Beyond_Culture

Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference Author(s): Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1, Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference (Feb., 1992), pp. 6-23 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656518 . Accessed: 10/05/2011 08:32 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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Blackwell Publishing and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference Akhil Gupta Department of Anthropology Stanford University James Ferguson Department of Anthropology University of California, Irvine For a subject whose central rite of passage is fieldwork, whose romance has rested on its exploration of the remote ("the most other of others" [Hannerz 1986:363]), whose critical function is seen to lie in its juxtaposition of radically different ways of being (located "elsewhere") with that of the anthropologists' own, usually Western, culture, there has been surprisingly little self-consciousness about the issue of space in anthropological theory. (Some notable exceptions are Appadurai [1986, 1988], Hannerz [1987], and Rosaldo [1988, 1989].) This collection of five ethnographic articles represents a modest attempt to deal with the issues of space and place, along with some necessarily related concerns such as those of location, displacement, community, and identity. In particular, we wish to explore how the renewed interest in theorizing space in postmodernist and feminist theory (An- zaldua 1987; Baudrillard 1988; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Foucault 1982; Jame- son 1984; Kaplan 1987; Martin and Mohanty 1986)-embodied in such notions as surveillance, panopticism, simulacra, deterritorialization, postmodern hyper- space, borderlands, and marginality-forces us to reevaluate such central analytic concepts in anthropology as that of "culture" and, by extension, the idea of "cul- tural difference." Representations of space in the social sciences are remarkably dependent on images of break, rupture, and disjunction. The distinctiveness of societies, na- tions, and cultures is based upon a seemingly unproblematic division of space, on the fact that they occupy "naturally" discontinuous spaces. The premise of dis- continuity forms the starting point from which to theorize contact, conflict, and contradiction between cultures and societies. For example, the representation of the world as a collection of "countries," as in most world maps, sees it as an inherently fragmented space, divided by different colors into diverse national so- cieties, each "rooted" in its proper place (cf. Malkki, this issue). It is so taken for granted that each country embodies its own distinctive culture and society that the terms "society" and "culture" are routinely simply appended to the names 6 BEYOND "CULTURE" 7 of nation-states, as when a tourist visits India to understand "Indian culture" and "Indian society," or Thailand to experience "Thai culture," or the United States to get a whiff of "American culture." Of course, the geographical territories that cultures and societies are believed to map onto do not have to be nations. We do, for example, have ideas about culture-areas that overlap several nation-states, or of multicultural nations. On a smaller scale, perhaps, are our disciplinary assumptions about the association of culturally unitary groups (tribes or peoples) with "their" territories: thus, "the Nuer" live in "Nuerland" and so forth. The clearest illustration of this kind of thinking are the classic "ethnographic maps" that purported to display the spatial distribution of peoples, tribes, and cultures. But in all these cases, space itself becomes a kind of neutral grid on which cultural difference, historical memory, and societal organization are inscribed. It is in this way that space functions as a central organizing principle in the social sciences at the same time that it disap- pears from analytical purview. This assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture results in some sig- nificant problems. First, there is the issue of those who inhabit the border, that "narrow strip along steep edges" (Anzaldua 1987:3) of national boundaries. The fiction of cultures as discrete, object-like phenomena occupying discrete spaces becomes implausible for those who inhabit the borderlands. Related to border in- habitants are those who live a life of border crossings-migrant workers, nomads, and members of the transnational business and professional elite. What is "the culture" of farm workers who spend half a year in Mexico and half a year in the United States? Finally, there are those who cross borders more or less perma- nently-immigrants, refugees, exiles, and expatriates. In their case, the disjunc- ture of place and culture is especially clear: Khmer refugees in the United States take "Khmer culture" with them in the same complicated way that Indian im- migrants in England transport "Indian culture" to their new homeland. A second set of problems raised by the implicit mapping of cultures onto places is to account for cultural differences within a locality. "Multiculturalism" is both a feeble acknowledgment of the fact that cultures have lost their moorings in definite places and an attempt to subsume this plurality of cultures within the framework of a national identity. Similarly, the idea of "subcultures" attempts to preserve the idea of distinct "cultures" while acknowledging the relation of different cultures to a dominant culture within the same geographical and terri- torial space. Conventional accounts of ethnicity, even when used to describe cul- tural differences in settings where people from different regions live side by side, rely on an unproblematic link between identity and place.' Although such con- cepts are suggestive because they endeavor to stretch the naturalized association of culture with place, they fail to interrogate this assumption in a truly fundamen- tal manner. We need to ask how to deal with cultural difference while abandoning received ideas of (localized) culture. Third, there is the important question of postcoloniality. To which places do the hybrid cultures of postcoloniality belong? Does the colonial encounter create a "new culture" in both the colonized and colonizing country, or does it 8 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY destabilize the notion that nations and cultures are isomorphic? As discussed be- low, postcoloniality further problematizes the relationship between space and culture. Last, and most important, challenging the ruptured landscape of independent nations and autonomous cultures raises the question of understanding social change and cultural transformation as situated within interconnected spaces. The presumption that spaces are autonomous has enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power. The inherently fragmented space assumed in the definition of anthropology as the study of cultures (in the plural) may have been one of the reasons behind the long-standing failure to write an- thropology's history as the biography of imperialism. For if one begins with the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected, then cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural contact and articulation but one of rethinking difference through connec- tion. To illustrate, let us examine one powerful model of cultural change that at- tempts to relate dialectically the local to larger spatial arenas: articulation. Artic- ulation models, whether they come from Marxist structuralism or from "moral economy," posit a primeval state of autonomy (usually labeled "precapitalist"), which is then violated by global capitalism. The result is that both local and larger spatial arenas are transformed, the local more than the global to be sure, but not necessarily in a predetermined direction. This notion of articulation allows one to explore the richly unintended consequences of, say, colonial capitalism, where loss occurs alongside invention. Yet, by taking a preexisting, localized "com- munity" as a given starting point, it fails to examine sufficiently the processes (such as the structures of feeling that pervade the imagining of community) that go into the construction of space as place or locality in the first instance. In other words, instead of assuming the autonomy of the primeval community, we need to examine how it was formed as a community out of the interconnected space that always already existed. Colonialism, then, represents the displacement of one form of interconnection by another. This is not to deny that colonialism, or an expanding capitalism, does indeed have profoundly dislocating effects on existing societies. But by always foregrounding the spatial distribution of hierarchical power relations, we can better understand the process whereby a space achieves a distinctive identity as a place. Keeping in mind that notions of locality or com- munity refer both to a demarcated physical space and to clusters of interaction, we can see that the identity of a place emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a system of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultural con- struction as a community or locality. It is for this reason that what Jameson (1984) has dubbed "postmodern hy- perspace" has so fundamentally challenged the convenient fiction that mapped cultures onto places and peoples. In the capitalist West, a Fordist regime of ac- cumulation, emphasizing extremely large production facilities, a relatively stable work force, and the welfare state, combined to create urban "communities" whose outlines were most clearly visible in company towns (Davis 1984; Harvey BEYOND "CULTURE" 9 1989; Mandel 1975). The counterpart of this in the international arena was that multinational corporations, under the leadership of the United States, steadily ex- ploited the raw materials, primary goods, and cheap labor of the independent na- tion-states of the postcolonial "Third World."' Multilateral agencies and powerful Western states preached, and where necessary militarily enforced, the "laws" of the market to encourage the international flow of capital, while national immigra- tion policies ensured that there would be no free (i.e., anarchic, disruptive) flow of labor to the high-wage islands in the capitalist core. Fordist patterns of accu- mulation have now been replaced by a regime of flexible accumulation-char- acterized by small-batch production, rapid shifts in product lines, extremely fast movements of capital to exploit the smallest differentials in labor and raw material costs-built on a more sophisticated communications and information network and better means of transporting goods and people. At the same time, the indus- trial production of culture, entertainment, and leisure that first achieved some- thing approaching global distribution during the Fordist era led, paradoxically, to the invention of new forms of cultural difference and new forms of imagining community. Something like a transnational public sphere has certainly rendered any strictly bounded sense of community or locality obsolete. At the same time, it has enabled the creation of forms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on an appropriation of space where contiguity and face-to-face contact are para- mount. In the pulverized space of postmodernity, space has not become irrele- vant: it has been reterritorialized in a way that does not conform to the experience of space that characterized the era of high modernity. It is this that forces us to reconceptualize fundamentally the politics of community, solidarity, identity, and cultural difference. Imagined Communities, Imagined Places People have undoubtedly always been more mobile and identities less fixed than the static and typologizing approaches of classical anthropology would sug- gest. But today, the rapidly expanding and quickening mobility of people com- bines with the refusal of cultural products and practices to "stay put" to give a profound sense of a loss of territorial roots, of an erosion of the cultural distinc- tiveness of places, and of ferment in anthropological theory. The apparent deter- ritorialization of identity that accompanies such processes has made Clifford's question (1988:275) a key one for recent anthropological inquiry: "What does it mean, at the end of the twentieth century, to speak . . . of a 'native land'? What processes rather than essences are involved in present experiences of cultural identity?" Such questions are of course not wholly new, but issues of collective identity today do seem to take on a special character, when more and more of us live in what Said (1979:18) has called "a generalized condition of homelessness," a world where identities are increasingly coming to be, if not wholly deterritorial- ized, at least differently territorialized. Refugees, migrants, displaced and state- less peoples-these are perhaps the first to live out these realities in their most 10 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY complete form, but the problem is more general. In a world of diaspora, trans- national culture flows, and mass movements of populations, old-fashioned at- tempts to map the globe as a set of culture regions or homelands are bewildered by a dazzling array of postcolonial simulacra, doublings and redoublings, as India and Pakistan apparently reappear in postcolonial simulation in London, prerevo- lution Tehran rises from the ashes in Los Angeles, and a thousand similar cultural dreams are played out in urban and rural settings all across the globe. In this cul- ture-play of diaspora, familiar lines between "here" and "there," center and pe- riphery, colony and metropole become blurred. Where "here" and "there" become blurred in this way, the cultural cer- tainties and fixities of the metropole are upset as surely, if not in the same way, as those of the colonized periphery. In this sense, it is not only the displaced who experience a displacement (cf. Bhabha 1989:66). For even people remaining in familiar and ancestral places find the nature of their relation to place ineluctably changed, and the illusion of a natural and essential connection between the place and the culture broken. "Englishness," for instance, in contemporary, interna- tionalized England is just as complicated and nearly as deterritorialized a notion as Palestinian-ness or Armenian-ness, since "England" ("the real England") re- fers less to a bounded place than to an imagined state of being or moral location. Consider, for instance, the following quote from a young white reggae fan in the ethnically chaotic neighborhood of Balsall Heath in Birmingham: there's no such thing as "England" any more . . . welcome to India brothers! This is the Caribbean! . . . Nigeria! . . . There is no England, man. This is what is com- ing. Balsall Heath is the center of the melting pot, 'cos all I ever see when I go out is half-Arab, half-Pakistani, half-Jamaican, half-Scottish, half-Irish. I know 'cos I am [half Scottish/half Irish] . . . who am I? . . . Tell me who I belong to? They criticize me, the good old England. Alright, where do I belong? You know, I was brought up with blacks, Pakistanis, Africans, Asians, everything, you name it ... who do I be- long to? . . . I'm just a broad person. The earth is mine . . . you know we was not born in Jamaica ... we was not born in "England." We were born here, man. It's our right. That's the way I see it. That's the way I deal with it. [Hebdige 1987:158- 159] The broad-minded acceptance of cosmopolitanism that seems to be implied here is perhaps more the exception than the rule, but there can be little doubt that the explosion of a culturally stable and unitary "England" into the cut-and-mix "here" of contemporary Balsall Heath is an example of a phenomenon that is real and spreading. It is clear that the erosion of such supposedly natural connections between peoples and places has not led to the modernist specter of global cultural homogenization (Clifford 1988). But "cultures" and "peoples," however per- sistent they may be, cease to be plausibly identifiable as spots on the map. The irony of these times, however, is that as actual places and localities be- come ever more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of culturally and ethnically dis- tinct places become perhaps even more salient. It is here that it becomes most visible how imagined communities (Anderson 1983) come to be attached to imag- ined places, as displaced peoples cluster around remembered or imagined home- BEYOND "CULTURE" 11 lands, places, or communities in a world that seems increasingly to deny such firm territorialized anchors in their actuality. The set of issues surrounding the construction of place and homeland by mobile and displaced people is addressed in different ways by a number of the articles in this issue. Remembered places have often served as symbolic anchors of community for dispersed people. This has long been true of immigrants, who (as Leonard [1992] shows vividly) use memory of place to construct imaginatively their new lived world. "Homeland" in this way remains one of the most powerful unifying symbols for mobile and displaced peoples, though the relation to homeland may be very differently constructed in different settings (see Malkki, this issue). More- over, even in more completely deterritorialized times and settings-settings where "home" is not only distant, but also where the very notion of "home" as a durably fixed place is in doubt-aspects of our lives remain highly "localized" in a social sense, as Peters (1992) argues. We need to give up naive ideas of com- munities as literal entities (cf. Cohen 1985), but remain sensitive to the profound "bifocality" that characterizes locally lived lives in a globally interconnected world, and the powerful role of place in the "near view" of lived experience (Peters 1992). The partial erosion of spatially bounded social worlds and the growing role of the imagination of places from a distance, however, themselves must be situ- ated within the highly spatialized terms of a global capitalist economy. The spe- cial challenge here is to use a focus on the way space is imagined (but not ima- ginary!) as a way to explore the processes through which such conceptual pro- ce