Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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labour. It was a courageous step even as late as the 1980s for an Amazonianist to admit to working among such inauthentic people—and to state not only the worth of such a study but also the irrelevance of our notion of ‘authenticity’ (see Gow 1991).

Still, times have changed, and we find that today the notion of hybridity is alive and well. Indeed hybridity is thought to be part-and- parcel of the post-colonial, globalized, fragmented identity—and for some (e.g. see Bauman 1995; Haraway 1990), everyone in the world, including both ‘natives’ and civil servants, have become hybrids. Thus writers within the post-colonialist tradition tend to write as if hybridity is a product of Western civilization.The present-day self is a fragmented one; we have become half humans, half machines. On the other hand, there is an anthropological view that sees all cultural activity as belonging to hybridity, as being a product of cultural assimilation. In other words, there has never been such a thing as an ‘authentic type’, or a ‘pure system’, for people are always exchanging, changing, processing, incorporating, elements of culture. From this perspective the position is that we have all always been hybrids. To live culturally is an ongoing, ever-shifting activity (we are the ones who place ‘culture’ within museums, centring, reifying, turning it into the matter of evolutionists’ dreams).

All people, however, do not belong to Homi Bhabha‘s category of the ‘unhomely’. Only ‘marginalized’ hybrids can be ‘unhomely’. They are not only betwixt and between, but also have no home.They are the ones classified as inauthentic hybrids, and thus it is they who still suffer from the remains of early-twentieth-century Eurocentric notions of authenticity with its associated time-warp ways of thinking. There exists the strong sentiment among politicians, development agencies and even anthropologists that deprived, powerless, dominated peoples must, if they wish to be recognized, remain ‘authentic’ by living frozen to their past. The imagery of the ‘pure’ primitive goes deep, and thus has political weight today (see Overing 1998).We have the bureaucrats of Brussels promoting with perhaps the best of intentions the idea of ‘the indigenous community’, a dutiful salvage job for the world of nation-states. The United Nations document, ‘Article 21’, calls for all nation-states to conserve the shared cultures, the united cultures, of their respective indigenous peoples. The understanding espoused is that natives live in homogeneous communities, the members of which share identical views of the world; the nation should respect these individual cultures, these homogeneous world-views. What should we do? Should we suspect such documents? Or aid and abet them? Should we ask, as Nicholas Thomas (1994) might do, whether such a

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document is yet another example of white society’s primitivism? And, as such, an aggressive act of essentializing? Is ‘Article 21’just another colonialist appropriation, with its emphasis upon the community of the native (we have individualism; they have community)? Yet, do we not wish to preserve the notion of community? There is the longing of Homi Bhabha (1994) for the creation of a ‘community of the unhomely’ to take care of the unhomely‘s desire for social linkage, and to join, to join …We find that this question of community is not very straightforward.

The importance of perspective

Similarly, Nicholas Thomas notes (1994) that despite the insidious role that ‘essential discourse’ has played in the colonial constructions of native identity, the notion of ‘authenticity’ also has its ambiguity, certainly as a political tool.To know the perspective of the user of such discourse is absolutely essential to understanding the power game at hand. We may well be offended by the ‘modernized’ Maori, or Aboriginal, or Native American promoting the ‘authenticity’ of their traditional ways.We see ‘hybrids’ disrupting the space of the ‘authentic native’. On the other hand, what these hybrids have learned is that the very act of essentializing, as the colonial West and global capitalism has long known, is empowering. Thus the table can be turned. Indigenous peoples may put themselves in the studio or the museum in order to subvert colonialist discourse. The Maori art exhibitions capitalized on white society’s primitivism, creating thereby some prestige and power for the Maori that did not exist before the 1980s. There is also the example from the Cultural Palace of the Rio Negro in Manaus, which recently engaged in a great cultural display of Amazonian ethnicity and a eulogy of its cultural authenticity in a festival entitled ‘Expressions of Identity and Ethnic Affirmation’. There was an example of Yanomami shamanism, and an ayawaska (hallucinatory drug) ritual of the Marubo. There was myth-telling, and chanting, ritual dances performed and videos of indigenous festivals shown. A sonata was even performed by the University of Amazonas orchestra, entitled ‘The Dance of the Masks’.The extent to which this display was indigenously planned and organized is unclear.

Nevertheless it is wise to remember that cultural activism on the part of the marginalized and ‘discontents’ of colonialist history has not been unusual. As the art critic, Guy Brett, observes (1991:118ff.), the sheer volume of artistic critique and resistance to the colonial process on the part of the colonized has been in fact concealed in the West—or not

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recognized by it (cf. Gossen 1996).The mocking critiques and images of colonial masters would make, it seems, a bad fit with the widely accepted view that the colonized are uncomprehending victims. Nowadays, this art of the unhomely, which often weds a ‘sophisticated’ Western training in Paris or London with imagery from ‘back home’, tends to make explicit the dialectics of cultural discourses between centre and periphery, and their related relations of power. There have been, however, many powerful artists from countries peripheral to the great art markets who on the whole are unknown to the West, ignored by it and thereby forcibly localized (Brett 1991).Though, if known (such artists as the Russian, Malevich, or the Mexicans, Rivera and Kahlo), they are seen by Europe as mere ‘primitivists’. It is, however, a particular political use of ‘primitivism’ that is for the most part radically different from the way it has been used in Western art (Brett 1991). We must remember that the one who does the labelling of the unhomely, the authentic or inauthentic, and the hybrids of the world—and for whom— makes all the difference to the game of empowerment: it follows that the flipside is disempowerment, as in the strategy of fixing ethnic identities long used by the nation-state.

The right to hybridity and the patronizing gaze

The Caribbean Nobel prize author, Derek Walcott, warns us (1996) about the dangers of the ‘patronizing gaze’ that insists upon the purity of culture. Walcott reminds us that a lot of defensive, aggressive academics and politicians have seized upon the definition of folk. He notes (1996:271) that there is something dangerous about ‘the property of reaching people and preserving what belongs to the people, all that stuff’—there is a curious kind of patronage in it. He says that he himself does not write ‘folk’:

[w]hen you talk about folk as a writer, then the danger there is you tend to say: ‘Well, we’ve got to preserve what we have, you’ve got to be rootsy, X or Y, you’ve got to talk that way’. You know, that kind of thing; it’s all very dangerous and ephemeral, that kind of aggressiveness. It turns into anthropology; and you can’t patronize genuine people by making them anthropological specimens, like saying: ‘Oh, you are a great representative of the folk. Now you keep doing that. Right?’ While in the meantime you’ve been watching a good soap opera, or singing country songs.

(Walcott 1996:271)

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Walcott goes on to insist (ibid.) that each person has the right to go to the cinema, ‘instead of being a damned representative of folk for the rest of his or her life. So anyway, there’s that, that we have to look out for.’ Stephen Hugh-Jones (1992) makes a similar powerful plea for the right of indigenous peoples to make their own decisions about the acquisition of consumer goods. He argues that there is hypocrisy to the assumption that the integrity of Amazonian ‘culture’ is in jeopardy as it comes into contact with the allure of greedy market forces, which are now entering contemporary Amazonia from a myriad of directions.The idea is that Amazonian folk must not partake of, they must in fact be protected from, the capitalist vision of humankind’s limitless needs, which are now propelling humanity to its benefit into an unbounded spiral of progress. Unlike people of the Western world, who are not beguiled by the necessary ruthlessness of market forces, indigenous peoples are portrayed as passive victims of the market economy.Yet, in the name of progress, they have been drawn into it willy-nilly at the hands of missionaries, merchants and government agents.As Hugh-Jones observes, the possibility is rarely considered that these are a people who are also fully capable of reflecting upon their relationships with the market economy, and that indeed they often well understand its risks, its dangers

and its allure.

Amazonian peoples are deeply aware of the dangers of rapid economic and social development. They have suffered conditions of extreme change over the past thirty years: they have seen strangers entering their territories to take their land and destroy it. They have experienced the building on their lands of hydro-electric dams and roads, the mining of gold and the extracting of oil, the burning of forests and the creation of large cattle ranches and mono-culture plantations. They have been displaced from their up-river small villages to down-river highly populated communities. Their young people have had to enter an educational system which uses a foreign language and teaches an alien knowledge of the world. The indigenous peoples have good insight into their problems with the market economy; they know the enemy and its effect upon them. They know about the social costs of rapid change, and also the economic and personal costs of the market economy. They increasingly do not have the land to sustain indigenous practices and the type of community life which they value. To survive and feed their families they must engage in wage labour—where they can neither look nor act in accordance to their ‘ordinary’ (authentic?) ways of doing things.They have many skills, but not the political ones for dealing with big government or big multi-nationals which would

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be necessary to get their lands back, and thus their freedom for leading in one way or other their ordinary, everyday life.

Contrary to popular ideas about the matter, indigenous peoples are often quite open to change. They tend to be epistemologically open (cf. Salmond 1985), and thus, because knowledge and practice are not separate for them, they are not opposed to accepting new practices. It is not unreasonable also to say that they themselves prefer having a say in the matter in order to decide what is good or damaging to their communities, and their desired ways of living. However, the idea of self-directed change is too much of a challenge to the axiomatic premise of the Western assimilation paradigm, where all change that can be appropriate must be decided upon by the ‘superior’ and ‘developed’ form of life, which by definition ‘knows best’. There are many academics, bureaucrats and politicians who believe strongly in the ‘purity’ of indigenous lifeways, and therefore view any sign of ‘openness’ to change with disdain, especially if self-directed and selfmotivated. The idea of ‘authenticity’ is a political stance which can be used against the ‘unhomely’ of the world as a means to keep them within control.

Thus it is for many reasons that to question the ‘authenticity’ of the motivations of indigenous peoples—who wish to wear trousers, or want to make their own decisions about (or use outside expertise with regard to) their relations to the market economy and the agents of the nationstate demanding their ‘development’—would border on the vacuous. However, among bureaucrats and agents of development, the pomposity, not to speak of the political weight, of their accusations of inauthenticity goes unquestioned (cf. Hobart 1993; Salmond 1995; Oldham 1996). In other words, indigenous people must not become skilled in their dealings with the world of the whites. Categorized by the state as irritating ethnic hybrids, they have no right to real hybridity which would allow them to act skilfully in both worlds. Their modern condition is precisely that which Homo Bhabha coined as ‘the unhomely’.

Is an anthropology of ‘the unhomely’ possible?

An interesting question to be raised is whether anthropology can become one of the voices for the unhomely? Can we take the perspective of the unhomely?—all those blurred categories, wanderings to and fro, an unease with Western capitalism, and nausea over the structures of domination created through modernist ways of thinking and acting. However, as Zygmunt Bauman has noted (1990:158), the

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