Critique of Identity Thinking

Michael Jackson

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781800734425, 9781789202823
• eBook ISBN: 9781789202830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent world-wide political developments have persuaded many people that we are again living in what Hannah Arendt called "dark times." Jackson's response to this age of uncertainty is to remind us how much experience falls outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible.  Drawing on such critical thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Karl Jaspers, whose work was profoundly influenced by the catastrophes that overwhelmed the world in the middle of the last century, Jackson explores the transformative and redemptive power of marginalized voices in the contemporary conversation of humankind.

1

MISTAKEN IDENTITIES

The Task of Thinking in Dark Times

To be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved.

—Gore Vidal, explaining why he refused to identify as “gay”

No longer doing fieldwork in far flung places, I have come to depend on riffling through old journals, talking with students, reading philosophy, and occasionally traveling abroad for my intellectual inspiration. Although these research methods are at once more adventitious and indirect than ethnography, they hopefully keep my thinking and writing grounded.

In the fall of 2016, I met with one of my students to discuss her current research. Born in China, Jiaying Ding came to the United States with her parents when she was seven. At school and at university, Jiaying became increasingly preoccupied with questions of identity. It was not that she sought a label that summed up who she was or that captured the experiences of the seniors with whom she was working in Boston and Beijing. Rather, Jiaying was struck by the impossibility of reducing persons to cultural, racial, sexual, or religious stereotypes. She found herself asking which of the problems faced by Chinese seniors reflected their ethnicity, which reflected their idiosyncratic experiences of aging and infirmity, and which could not be so easily pinned down. Turning to her own experience at Harvard, she mentioned “the hollow sense of one dimensionality” that sometimes overwhelmed her when she would give her one-minute “elevator introduction at a meeting or at the beginning of class” about who she was and what she was researching.

When I said “Chinese immigrants” it gave me an identity in a community that emphasized diversity, but it also felt alienating. I began to imagine my parents, sitting in puzzlement in the Old South Church, listening to a sermon. How can I reconcile my strong yearning for a place I can call home, of going back to China and seeking the resonances I feel I can only find there, with my growing conviction that people should not be treated one dimensionally, by their skin color, or by their status, or by other stereotypes?¹

I suggested to Jiaying two ways out of this impasse. The first was to pursue a train of thought she had already discovered in Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir of growing up in Stockton, California. “Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?”² In other words, culture is best thought of not as delimiting one’s identity but as a resource or fund on which one can draw creatively and variously, depending on the exigencies of the situation in which one finds oneself.

Like everything in life, the doctrine of diversity has its shadow side. In playing up difference and focusing on single traits such as skin color or nationality, we risk diminishing the significance of what we share. Furthermore, by reducing religious life to what is inscribed in religious texts (an error into which vociferous atheists and religious scholars often fall), or viewing happiness and unhappiness through clinical lens, or defending the rights of one group as if its moral claims on us were more compelling than the claims of others, our reified expressions of difference tend to blind us to the reasons we create such forms of distinction and division in the first place, as well as obscure the inherent dangers of these discursive forms.

Lila Abu-Lughod observes that life stories subvert “assumptions of homogeneity, coherence and timelessness … by revealing the struggle, negotiation, and strategizing that lie at the heart of social life.”³ John Berger puts it even more forcefully: “In poor societies abstraction and tyranny go together; in rich societies it is indifference which usually goes with abstraction. Abstraction’s capacity to ignore what is real (and the heart can abstract as well as the mind: unjustifiable jealousy, for example, is an abstraction) is undoubtedly where most evil begins.”⁴

Although I argue for deconstructing the category terms we deploy in our efforts to make life intelligible and manageable, a case can be made for creating such constructs and even for compressing into them more rather than fewer associations. In the same way that the God concept originates in kinship with images of paternal authority and maternal care, but accrues abstract ideas such as omnipotence, omniscience, infinity, and ineffability, identity terms tend to become condensation symbols that bring together images of ethnicity, kinship, history, and moral value, as in the Maori notion of Maoritanga explored in chapter 6 of this book.⁵ One can, therefore, appreciate the appeal of identity thinking for minorities fighting for recognition. Cultural fundamentalism provides beleaguered people with a spiritually uplifting and politically powerful sense of shared identity.⁶ Hannah Arendt’s comments are edifying here. In a 1964 interview, she describes the “special warmth” that existed among Jewish people when they were dispersed and without a state, and argues that this “pariah status,”⁷ “this standing outside of all social connections,” “this sense of being an emigrant in one’s own homeland,”⁸ paradoxically generated an intellectual spirit of open-mindedness, “a trust in what is human in all people.” But “this humanity,” she goes on to say, “has never survived the hour of liberation by as much as five minutes.” And so it was with the founding of the Jewish state. At the very moment of liberation, this “trust in what is human in all people” was broken. For Arendt, love is an emotion that arises between persons. One cannot love a people or a collectivity.⁹

When identity thinking passes from being a coping strategy to an entrenched dogma it effectively traps one in an oppositional way of thinking that perpetuates rather than bridges the gap between oneself and others. The Jews established a homeland in Israel only to treat Palestinians as second-class citizens. South Africa dismantled racial apartheid only to reinforce economic apartheid, dividing the country not by color but by class. And US neoliberalism turned a blind eye to working people, placing its trust in well-educated professionals who, it was believed, would solve the problem of growing inequality, even though this new class would exclude anyone who questioned its master narrative.¹⁰ Perhaps this explains why marginalization is so often the necessary condition for recovering our humanity, and why an ethnographer living in a society where he or she is both marginal and powerless may momentarily achieve that state of open-mindedness that Arendt and Jaspers associate with humanitas.¹¹

In any event, I told Jiaying that her comments resonated with those of Hannah Arendt and Maxine Hong Kingston—that there is more to a life than can be explained in terms of cultural background, social class, or ethnic identity, and the migrant may be more likely to know this than a person who has remained rooted in one place. This does not, however, preclude an individual playing up or playing down the “Chinese” elements in her life depending on the situation in which she finds herself. Speaking of her aunt, who drowned herself and her newborn son after it was discovered that she had been unfaithful to her husband (who had migrated to the United States), Hong Kingston declares, “Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help.”¹² Culture and ethnicity are not determinants of an identity one can do nothing about, but potentialities that may be drawn on in very different ways depending on the situation at hand.¹³ Writer and academic, Sunil Badami writes of himself as a

masala of multiculturalism … I’m different at different times, in different places and contexts, with different people. A man—but also a husband, a father, a son, a friend, a teacher, a writer. And more, including my Indian ethnicity and my Australian heritage.

And despite all these different identities, they’re all the same person: me. I’m just not only one identity, nor should I be defined by only one.¹⁴

Living in the United States, Sejal Patel confides that she needs the category word “Indian,” because it “makes me feel that my otherness is shared” and “I don’t have to attend to the world and its prejudices alone.” At the same time, Sejal rejects the assumption that her Indian identity means that non-Indians cannot understand her or that her heritage prevents her from understanding them. Both as an individual and as a lawyer, Sejal emphasizes the power of “spending time face-to-face with others in order to see the humanity in them rather than the difference.”¹⁵

Such “strategic essentialism”¹⁶ may help one counter discrimination and disempowerment, as with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. What is compelling about such social movements is that they bring together ideas concerning a common cause or shared identity, and immediate, visceral experiences of moving and acting as a single body. Although such totalizations of identity have, historically, had revolutionary consequences and been liberating, sometimes, as in fascist states, they have been enslaving. What makes the difference is often the degree to which such mass mobilizations preserve or destroy people’s rights to decide whether they will or will not go along with the crowd.

To be forced to identify as Black or Chinese, either because a powerful person insists that this is all you are or because your community considers this a matter of honor and solidarity, is to lose one’s freedom to lead one’s life in one’s own terms. “Students of color” sometimes feel that they are recruited to a college on the basis of their outward appearance rather than their inner qualities—invited to be “on the table” rather than “at the table.” Their struggle to decide the terms on which they will live their own life and choose their own identities, is exemplified by Zora Neale Hurston’s declarations of independence—declarations that frequently put her at odds with the political agendas of black intellectuals and activists. “At certain times I have no race. I am me … I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within boundaries.”¹⁷

Sidra Ali’s experience is relevant here. Sidra’s parents migrated to the United States from Pakistan, and though she was born in the United States, Sidra confesses to “having spent much of my life explaining and defending my citizenship due to the color of my skin and the etymology of my name. I am routinely asked where I am from, and when my answer of ‘Michigan’ proves insufficient, I cite Jacksonville, Florida, my birthplace—much to the dissatisfaction of the questioner. The next question is always, ‘Where are your parents from?’ and when I answer ‘Pakistan’ the interrogator is relieved.”¹⁸

Speaking of how irksome it is to be typecast as an immigrant when she is an American, Sidra cites the kinds of misidentifications she has to rebut or navigate in her everyday life.

People assume I am Hindu and give me vegetarian meals. People assume I am unable to speak English and speak to me in slow, exaggerated, staccato sentences as if to preemptively help me to understand what they are saying. People assume I am a devout Muslim and refuse to shake my hand, even when I proffer it in a professional setting. People assume I am an Arab, and request family recipes for hummus and shawarma. People assume I am a suicide bomber and shift uncomfortably where they stand, or demand different seating arrangements on airplanes, or threaten to call airport security if I continue to insist that my small backpack can indeed fit into the overhead compartment. People assume that I have been oppressed and congratulate me on being a strong, “liberated” and “modern” woman. People assume it is my responsibility to speak on behalf of ISIS’s frustrations, to understand the complex political climate of the Middle East, or apologize for actions undertaken by individuals who have tenuous ties to my nebulous identity as a “Muslim.” People assume I am Latina and speak to me in Spanish; assume I am African American and ask me about my enslaved ancestors; assume I am white and deride me for my privilege; assume I am not attuned to the struggles of marginalized communities; assume that I am more than human. Such encounters leave me flayed—as if the curious party cannot accept my hope to sustain a conversation without identity markers.¹⁹

Sidra and Jiaying are not alone in their discomfort with the ways in which identity thinking influences the images of diversity with which universities now advertise themselves. Like me, they are troubled by the artifice of this window-dressing, in which a cherry-picked group of white, black, yellow, and brown men and women (rarely old or infirm) are captured smiling at the camera as though they had discovered in one another’s company an oasis of peace and enlightenment. Too much is made of superficial differences, like skin color or dress. Although every individual sees the world differently and has a different story to tell, these utopian images inadvertently perpetuate the one-dimensional, reductive, and categorical ways of thinking that we associate with racism. For, despite appearances, the average genetic difference between any two human beings is greater than the average genetic difference between any two human populations (e.g., Europe and sub-Saharan Africa). As Alan Goodman notes, “There is no good scientific evidence beyond word length, convenience, and maintenance of the status quo (laziness in short), to continue to racialize human variation. Moreover, doing so may cause harm.”²⁰

Not only photographic images, but language itself can blind us to the nature of what is. Gadamer observes that “Greek philosophy more or less began with the insight that a word is only a name—i.e., that it does not represent true being.”²¹ By implication, true being is revealed less in our dialogues than in our actions, cooperating in building something, making music together, eating together, or sharing our tribulations. But such forms of interaction are precluded if not forbidden when our consciousness is clouded by notions of essential difference. In other words, diapraxis may be a better way of achieving humanitas than dialogue—doing things together rather than sharing worldviews. Indeed, theories, like prejudices, would seem to be one of the principal causes of misrecognition, since they tend to make the other an object whose only value is to confirm our suspicions or prove our point of view.

When James Baldwin left the United States for France, he wrote, “I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.”²² Though dependent on English literature—a literature of “white centuries”—Baldwin felt free to make that literature his own.²³ As for being seen solely as a Negro, he declared, “I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt.”²⁴

Edmund White’s experience of moving to France resonated with Baldwin’s. While Americans were trapped in “a politics of identity,” foregrounding their particular affiliations and ethnicities, the French, according to White, extolled the virtues of centrism. “In France there is no Jewish novel, no black novel, no gay novel; Jews, blacks and gays, of course, write about their lives, but they would be offended if they were discussed with regard to their religion, ethnicity or gender.”²⁵ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Mistaken Identities: The Task of Thinking in Dark Times
• Chapter 2. Radical Empiricism and the Little Things of Life
• Chapter 3. The Witch as a Category and as a Person
• Chapter 4. The New Materialisms
• Chapter 5. Words and Deeds
• Chapter 6. Critique of Cultural Fundamentalism
• Chapter 7. Existential Scarcity and Ethical Sensibility
• Chapter 8. Identification and Description: An Essay on Metaphor
• Chapter 9. Islam and Identity among the Kuranko
• Chapter 10. In Defense of Existential Anthropology
• Notes
• Index