SAHLINS & FABIAN ON
IDENTITY AND DIFFERENTIATION
The following is from Marshall Sahlins'
essay called "Two or Three Things I Know About Culture", published in Man
in 1999. The essay covers many of the ideas he presented in the article
you read, but with some significant additions and with different examples.
In this passage, he goes somewhat further than he did in the section on
"the indigenization of modernity" in his "What is Anthropological Enlightenment?".
Here, he starts to lay out a notion of a "dialectic of similarity and difference",
which is itself an idea that has many origins, including structural linguistics,
Levi-Straussian structuralism, and a good deal of post-structuralism. Notice
that what he's talking about here is an absolutely fundamental cultural
process of making sense of things by describing similarities against the
background of differences and differences against the background of similarities.
Symbolic anthropologists often talk about this process under the heading
of metaphor, but we'll get back to that later. (A metaphor, after all,
highlights similarities against a background of difference: Mike Harris
is an ass.)
Consider again this surprising paradox of our time:
That localization develops apace with globalization, differentiation with
integration; that just when the forms of life around the world are becoming
homogeneous, the peoples are asserting their cultural distinctiveness.
"An increasing homogenisation of social and cultural forms", as Marilyn
Strathern says, "seems to be accompanied by a proliferation of claims to
specific authenticities and identities." Appadruai, Hannerz and many other
students of globalization point out the linkage of these seemingly opposed
processes, noting that the marking of cultural difference is responsive
to the hegemonic threat of world capitalism. The short answer to the paradox
is thus "resistance". Problem is, the people are not usually resisting
the technologies and "conveniences" of modernization, nor are they particularly
shy of the capitalist relations needed to aquire them. Rather, what they
are after is the indigenization of modernity, their own cultural space
in the global scheme of things. They would make some autonomy of their
heteronomy. Hence what needs to be recognized is that similitude is
a necessary condition of the differentiation. For in the end, culturalism
is the differencing of growing similarities by contrastive structures.
This dialectic of similarity and difference, of
convergence of contents and divergence of schemes, is a normal mode of
cultural production. It is not unique to the contemporary globalizing world.
On the contrary, its precolonial and extracolonial occurances help explain
the colonial and postcolonial. In regard to similitude,
ethnography has always known that cultures were never as bounded, self-contained,
and self-sustaining as postmodernism pretends that modernism pretends.
No culture is sui generis, no people the sole or even the principle
author of its own existence. The a priori conceit that authenticity
means self-fashioning and is lost by reliance on others seems only a legacy
of bourgeois self-consciousness....
From all this, it follows that hybridity is everyone.
I mean hybridity in the way that Homi Bhabha's idea of it as deconstructed
in-betweenness ... has popularly come to mean the cultural admixture we
used to call "acculturation". In that sense, as Boas, Kroeber, & co.
taught, all cultures are hybrid. All have more foreign than domestically
invented parts....
Hybridity is a geneology, not a structure.... It
is an analytic construal of a people's history, not an ethnographic description
of their way of life. In their way of life, externalities are indigenized,
engaged in local configurations and become different from what they were.
In this regard, the Hegelian dialectic of self and other may be the mother
of all culturalisms. More proximately, complementary differentiation of
similar structures among nearby peoples was the main dynamic of Levi-Strauss's
Mythologiques:
symmetrical inversions that ran the length and breadth of aboriginal North
and South America....
...[after Ruth Benedict's works of 1932 & 1934]
the anthropological wisdom would be that cultures are largely foreign in
origin and distinctively local in pattern....
Saussurean structuralism later gave the pattern
argument the added force of positional value. Even if coercively imposed,
external practices and relationships are necessarily brought into value-determining
associations with native categories. In the upshot, they acquire indigenous
logics, intelligibilities and effects. Although in theory structure is
supposed to be a concept antithetical to history and agency, in practice
it is what gives historical substance to a people's culture and independent
grounds to thier action. Without cultural order, there is neither history
nor agency. Still, I am not speaking of a "culture of resistance" so much
as the resistance of culture. Inherent in the meaningful action of socially-situated
persons, the resistance of culture is the more inclusive form of differentiation,
neither requiring an intentional politics of opposition nor confined to
the colonially oppressed. People act in the world in terms of the social
beings they are, and it should not be forgotten that from their quotidian
point of view it is the global system that is peripheral, not them.
On the matter of complementary oppositions, Simmel
[1908] pointed out that when elements already differentiated are forced
into union, the usual effect is a more intense repulsion, "an actualization
of antitheses that otherwise would not have come to pass." "Unification",
he said, "is the means to individuation and its emergence into consciousness."
Was he speaking presciently of the current globaliztion and its local discontents?
No, of the Holy Roman Empire, whose "politics of world domination... only
served to release the particularisms of peoples, tribes and nations." The
Empire contributed to its own destruction by the individuation "it created,
intensified and brought to awareness." I stress the awareness, the
emergence of difference into consciousness, because it brings us back to
the diacritical claims of cultural uniqueness among contemporary peoples
who are becoming ever more integrated and alike.
...The strange argument with which I conclude is
that these cultural claims are indexes of more basic structuring codes,
modes of order that are themselves largely imperceptible yet make all the
difference between peoples who are perceptibly similar....
From a comment (Current Anthropology 40 [Supplement]
Feb 1999: p. S38) by Johannes Fabian on a paper by Vassos Argyrou.
This edited excerpt is a bit mangled, since I've removed the explicit references
to Argyrou's work. But I think this does two very useful things: notice
his distinction between meaning and sense, and then his argument that identity
and difference are created together through action that is historically
situated. This latter point is the same one made by Sahlins: processes
creating identity necessarily create difference. But where Sahlins was
specifically interested in pointing at the process by which globalization
generates the self-conscious expression of local cultures, Fabian is saying
that this same general process is at the lived heart of ethnographic work.
They present the essential process as "dialectical" in the sense that actions
are said to produce their opposites.
Anthropologists, since they have lost... their ontological
certainties, have been worrying about what they are doing.
What are we doing? We work to produce knowledge
about people who usually do not share what goes, for us, without saying.
The problem of alterity is not one of (ontological) difference but one
of being able (willing, and competent) to engage in practices from which
such knowledge can emerge. Knowledge worth laboring for, I would argue,
is knowledge that changes the knower (and the known; there are no one way
practices). The key is in the difference between meaning and sense. Meaning
posits and confirms.... Anthropology, as I see it, is about making sense;
it is not a quest for meaning. Assuming we would find it, to whom would
we peddle it? With whose authorization? Sense strikes and illuminates;
it comes from, and causes, struggle; it is, to use as apt Greek term, agonistic.
Meaning may be met with a "knowing smile". It is not always easy to deal
with sense gently.
...[N]o doing is imaginable that does not give itself,
or cling to, an identity...; ...[but] action, in our case knowledge production,
could not take place unless identities were transformed. What sounds like
a paradox is, however, just a way of affirming that Sameness and Otherness
are neither qualities nor states but actions and processes. Such actions
are historically situated and politically involved....
[Sameness], inasmuch as it enters our critical thoughts
on anthropology, is a matter concerning the possibility of knowledge production,
hence an epistemological matter. This is what allows me to continue presenting
experiences and documents in ethnographic and historical accounts that
have a chance to "strike" by the sense they make rather than give meaning
that comforts. What I dread is being read as if all the pleasures and pains
of writing anthropology were about nothing but taking a position, or about
nothing but enacting a position, which comes to the same.