Encountering Difference

Robin Cohen, Olivia Sheringham

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781509508808, 9781509508792
• eBook ISBN: 9781509508839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

In the face of the destructive possibilities of resurgent nationalisms, unyielding ethnicities and fundamentalist religious affinities, there is hardly a more urgent task than understanding how humans can learn to live alongside one another. This fascinating book shows how people from various societies learn to live with social diversity and cultural difference, and considers how the concepts of identity formation, diaspora and creolization shed light on the processes and geographies of encounter.

Robin Cohen and Olivia Sheringham reveal how early historical encounters created colonial hierarchies, but also how conflict has been creatively resisted through shared social practices in particular contact zones including islands, port cities and the 'super-diverse' cities formed by enhanced international migration and globalization. Drawing on research experience from across the world, including new fieldwork in Louisiana, Martinique, Mauritius and Cape Verde, their account provides a balance between rich description and insightful analysis showing, in particular, how identities emerge and merge 'from below'.

Moving seamlessly between social and political theory, history, cultural anthropology, sociology and human geography, the authors point to important new ways of understanding and living with difference, surely one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century.

1
Shaping the Tools: Three Concepts

Social identity is the first of our three organizing concepts (the others being diaspora and creolization). It is a relatively recent construct in mainstream social sciences, yet now seems to be of ubiquitous concern. This stronger need to form or defend social identities is probably a reaction to the increased connectivity associated with globalization and the greater volumes and diversity of migration of all types (forced, semi-free, free, male or female, and from nearly all ethnicities, religions and nationalities). Identity construction arises among migrants, refugees and settled populations and involves assertions or reassertions of ethnicity, nationalism and religious observance as well as an embrace of more cosmopolitan possibilities. When do these manifestations of social identity result in different and contradictory trajectories? When, by contrast, do they intersect or converge?

Unlike social identity, diaspora and creolization are of much older provenance. Diaspora is an idea that ancient Greeks developed and that Jews appropriated and re-burnished for contemporary purposes. The term was conventionally deployed to represent a history of exile and dispossession, a sense of co-solidarity with other members of the dispersed group; it is associated with the development of myths of a common provenance and home, as well as determined efforts to establish or re-establish a homeland. If the term was to be generalized, the first task was to move it beyond its near exclusive usage to describe Jews (and to a lesser extent Armenians and Africans), and to transcend the trope of victimhood. This task was accomplished by social practice – as more and more groups (mainly ethnically denoted) described themselves as diasporas – and by the interventions of a number of social scientists, who liberated the notion from its old anchor points and gave it wider conceptual purchase.¹

A contrasting form of identity formation to diaspora is the idea of creolization, our third organizing concept, which centres on cross-fertilization between different societies as they interact. One must immediately confess that this term has a remarkable plethora of near synonyms – hybridity, métissage (French), mestizaje (Spanish), mestiçagem (Portuguese), interculturalism, multiculturalism, multiculture, pluriculture, transculturation, cultural pluralism, syncretism and mixity. No doubt, we have missed a few besides. Without going into a detailed etymological and historical explanation of each expression, the ones we consider paralleled and complemented our intentions are briefly amplified below:

• Hybridity has been used in recent years, particularly in cultural studies and literature, to signify overlapping cultural traditions and the creations of ‘third cultures’. Hybridity had unfortunate origins in the history of racial science and plant biology, indicating vigour combined with sterility and, in extreme versions, degeneracy, but a more positive use has now been widely accepted. One dissenting voice argues that because discussions of hybridity have become so pervasive, non-hybrid elements are ‘rejected, silenced, or exterminated from cultural discourse’.²
• Syncretism is used mainly to describe the fusion or selective adoption of religious beliefs, an arena of social interaction that is discussed by us from time to time. Charles Stewart notes that syncretism was mainly used for religious mixing and refers to its ‘objectionable but nevertheless instructive past. If this past can be understood, then we are in a position to consciously reappropriate syncretism’.³
• Interculturalism is perhaps the newest term to be deployed to signify cultural convergence. Its great virtue is that it evidently transcends the segmentation implied in multiculturalism. Interculturalism has been favoured by progressive educationalists and frequently used in their rather restricted circles. However, it is gaining increasing acceptance in international agencies and the United Nations and is chosen in a valuable discussion of ‘community cohesion’ in Britain.⁴

Though our argument draws on all three concepts, our favoured expression is creolization, a more deep-seated idea – firmly anchored in historical experiences, scholarly use (particularly in linguistics) and popular practice. For at least five centuries there have been creole languages, self-described Creole peoples and creole/creolizing societies. We explain below how we use the term.

Social identity formation

In general, interest in social identities has increased dramatically over the past 30 years – to such a degree, indeed, that it has become a dominant theme in anthropological and sociological studies. Historically, this is surprising given that most of the grand figures in these disciplines (luminaries like Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski) managed perfectly well without recourse to the idea of social identity. These thinkers were not so naive as to assume that ethnicity, nation, community, class or religion (‘gender’ was rarely used) were fixed and unyielding social categories, but none foresaw the extent to which some identities would become so malleable. It may be that the scholars we list are too easily and conventionally chosen and that an alternative early genealogy of identity-related thought can be found in Georg Simmel, George Herbert Mead or C.H. Cooley, particularly in the latter’s idea of the struggle of the marginalized minority to escape the impress of conformity dictated by the majority. This different intellectual provenance is discussed in Richard Jenkins’s account of social identity. However, he also dates the paradigmatic shift more recently, declaring that ‘identity became one of the unifying themes of social science in the 1990s and shows no signs of going away’.⁵

Three accounts are emblematic of this shift:

1. Erik Erikson moved the study of identity from an examination of how the ego and personality adjust over a lifespan (the traditional domain of psychology) to that of the social roles individuals are called upon to play. The idea that there might be a tension between these processes was vital to his notion of an ‘identity crisis’.⁶ A number of other social scientists have picked up and diffused the sociological aspects of his analysis.
2. An influential work by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann generated a conviction in social constructivism that almost became an article of religious faith among some social scientists.⁷ Their work fed a radical anti-essentialism that questioned any given historical fact or material entity, let alone the contours of any group identity. In other words, representation, imagination and social action could construct, destroy or reconstruct reality itself.⁸
3. Given such a radical programme, it was perhaps a modest enough claim to suggest, as Benedict Anderson did in his famous account, that the nation was also an imagined community.⁹

Paralleling the shifts in academic thinking were changes in the real world as the axes of political mobilization shifted away from class politics to the politics of identity. A wide range of communities – ethnic, racial, gender-based or religious – proclaimed their distinctive programmes amidst an array of other voices clambering to be heard.

The outcome of these intellectual interventions and social changes was to shatter any notion of fixed social identities. The social world became a world of identity flows, boundary formation/deformation, frontier zones, blurring, uncertainty, hybridity and mixtures rather than one marked by purity, homogeneity, timelessness and bounded entities.¹⁰ This new emphasis on fluidity resonated with many aspects of an increasingly globalized world. Improved connectivity had brought many cultures into eye contact, sometimes into collision. Increased resistance to neo-liberal versions of global capitalism reactivated old religious beliefs and new social movements alike. The more varied origins of international migrants meant that alien ways appeared not only on television screens, but also as lived realities in local communities. For radical social constructivists, this was predictable and explicable. Modernity, with its attempt to integrate differences through ideology, citizenship and the nation-state, had to yield to the ambiguous and complex world of postmodernity, where grand narratives explained nothing. Reality was reduced to radic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Usage
• Framing the Question: A Preamble
• 1 Shaping the Tools: Three Concepts
• 2 Exploring Difference: Early Interactions
• 3 Locating Identity Formation: Contact Zones
• 4 Expressing Merged Identities: Music
• 5 Celebrating and Resisting: Carnival
• 6 Constructing Heritage
• 7 Marking Identities: The Cultural Politics of Multiple Loyalties
• 8 Encountering Difference: A Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement