might only be viewed negatively by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere. It would then be necessary to look at human evaluations of the night in a much more exhaustive, penetrating and comparative way. Though such an enterprise is, of course, far beyond the scope of this paper,6 some examples may help nevertheless to illustrate the complex nature of the dualism of night and day being discussed here. Let us start by looking at the Judeo-Christian world view concerning the night. Take the very first lines of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. […] And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Genesis 1, 1-5). In this view, quite similar to that put forward by Hegel, the inception of being and becoming—in short, God’s creation and the existence of mankind—started with the making of light. While night was “just there”, light is a divine creation. It is no wonder, then, that given such an aetiology of the world, in Christian belief and practice the night is associated with evil forces and unholy, or at least unethical and amoral actions. It is the time when thieves, werewolves, devils, witches, goblins, sorcerers, demons, the undead and other “creatures of the night”, whether real or imagined, start their uncontrollable and life-threatening activities. 5 The first opposition, between darkness and light, should receive special treatment, because it is more essential and dominant than the others and has its own “follow-ups”. Darkness is almost always and everywhere made synonymous with the night, light with the day. And then, more often than not, light is considered “better” than darkness, such as when, for example, evil forces are dark forces, or solving an intellectual problem “brings light” to the matter. 6 As far as I am aware, there is only one scholarly study which tackles this task cross-culturally, namely Reimbold 1970.

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However, the case is not as clear cut as it seems at first glance. In the biblical view referred to above the night is not completely erased by the Christian demiurge, but remains in existence, if only during half of the “day”. These two halves together are called “one day”, not “one night”. Hence, night is still there, but reduced to a half and subsumed under the day. Night is, in Dumont’s terms (1978), “encompassed” by the day, just as, again according to the biblical world view, woman is encompassed by man. Darkness and light, night and day, are thus not only seen as two diametrically opposed and hostile sides. Rather, night and day are also (and ultimately) perceived as standing in a complementary relationship to one another; representing two unequal, but also two necessary, interconnected and interdependent partners, which cannot do without each other. Despite all the differences and even antagonism which the relationship between day and night and the numerous associated relationships exhibit, in the Christian world view (and in most other religions of the world), then, there is a “hierarchical solidarity” between the two. In this interconnectedness the day represents the superordinate norm, the night being the (albeit more fascinating) denial, reversal and sometimes transgression of this norm. And before we attribute too much dominance to the day, we must not forget that, even in the rather “night-hostile” Christian view of things, the night was there before the day, and in a way light was born out of the womb of darkness (just as, one might add, in this view man is born out of the womb of woman). 3.3 Positive Aspects of the “Other Night” All this means that we cannot look at the night without looking at the day, and vice versa. Seen in the light (or darkness?) of the idea of the night as the “mother of all things”, it is hardly surprising that the night in human imagination is seldom just negative. In the representations and evaluations of the night of many cultures, we can very often (if not always) also find elements, traits, activities and agents in and of the night which have positive connotations and are believed to have benevolent reverberations in human life. Let me give some examples. For most human beings before, but generally also after the invention of artificial light, night is the time and space when they do not work, when they are free from the burdens, obligations and constraints of the day. It is the time when the heat of the day cools off and when the rush and noise of diurnal activities calm down; it is the time when the flies stop pestering you, and when the boss, the police, the neighbours, the priests do not see (or see less well) what one is doing. Consequently, night-time can be filled differently than daytime: with leisure activities and pastimes; with narrating stories and breeding fantasies; with privacy or being together just with one’s closest kin; with sleeping and dreaming; with dancing, drinking and merry-making, and, last but not least, with sex, whether marital or “illicit”. And not all agents of the night are seen as negative, dangerous, amoral

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Figure 1: Edvard Munch “Vampir” (1893/94)

Haus der Kunst München (ed.) (1998): Die Nacht, Wabern/Bern: Benteli Verlag, 293.

and so on. In Hindu religion, for example, we can find that not only demons, but also certain revered deities of the so-called “great tradition”, the goddess Kali perhaps being the prime example, have greater presence and energy (sakti) at night and are more easily accessible then. In any enumeration of the positive aspects of the night, one should also point out that many religions, no matter how much they dislike the night in principle, have certain nights in the year which are considered holy. Among these nights, one can almost universally find the six “special real nights” pointed out above, i.e. new moon and full moon nights, midsummer and midwinter nights, as well as the nights close to the two equinoxes of the year. In different socio-cultural and religious settings, each of these nights may be filled with different meanings, mythologies, cults and appreciations, although they have in common the fact that they are special almost anywhere. In Nordic countries, for example, we find that great importance is given to midsummer or Johannis-nights and to midwinter or Yule nights, each with its specific sets of beliefs and practices, such as the killing of a boar at midwinter night or the dancing around a bonfire at “Johannis” night. At the night of the autumn equinox, Jews celebrate the “Feast of Tabernacles” (“Laubhüttenfest”), while the 128

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Christians celebrate “Thanksgiving” (“Erntedankfest”). Numerous other examples could be given. Apart from these six nights, there are, more often than not, the fixed nights of New Year’s Eve and the night leading to the first of May, which in German is called “Walpurgisnacht” and is associated with the dancing of witches and with all sorts of amoral behaviour (see Dohrn-van Rossum 1998: 169-171). However, although this night is associated with amoral beings, it is not wholly negative, at least not as far as ordinary people are concerned, although church officials may condemn it wholeheartedly. Hence, different people judge differently whether a night is good or bad, evil or benevolent, holy or not.7 One possible yardstick for measuring the condemnation or appreciation of the night which a certain culture or religious system exhibits, or the specific way in which the relationship between day and night is envisaged, is by looking at the number of holy nights which each entails and by looking at how exactly they are celebrated. In Christianity, one can find only two explicitly religious holy nights, at Christmas and at Easter, and both are marked by somewhat subdued spirits. The Christian “Holy Night” is a “Silent Night”. Hinduism, by contrast, has an abundance of celebratory nights. There are, to mention only the most important, Shiva Ratri (ratri meaning “night”) in February and Nava Ratri (the “nine nights”) in honour of Durga in October. Both count as the most important dates in the Hindu religious calendar, including the diurnal festivals; in addition there are numerous other festivals such as the important Diwali, which are not specified explicitly as nights, but are mainly celebrated in the evening and at night. Furthermore, in Hinduism we find numerous regionally or locally specific religiously motivated “night watches”, called jagas, during which believers must stay awake until dawn in order to show their great devotion to the gods. And still in Hinduism, full moon and new moon nights have more than just emotional significance, but generally also some kind of religious significance. In particular, full moon and new moon nights that are close to seasonal changes are often a time to celebrate important pan-Indian gods, such as when Hindus honour Krishna in the spring. Again there are many local and regional variations on this, for example, when people in Orissa celebrate Thakurani Yatra during the spring and earth goddesses in autumn nights, or when some festivals, such as the “Dance of Punishment” (Dando Nato) require that their participants stay awake for thirteen nights in a row unless they want to attract the anger of Kali. And these nights are far from being silent.8 Hence, almost universally the six “special real nights” plus, more often then not, several further “ordinary real nights”, are made into “special”, even “holy other nights”. Some cultures single out less, others more “real nights” in 7 On midwinter nights, midsummer nights and equinox nights, see especially Reimbold 1970: 165-174, 216-219. 8 See Hauser 2005, Henn 2003, Schnepel 2005a. For “holy nights” in Islam, Buddhism, Christianity and other religions, see especially Reimbold 1970: 190-191, 204-210.

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order to make them into “special other nights”; and while in some cultures these special nights are celebrated in silence and seriously, in others they are full of ribaldry, obscenity and noise. 3.4 Internal structuring of the night So far we have seen that not all nights are bad and that not all creatures typically belonging to this time-space are evil. But we have to go one step further and emphasize that nights are seldom seen as unstructured wholes. Rather, the night is often divided into clearly identifiable units. For example, in medieval European descriptions of the night or of nocturnal happenings, one can often find the standardized pattern of sunset, dusk, appearance of the evening star (Venus), silence, total breakdown of all activities or stillness, the first crow of the cock, dawn and sunrise. The old Roman division of the day and the night into twelve units respectively, each half also having four quarters—a division which stemmed from older Babylonian, Greek and Egyptian astronomical explorations—later entered Christian ways of structuring the night. In popular Christian conceptualisations these four units are evening, midnight, cock-crow and morning, which also figure prominently in the New Testament, especially in descriptions of the night of Christ’s passion. There are ritual expressions of this nocturnal passion in the form of prayers and singing, the so-called vigils or night watches, either on special nights by all members of the Church or “daily” by ascetic monks. Apart from memorizing and re-living Christ’s passion, these night watches are also connected with the desire to praise God incessantly as well as with the belief that the saviour will come at night and that one should be prepared for this. As far as monks are concerned, these vigils were also connected with an ascetic ideal of sleeping less and killing all bodily desires. Since night and sleep are seen as the domains of sin and the devil, one must be watchful and awake. The coming of daylight is eagerly awaited, and when it finally arrives it is greeted with prayers of praise. During some of these temporal units, especially the last hours of the night, at four o’clock or so, the monks’ night is quite distinctly not characterized by the absence of God, but by the greater possibility to reach out to God, to communicate with him, to gain access to him and obtain a response from him through prayers, contemplation or simply being awake. In other periods, especially “the deepest night”, the hour after midnight, that is, the true believer may not just experience nightmares and fears: this is also the time for divine visions and enlightenment.9 Another description of how important the culturally specific structuring of the “dark half of the day” is in understanding how human beings encounter the night and its “creatures” can be found in Kapferer’s study of exorcism and healing rituals in South Asia. In the Sri Lankan (Buddhist) context, demons 9 See Dohrn-van Rossum 1998: 171-173; Reimbold 1970: 185-189, 198-203, 210220; Seitter 1999: 83-99.

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are regarded as lowly, filthy and insatiable in their cravings for food and sex. They may especially announce their presence in unsettling dreams or in the form of dark mysterious figures moving in the stillness of the night. Humans are especially prone to be attacked by them at night, especially if they walk about alone on unfrequented paths. Kapferer describes the various ways in which exorcists attempt to bring back health to the victims of demonic attacks and to restore order in their social environment. If all minor curative measures fail, there is often a final recourse to great, all-night ceremonies. What is important here is not only that demons are basically creatures of the night who start their attacks at night, or that the cure from demonically caused illness takes place at night. Rather, the issue is “the importance of the performance structure of large ceremonies” (Kapferer 1983: 82) and the fact that “the movement of a patient from a condition of demonic control to a condition freed from the power of the demons is presented and validated in the order of the performance” (ibid.). Some such ceremonies, like that of the “Great Cemetery Demon” called Mahasona,10 can be described as wellstructured transformational journeys, guided by music, dance, drama, ritual and other forms of the aesthetic. During the “evening watch” from 5 pm to 9.30 pm, the Buddha and other major Sinhalese deities are honoured with gifts and prayers. The midnight watch, which starts around ten, reaches its climax around midnight and concludes around 2 am. During this period demons are summoned to the ritual ground and “celebrated” there. This is the time for comical performances and for the splendid enactment of the “Dance and Death of Mahasona”. The “morning watch” starts around 3 am. This is again the time for a number of comic episodes and for further dramatic dances with masked representations of minor demons which are performed by the chief exorcist and his aids. The ceremony ends at daybreak with salutations to Buddha and other major Sinhalese deities. At the end of this sequence, order and health are restored in a tripartite nocturnal passage during which, paradoxically, or so it seems at first, the demons are first “invited”, or better lured on to the ritual stage, only to get rid of them afterwards. This dispelling of the demons is made possible, so to say, because their controlled presence was assured first. Having been brought from the wilderness on to the ritual stage, the demonic forces are made visible, approachable and touchable; in this ritual frame and at this special time of the night, they can be controlled, mocked and subordinated to Buddha and the major deities; and from there they can finally be expelled. The night is a structured time in which demons and humans, in different periods of this whole nocturnal time—space, play different roles and relate to each other in different ways.11 10 Fully discussed in Kapferer 1983: Chapter 7. 11 Kapferer mentions the important role of the cock as a sacrificial victim and patient-substitute in these ceremonies, though he does not link this symbolic quality of the cock with its being the harbinger of a new day.

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3.5 “Hyper Nights” and “Hypo Nights” It appears from the evidence discussed so far, however scarce and selective it undoubtedly is, that in most religious, philosophical, mythical and literary evaluations of the relationship between night and day, this relationship is conceived as being dualistic and even antagonistic in character. At the same time, however, it is also a relationship that is characterized dialectically by interconnectedness, interdependency, hierarchy and overlapping. Night and day are partners in a relationship of conjunctio oppositorum, opposed and yet inextricably and complementarily linked. Similarly, and in accordance with this observation, the night in itself is seldom viewed as only and completely bad, dangerous, evil, etc. Rather, it is frequently seen as an ambivalent timespace, and its very own creatures are equally ambiguous in character. Some of them may even be or become fully benevolent beings, if only at certain nights of the year, if only in certain structural units of the night, and if only in the case of some of the actors involved, and when properly treated. This ambiguity of the night and the oscillating multiplicity of meanings it may carry along with it correlate with the numerous distinct ways in which human beings approach and construct the “other night”.12 In this section, I would like to argue that there are two principal sentiments or attitudes concerning the making and unmaking of the night which produce what one could call a) “hyper nights” and b) “hypo nights”. 13 In the case of “hyper nights”, we find that actors are seeking to turn the phenomena, things, beings and actions of the nocturnal chronotopos (Bakhtin) into something which is more intensive and vibrant and which represents an alternative or even counterpoint to the day. “Hyper nights” are nights which offer spaces for rebellious and even revolutionary forms of behaviour, spaces in which the normal, diurnal form of life, with all its behavioural patterns, norms and moral values, is questioned, mocked and even transgressed. “Hyper nights” entail, for examples, witches dancing at Walpurgisnacht or, less dramatically, young Madrilenians dressing up and going to their favourite disco, or ancient Greeks sleeping in temples in order to see God. “Hyper nights” are the nights cherished by Kafka as the time of writing and the nights seen by Novalis as the metaphorical abodes in which it is possible to join the beloved and dead ones and to free the soul from its earthly cravings. “Hyper nights” are the nights in which Indian Adivasis become possessed and sacrifice goats 12 One could argue that the human creation of “other nights” consists of two kinds of transformation which somehow combine into one. First, there is the transformation of the “real night” into the “other night”. Secondly, there is the transformation of the “other day” into the “other night”. Both these transformations combine to create the “other night”. 13 Since it should be clear that at issue here are variants of “other nights”, I shall drop the word “other” from now on. This terminology is inspired by kinship anthropology and its terms of hypergamy and hypogamy, i.e. “marrying up” and “marrying down”.

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to the earth goddesses in order to promote fertility and well-being for human beings, animals and crops. “Hyper nights” are the nights when women of the Chinese diaspora go to their favourite gambling halls, or when people in a north German village stay awake until 3 o’clock in the morning in order to see Muhammad Ali fight Joe Frazier on TV. “Hyper nights” are New Years Eve and all the other special nights mentioned above. They are also the timespaces of those who need darkness for their special activities: thieves, demons, hunters, warriors, exorcists or healers; they offer the shelter and opportunity to beg, steal, fight and murder, but also to heal and cure. “Hyper nights” are “heterotopias” (in the Foucauldian sense), where fantasies and erotic desires become possible and are realized.14 “Hyper nights”, then, are characterized by the fact that in them, human beings wish to achieve, experience and feel more than is possible during the day and in ordinary nights. “Hyper nights”, in a nutshell, are the domains of a different and heightened (nocturnal) way of living. “Hypo nights”, by contrast, are the result of the human desire and emotional need to tame and colonize the night;15 of the ambition to control and overcome the night’s dangers and evil creatures, or just to cope with its inaptitude and disadvantages. Just like “hyper nights”, “hypo nights” may thus contain a great number of different things, from demon-expelling rituals in Indonesia to hiring night watchmen in a medieval town. “Hypo nights” are nights in which people sleep together in one room with age mates behind locked doors. “Hypo nights” are also the results of the everlasting attempts by human beings at all times and everywhere to bring light into the threatening darkness of the night, attempts starting from the early torch to candles and petroleum lamps, from a naked electric bulb in the shabby living room of a South African miner’s household to the present-day glitter of New York’s Time Square. Furthermore, stressed managers taking sleeping pills, people calling the police when the neighbour makes too much noise, old couples staying indoors and watching TV behind closed curtains are all indicative of a desire to establish “hypo nights”. “Hypo nights” are the nights when the family members reunite and when, in the marital bed, procreation is attempted. “Hypo nights”, in a nutshell, are the results of the human attempt and need to shelter oneself from the night and its creatures, of the desire to master and even “enlighten” the night. When human beings exhibit this second, conservative approach to the night, they seek to make less out of what the night has to offer; they want to minimize, diminish and get rid of its otherness, to make it closer to, even into, the day.

14 On Kafka’s, Novalis’, Shakespeare’s, Schnitzler’s and other writers’ aesthetic exaltations of the potentials of the night, see especially Bronfen 1998. On “heterotopias”, see Foucault 2005. On night as a time for transgression, see Allison 1994, Jun 2003, Nottingham 2003 and Palmer 2000. 15 The aspect of the “colonization” of the night is especially strong in Melbin 1987.

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Figure 2: Edward Hopper “Fenster bei Nacht” (1928)

Haus der Kunst München (ed.) (1998): Die Nacht, Wabern/Bern: Benteli Verlag, 521.

Certainly “hyper nights” and “hypo nights” or rather the emotions, intentions, motivations, attitudes, sentiments and ambitions that lie behind their creation, cannot be separated too strictly from each other; there are no distinct “hypo” and “hyper nights”, or even “hypo” or “hyper night cultures”. One and the same night may have been designed and experienced by two different actors either as “hyper” or “hypo”, such as when a thief finds that the door he so eagerly wants to open has been heavily locked by the household head from the inside. Even when two actors are doing the same thing, their motivations may differ according to our hyper and hypo schemes. Thus one participant in a nocturnal prayer wants to overcome his fear of the night and its forces (hypo), while the other actively seeks a vision of God (hyper). Or one structural unit of the night may be “hypo”, while the next is already “hyper” in character. Or a “hyper night” may be safely embedded in and subsumed by a “hypo night”, such as when visiting the moon or fighting an enemy only takes place in the visual and virtual reality of the TV room. Or a “hypo stance” may be embedded in a “hyper” one, such as when someone at a wild party spends most of the time in the kitchen with his wife and best friends only, feeling too shy to talk and dance with the others. Or some approaches towards the night are am134

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biguous and exhibit both “hypo” and “hyper stances”. For example, when a philosopher seeks to “enlighten” the world through his ponderings or when a Soviet committee puts the electrification of a remote Siberian village at the top of its agenda, then these actions may be motivated by both a desire to make more out of the night and a wish to control the night and what is going on there. Celebrating the night of the spring equinox or staging a great festive bonfire or firework may be as much an expression of a “hyper-attitude”, which seeks to transgress normal behaviour and achieve an exalted time, as they may be an expression of a “hypo-attitude”, which aims to dispel the demonic forces of the winter. 3.6 Some Sub-fields in the Anthropology of the Night So far we have explored only one sub-field in the anthropology of the night, which concerned the philosophical-ontological, aesthetic, artistic and religious dimensions as well as evaluations of the night.16 These dimensions were inevitably connected with the question, more or less directly linked to all the others, namely how, in a given culture, day and night are seen in their opposition as well as in their dialectical interdependence. This sub-field might be called “Night and Day” (sub-field no. 1). And of course, in this connection one would have to inquire into all the beings, whether dangerous animals and demons or certain deities, who only appear when darkness falls and are at their most powerful then. This is what one might call the “Creatures of the Night” sub-field (sub-field no. 2). Another sub-field in the anthropology of the night involves questions such as: How do people actually sleep? Do they all have futon beds with duvées, etc.? When do they go to bed? When do they get up? For how long do they sleep? Are there any moral evaluations connected with sleeping for long or short periods? Do people sleep alone and, if not, who sleeps together? Do only people of one sex and age-group sleep together? Do parents and children sleep separately or jointly? Related to this is the question of noise. Many of us who have done fieldwork in foreign places may have felt that the concept and legal dictum of nightly disturbance does not exist in all cultures, at least not at all times and not as rigidly as, for example, Germans see it.17 What does a “good” night and “sleeping well” mean in a given socio-cultural setting? Is it always the Western ideal of sleeping for eight hours without any interruptions and disturbing dreams? For instance, during my fieldwork in India, I was surprised at the fact that, generally, Indians were able to sleep in situations (for example, next to a loudspeaker blasting out devotional music) in which I myself 16 All these dimensions of course require independent treatment as well. For a consideration of the religious aspect, see especially Reimbold 1970. In philosophy, the “metaphorical night” is well treated by Seitter 1999: 40-156. For the night in art and literature, see especially Haus der Kunst München (ed.) 1998. 17 As a matter of fact, the concept of “nächtliche Ruhestörung” seems to be an invention of the Swiss. For “Noise as Cultural Struggle”, see Roberts 1994.

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could not even dream of getting a wink of sleep. Or, if they did not sleep, they did not mind. There thus seem to be different ideas of “being quiet” and what a “good night” and “sleeping well” entail. This sub-field may be called “Good Night! Sleep Well!” (sub-field no. 3).18 Yet another sub-field, integrally linked with the phenomenon of sleeping, might be headed with the words “Sweet Dreams, Bad Dreams” (sub-field no. 4). How and what do people dream? How do they evaluate dreams? How do dreams affect their lives when awake? How, if at all, and to whom are dreams narrated? How are they interpreted and acted upon? This sub-field therefore entails a myriad of questions concerned with the anthropology of dreams, dreaming and dream interpretation, which is, no doubt, one of the most and best studied of all nightly phenomena.19 But at night we do not only (try to) sleep and dream. The night contains a lot of other activities when awake. There are first of all those which one could subsume under the title “On the Night Shift” (sub-field no. 5), concerning people who work at night: taxi-drivers, nurses, night watchmen, policemen, thieves, businessmen, prostitutes, television studio technicians or disc jockeys, that is, people whose activities refer to and take care of all those things that typically relate to and happen in the time-space of the night. But people on the night shift also include those who do jobs—office-cleaners, maintenance people on the underground or bakers—which get everything ready again for the coming day. This sub-field is of course closely connected with a former one, namely the “Creatures of the Night” sub-field (no. 2), which embraces all the extra-human agents of the night, the vampires, werewolves, witches, goblins and demons, like the Icelandic huldufolk who shirk the sunlight and the everincreasing artificial electric light. Then there are those night-time activities which are leisure activities and are often distinctively meant to be different from what you do during the day. This sub-field, which might be given the title of “Night-clubbing” (sub-field no. 6), includes such varying phenomena as dancing in a disco to Hindu festivals which must last all night without anyone being allowed to fall asleep if the gods are to be satisfied.20 Another sub-field might be called “Let there be Light” (sub-field no. 7). This refers to all activities that aim at the colonization or domestication of the night, with its creatures and dangers. Among the most important means of trying to reach this aim since the inception of mankind are the steadily improving ways of illuminating the night: open camp-fires, torches, candles, oil and gas lamps, electric lighting. One of the first attempts to illuminate the night on a grander, communal scale happened in Poitiers in 1542. Anyone who wanted to walk through this town at night had by law to carry a lamp and was forbid18 For sociologies and anthropologies of sleeping and sleep-control, see Alvarez 1995: 61-86, Aubert and White 1959, Ben-Ari 2005, Steger and Brunt 2003, Steger 2005, Seitter 1999: 157-208. 19 For a comprehensive bibliography on the anthropology of dreams, see Schnepel 2001 and Schnepel 2005b. 20 See, for example Brunt 2003, Erenberg 1994, Heijnen 2005 and Tinat 2005.

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Figure 3: Hans Georg Scholz “Bahnwärterhaus” (1924)

Haus der Kunst München (ed.) (1998): Die Nacht, Wabern/Bern: Benteli Verlag, 523.

den to carry a sword. The domestication of the night was therefore achieved by a combination of illumination and disarmament (see Seitter 1999: 88-90). Similar motives of surveillance can be traced in connection with the illumination of Paris in 1662 with gas lamps, followed by Berlin in 1680, London in 1694 and Leipzig in 1701. But nightly illuminations such as bonfires and fireworks were also used, especially in the Baroque period, to celebrate, to create festive environments and to display wealth and splendour. In this connection, therefore, there arise questions such as whether illuminating the night is connected with an intention to police the people or whether it aims to construct a world full of possibilities of forgetting, of joy and transgression.21 Last but not least, there is the sub-field of nocturnal eroticism, which might be labelled as “Love Nights” (sub-field no. 8). Night is the favourite time-space for sex, as well as for marital procreation. Thus, it is also the time-space for one of the most important domains in which the genders regulate their respective values and interconnectedness. Moreover, the night itself is gendered, being female in most cultures we know of. And the genders act differently at night. 21 For a social history of lighting, see especially Schivelbusch 1983; see also Garnert 1997, Jakle 2001 and Schmid 1998.

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4. Summary and Conclusions Let me summarize my argument so far and offer some conclusions. During the preceding discussion, I hope it will have become obvious that looking at things from the perspective of an anthropology of the night can throw much new evidence not only on nocturnal phenomena, but also on socio-cultural life during the day and in general. As far as the conference theme of the making and unmaking of differences is concerned, this claim to the great heuristic value of a decidedly nocturnal anthropological focus is even more valid because of the importance of the difference between night and day. In addition, it leads to many subsequent differences, differentiations and transformations, all of which have a considerable impact on human life. Let us recall what these differences are in detail. To start with, I found it necessary to distinguish between “real nights” and “other nights”. These in their turn were both qualified by the adjectives “ordinary” and “special”, which led to two further kinds of difference, first that between “ordinary real nights” and “special real nights” (for, example, full moon nights), and secondly that between “ordinary other nights” and “special other nights” (for example, the “twelve nights”). One variant of the “special other night” was the “holy night”, for example, Shiva Ratri. All these kinds of night may appear in a great variety of guises: we can have cloudy ordinary real nights or some with the sky full of sparkling stars; or we can have silent or noisy holy nights. To complicate the matter even further, we have seen the multiplex, relative and ambiguous ways in which the relationship between night and day and the character of the night in itself can be envisaged. As Alvarez puts it, “night contains whatever you care to put into it, and, because you can’t see, or can see very little, it gives your imagination unlimited space to work in” (Alvarez 1995: 35). Moreover, we have seen that the night is not an unstructured whole, but is made up of different structural units which are filled with various kinds of human imagination, evaluation and action. Especially important here are times of transition, namely dusk and dawn, as well as the “deepest night”,—and what humans make of it. As far as human approaches and attitudes towards the night are concerned, I distinguished between two basic attitudes connected with the making (and unmaking) of “other nights” namely one which results in “hypo nights” and a second one which results in “hyper nights”. This distinction multiplies the complexity of the present issue in a great number of ways, such as when we find “hypo holy other nights” (e.g., the “silent” Christmas night) contrasted with “hyper holy other nights” (such as Walpurgisnacht), and so on. On top of all this, I found it useful and necessary to distinguish analytically a number of themes and typical activities relevant to an anthropology of the night, from the “metaphorical night” to sleeping and dreaming, to being on the night-shift, to working, dancing and making love at night. Focusing on these sub-themes allows us in nuce to investigate all the

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types of cross-cutting and dynamically shifting differences, differentiations and transformations outlined above. While these distinctions may look somewhat artificial, let me emphasize that in one way or another these differentiations are made (and experienced as real) by the actors themselves, though of course with different terminologies, and seldom with the systematic stringency exhibited here. The various “cultures in the dark” which anthropologists encounter in all regions of the world and which historians can detect down the ages, like their diurnal partners, each have their own concepts of personhood, their own religious systems, their own human and extra-human beings, their own natural habitats, their own philosophies, their own rituals, their own secular activities, their own joys and freedoms, their own fears and burdens, their own hopes and ways of relaxation, their own moral standards, their own heroes, and so on. With regard to the conference theme two basic questions therefore arise. First, in what dimensions and aspects do different “cultures of darkness” differ from each other? This is a cross-cultural question. Secondly, how, in any given socio-cultural setting, do its “diurnal culture” and its “nocturnal culture” differ from each other. In pursuing this second question, it is of course necessary to break it down sociologically even further. In a given socio-cultural setting, for example, do different age groups or the two sexes, or the rich and poor, exhibit different approaches to, different kinds of behaviour in, and different evaluations of, the night? The days of these different actors are of course also different, but these diurnal differences may be different from the nocturnal ones. Does the night belong to young people only, while the day belongs to the adults? Or are there cultures in which, at night, the poor start to dance and be merry, while the rich and good citizens (have to) stay at home and protect their belongings and morality?22 If so, night-time may provide relief and offer opportunities for reversal; in the long run, this freedom of the nocturnal time-space may even lead to a change in the moral standards and power structures of the day as well.23 Or do the distinctions and differences that rule during the day between, let us say, black and white, or polluted and pure castes, become even stronger during the night? Do the poor sleep badly in cramped, overcrowded, sticky rooms? Are oppressed women in rigidly patriarchal systems even more strictly prohibited from leaving the house than during the day, while rich men frequent expensive bars and restaurants or indulge in other costly pleasures or simply sleep in comfortable beds behind well-locked doors? This latter variant, namely that the night reinforces and even multiplies the differences and injustices experienced during the day, seems to have more plausibility than its alternative, namely that the night offers relief and reversal for the downtrod22 For an example of this possibility, see Bastide 1978. 23 Many of the relatively free moral and sexual standards which Western people in particular enjoy today have first been “tested out” and “propagated”, so to say, in night life and within the framework of night-time institutions, such as bars, cabarets, etc., or in nocturnal metaphors. See especially Erenberg 1994.

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den. There is one chief reason for this, namely that illumination is costly, especially before electrification. Hence, not going to bed, but reading, celebrating, dancing or gambling instead was and is a form of conspicuous consumption, an ostentatious kind of behaviour with which the haves can singularly exhibit—and ferment—their otherness from the have-nots. Finally, in this argument, it is also necessary to add another analytic criterion, namely to consider how the night is celebrated and/or contained in rural areas, and how, by comparison and distinction, city nights are lived. Last but not least, there is one final kind of difference that I would like to point out, one which refers, at long last, directly to the title of my paper: Who are these “strangers in the night”? The answer is, of course, that they are those who are the others during the day as well, only maximized or minimized in accordance with the “hyper-” or “hypo-movements” which we find otherwise. But this is not the only story. The night may create “other others” that is, others who do not figure in this capacity during the day; or it may make some diurnal others into friends and playmates at night, while some diurnal acquaintances become strangers: “friend by day, enemy by night” (see Keiser 1991). And finally, “strangers in the night” are not only the others; they are not only nocturnally deflected and fragmented versions of diurnal others, and they are not only other others than the diurnal others. Rather, the other, whom one meets in the dark, this stranger in the night, may also be “another me”. It is, so to say, another self which might be quite different from one’s diurnal self. Night offers one a space to transcend one’s diurnal self and personhood through fantasies, divine visions, dreams, artistic creativity, sexual ecstasy, violence, or simply by ignoring the night.24 Thus, at night not only are the others othered, but sometimes oneself is othered as well. In making this point,25 I am not intending to present a merely psychological or socio-psychological argument. Rather, I propose to look at this nocturnal construction of another me quite deliberately from a performative or even theatrical point of view. The night offers a privileged stage, a special frame, as Goffman (1974) says, in which it is easier to become another me, in which it becomes possible to other oneself, to create and act out different personae, which cannot be displayed during the day at all, or only with difficulties.26 In a nutshell, therefore, and in conclusion, it can be suggested that it is not only the difference between a given group of people during the day and the same group at night, and not only the difference between various “cultures 24 Such as when sleeping little (or even not sleeping at all) is taken as a sign of manhood, or is taken as the expression of a strong belief or of being a hard worker. 25 This has also been emphasized, among others, by Handelman 2005. 26 In this context, it is important to realize that many “special other nights” and even “holy nights” mark times of seasonal and collective transition. The same applies to rites of passage in the life-cycle of the individual, such as the wedding night. Hence, the night is also a privileged time-space for creating more permanent other me-s, not just different me-s oscillating between day and night.

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Figure 4: Ludwig Meidner “Mein Nachtgesicht” (1913)

Haus der Kunst München (ed.) (1998): Die Nacht,Wabern/Bern: Benteli Verlag, 541.

of darkness”, but also the difference between (the possibilities of) a diurnal self and a nocturnal self, which needs to be explored more thoroughly if we want to understand the issue of the making and unmaking of difference in all its dimensions. 141

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References Allison, Anne (1994): Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Alvarez, A. (1995): Night, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Aubert, Vilhelm/White, Harrison (1959): “Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation”. In: Acta Sociologica 4, 1-16, 46-54. Bastide, Gaston (1978): The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpretation of Civilizations; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ben-Ari, Eyal (2005): “Docile Bodies, Pharmorgs and Military Knowledge: The Regulation of Sleep and Night-time Combat in the American Army”. In: Paideuma 51, 165-180. Blanchot, Maurice (1955): L’espace littéraire, Paris: Gallimard. Bronfen, Elisabeth (ed.) (1993): Die Nacht. Ein Lesebuch von Träumen, Gewalt und Ekstase, München: Goldmann. Bronfen, Elisabeth (1998): “Nächtliche Begegnungen der anderen Art”. In: Haus der Kunst München (ed.), Die Nacht, Wabern/Bern: Benteli Verlag, 153-168. Brunt, Lodewijk (2003): “Between Day and Night: Urban Time Schedules in Bombay and Other Cities”. In: Brigitte Steger/Lodewijk Brunt (eds.), Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life, London: Routledge and Curzon, 149-170. Das, Veena (ed.) (1994): Mirrors of Violence. Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard (1998): “Die Nacht im Mittelalter: Historische Erfahrungen mit der Dunkelheit”. In: Haus der Kunst München (ed.), Die Nacht, Wabern/Bern: Benteli Verlag, 169-176. Dumont, Louis (1978): Homo Hierarchicus, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ekirch, A. Roger (2005): At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, London: Norton & Co. Erenberg, Lewis A. (1994): Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel (2005): Die Heterotopien. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Garnert, Jan (1997): “Über die Kulturgeschichte der Beleuchtung und des Dunkels”. In: Historische Anthropologie 5, 62-82. Goffman, Erving (1974): Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, New York: Harper and Row. Handelman, Don (2005): “Epilogue. Dark Soundings: Towards a Phenomenology of Night”. In: Paideuma 51, 249-264. Haus der Kunst München (ed.) (1998): Die Nacht, Wabern/Bern: Benteli Verlag.

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Hauser, Beatrix (2005): “Travelling Through the Night: Living Mothers and Divine Daughters at an Orissan Goddess Festival”. In: Paideuma 51, 223236. Heijnen, Adrienne (2005): “Dreams, Darkness and Hidden Spheres: Exploring the Anthropology of the Night in Icelandic Society”. In: Paideuma 51, 193-208. Henn, Alexander (2003): Wachheit der Wesen: Politik, Ritual und Kunst der Akkulturation in Goa, Münster/Hamburg: Lit Verlag. Jakle, John A. (2001): City Lights: Illuminating the American Night, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jun, Ayukawa (2003): “Night-time and Deviant Behaviour: The Changing Night Scene of Japanese Youth”. In: Brigitte Steger/Lodewijk Brunt (eds.), Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life, London: Routledge and Curzon, 149-170. Kapferer, Bruce (1983, 1991): A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka, Oxford: Berg. Keiser, Lincoln (1991): Friend by Day, Enemy by Night: Organized Vengeance in a Kohistani Community, Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Melbin, Murray (1987): Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World after Dark, New York: Free Press. Nottingham, Chris (2003). “‘What Time Do You Call This?’ Change and Continuity in the Politics of the City Night”. In: Brigitte Steger/Lodewijk Brunt (eds.), Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life, London: Routledge and Curzon, 191-214. Palmer, Bryan D. (2000): Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression, New York: Monthly Review Press. Reimbold, Ernst Thomas (1970): Die Nacht im Mythos, Kultus, Volksglauben und in der transpersonalen Erfahrung: Eine religionsphänomenologische Untersuchung, Köln: Wison Verlag. Roberts, Michael (1994): “Noise as Cultural Struggle: Tom-Tom Beating, the British and Communal Disturbances in Sri Lanka, 1880s-1930s”. In: Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence. Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 240-285. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang (1983). Lichtblicke: Zur künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, München: C.H. Beck Verlag. Schmid, Gabriele (1998). “Kleine Kulturgeschichte des künstlichen Lichts”. In: Haus der Kunst München (ed.), Die Nacht, Wabern/Bern: Benteli Verlag, 573-577. Schnepel, Burkhard (2001): “Einleitung: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven in der Traumforschung”. In: Burkhard Schnepel (ed.), Hundert Jahre ‘Die Traumdeutung’: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven in der Traumforschung, Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 7-30. Schnepel, Burkhard (2005a): “The ‘Dance of Punishment’: Transgression and Punishment in an East Indian Ritual”. In: Ursula Rao/John Hutnyk (eds.),

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Celebrating Transgression. Methods and Politics in the Anthropological Study of Culture, Oxford: Berghahn, 115-127. Schnepel, Burkhard (2005b): “‘In Sleep a King …’ The Politics of Dreaming in a Cross-Cultural Perspective”. In: Paideuma 51, 209-220. Schnepel, Burkhard (ed.) (2001): Hundert Jahre ‘Die Traumdeutung’: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven in der Traumforschung, Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. Schnepel, Burkhard/Ben-Ari, Eyal (2005): “Introduction. ‘When Darkness Comes …’ Steps Toward an Anthropology of the Night”. In: Paideuma 51, 153-164. Seitter, Walter (1999): Geschichte der Nacht, Berlin: Philo Verlag. Steger, Brigitte (2005): “Creating Time for Enjoyment, Creating Positive Energy: Why Japan Rises Early”. In: Paideuma 51, 181-192. Steger, Brigitte/Brunt, Lodewijk (eds.) (2003): Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life, London: Routledge and Curzon. Tinat, Karine (2005): “The Spanish ‘Fiesta’: The Theatricality of a Night Club in Madrid”. In: Paideuma 51, 237-248. Verdon, Jean (2002): Night in the Middle Ages, Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Heike Behrend is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Cologne, Germany. She has conducted intensive research in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria; currently she is studying media (video and photography) and continues investigating the relationship between religious change, violence and war in Uganda. She is the author of numerous books and articles, among the last publications are: “Photo-Magic. Photographies in practices of healing and harming in Kenya and Uganda”, in: Journal of Religion in Africa, 33, 2, 2003 (special issue); “‘Satan gekreuzigt’: Interner Terror und Katharsis in Tooro, Westuganda”, in: Historische Anthropologie, 12, 2, 211-227, 204; “‘Untergang der Titanic’ in Afrika: Zur interkulturellen Transkription eines nordnigerianischen Remakes”, in: Bewegliche Horizonte, Festschrift für Bernhard Streck, K. Geisenhainer and K. Lange (editor), Leipzig 2005. Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and the Free University of Amsterdam. He currently (2004-2009) directs an interdisciplinary research programme on cultural complexity in the new Norway (http://www.culcom.uio.no). His research has mainly dealt with identity politics and cultural complexity. His major books in English include Ethnicity and Nationalism (1993/2002), Common Denominators (1998), Small Places, Large Issues (1995/2001), A History of Anthropology (with F. S. Nielsen, 2001), Globalisation - Studies in Anthropology (editor, 2003) and Engaging Anthropology (2005). Karl-Heinz Kohl is Professor of Ethnology and Director of the FrobeniusInstitute at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt. He did fieldwork in New Guinea, East Indonesia and West Africa. From 2001-02 he was Theodor-Heuss-Professor for Cultural Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York. His main fields of interest are religion, the history of anthropology, and xenology. His publications include: Exotik als Beruf. Zum Begriff der ethnographischen Erfahrung bei B. Malinowski, E.E. Evans-Pritchard und C. Lévi-Strauss, Frankfurt 1986; Entzauberter Blick. Das Bild vom Guten Wilden und die Erfahrung der Zivilisation, Frankfurt 1986; Ethnologie - die Wissenschaft vom kulturell Fremden. Eine Einführung, München 1993; Der Tod der Reisjungfrau. Mythen, Kulte und Allianzen in einer ostindonesischen Lokalkultur, Stuttgart 1998; Die Macht der Dinge. Geschichte und Theorie sakraler Objekte, München 2003. 145

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Flavia Monceri is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università del Molise (Campobasso, Italy). Her research interests include the theory and practice of intercultural communication, the application of complexity theories to the social sciences, individual creativity and novelty, self and identity, globalization studies in a cross-cultural perspective, with a special focus on Japan. Among her recent publications: “The Transculturing Self: A Philosophical Approach” (LAIC-Language and Intercultural Communication, 3/ 2/2003); “Complexity and novelty: Reading Mark C. Taylor” (World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, 61/5/2005). Contact address: flavia. [email protected]. Richard Rottenburg is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). He has written and edited books on the Sudan (Ndemwareng. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in den Morobergen. München 1991), on organisations (edited together with Achim von Oppen, Organisationswandel in Afrika: Kollektive Praxis und kulturelle Aneignung (Berlin 1995), on economic anthropology (edited together with Herbert Kalthoff and Hans-Jürgen Wagener, Facts and figures. Economic representations and practices. Marburg 2000), and on the transcultural production of objectivity (Weit hergeholte Fakten. Eine Parabel der Entwicklungshilfe. Stuttgart 2002). Burkhard Schnepel is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Martin-Luther-University in Halle-Wittenberg. He has done research on the Shilluk of the Southern Sudan and on the jungle kings of Orissa in East India. Other research interests include village theatre, fools, and “cultures in motion”. Currently he works on tourism and the Séga dance on Mauritius, as well as on various aspects of an anthropology of the night. His publications include: Twinned Beings. Kings and Effigies in Southern Sudan, East India and Renaissance France (1995); The Jungle Kings. Ethnohistorical Aspects of Politics and Religion in East India (2002); and he has edited Jagannath Revisited: Society, Religion and the State in Orissa (2002) as well as Hundert Jahre Die Traumdeutung. Träume im Kulturvergleich (2001). Shingo Shimada is Professor of Japanese Studies at the Heinrich-HeineUniversity, Düsseldorf. His research interests include the theory and method of cross-cultural comparison, theory of culture and translation, modernization of the Japanese society. Among his recent publications: Die Erfindung Japans. Kulturelle Wechselwirkung und politische Identitätskonstruktion (2000); Development of the Sociology in Japan (2005). Lukas K. Sosoe is Professor at the University of Luxemburg at the Philosophy and Law Department. His books include Naturalismus. Kritik und Autonomie der Ethik (1989); Philosophie du droit (with Alain Renaut 1991); Bioéthique et culture démocratique (with Yvette Lajuenesse 1996); Les Sources 146

ON THE AUTHORS

de la philosophie kantienne du 17ème et du 18ème siècle (ed. with Robert Theis 2005). Charles Stewart is Reader in Anthropology at University College London. He has conducted long-term field research in Greece, primarily on the island of Naxos. He is the author of Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (1991), co-editor (with Rosalind Shaw) of Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis (1994). Currently he is editing an interdisciplinary volume on creolization, and also completing a monograph on dreaming and historical consciousness in Greece.

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