Less Vacuuming, More “Cultural Identity"
Whatever that is!
A newsletter at last! Sorry everyone, I’ve been getting used to a new job. Now that I’ve figured out the basics, I’m trying to get my writing schedule back up and running. What have I called in to help free me up to write? A robot mop + vacuum cleaner! I’ve been waiting for ages to get one of these things!
Anyway, what am I writing again?
What is “cultural identity”? And why is it so powerful?
The first thing – and it’s now well overdue – is my half of an article on the way the Australian state is calling into service this force it’s calling the “Indian diaspora,” which it usually imagines as an undifferentiated group of people who share a common “cultural identity.”
I won’t get into why it would encourage that way of thinking about people or culture here, as that’s an issue for the article so I’ll share some ideas later. But I’m reading a few books to get the argument written and one of them is an oldie now, and a bit difficult, but I’ve read it again because I didn’t do it right last time.
It’s Jean-Francois Bayart’s 2005 book, The Illusion of Cultural Identity (first published in French in 1996).
This book sets out to analyse why almost every question about politics seems to be answered in terms of “cultural identity,” and how this explanation became so attractive after 1989.
It’s not the kind of book that features sustained engagement with one or two case studies. Rather, it jumps around between a million examples to show that Bayart, a political scientist whose work is on African states, also digested a wide range of literatures that cover much of Asia and the Middle East, not to mention the West.
So, it can feel like he aims to bamboozle rather than convince, and a couple of reviewers said they found the book a hard read. It is, but I think it’s useful regardless – Bayart totally dismantles the idea that we have fixed, coherent, and consistent cultural identities that we inherit from the past and carry into the future.
He tears strips off the idea that contemporary political actors are behaving “traditionally,” even when they mine the past for cultural forms and practices that help them differentiate themselves, including to the point of ethnogenesis. He argues that they, like all of us, are integrated into global markets, and draw on a global repertoire of symbols and practices, many of which they use in combination with “traditional,” civilisational claims.
They aren’t traditionalists, however, just because they invoke tradition – they’re mobilising old and new cultural elements in fresh combinations, in specific circumstances that can shift quickly, i.e., they’re contingent on combinations of social, political, and economic factors. In Hobsbawm’s terms, they’re creatively “inventing” traditions to help them cohere and mobilise contemporary political communities, which, as Anderson points out, are always imagined, for example by associating their identities with certain ancient traditions.1
The world is interconnected, of course, and we don’t live in discrete cultural bubbles with our putative ancestors. And yet, because people nevertheless assert their cultural differences in many ways, and even believe in cultural claims as if they are simply “true,” Bayart still thinks it’s important to analyse “the cultural dimension inherent in political action.”
And this is where his idea of the “imaginaire” comes in. Imagined communities exist in imagined cultural fields, in which their members share exposure to national cinemas, for example, or ideas about how certain types of dress or styling – or animals, or speech registers – correspond with certain forms of politics, and so on. These fields, however, are ambivalent and incomplete – they aren’t universally compelling, nor can we isolate ourselves from “outside” cultural influences. But we can understand how to read these fields and figure out how they contribute to certain types of state-formation, for example.
In short, we should not content ourselves with “culturalist” explanations – “they behave like this because it is their culture” (or worse, “and that culture is in their blood, or DNA”). Rather, we can understand the forces and processes involved in the production of culture, even as we grapple with both our irreducible diversity, and the fact we’re all stuck with each other in common, global systems whose logics all of us also internalise.
So much for the essentialist claims we often see associated with cultural identity.
See Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 2012. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press. See also Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. Verso.