The latest Theory Talk features an interesting interview with James Ferguson, Stanford political anthropologist and outspoken critic of the “development” doctrine. In the talk, he offers insights to his work and vita, but he also talks more generally about social science approaches to global studies:

One of the things that bothers me about a lot of what I read the in social sciences that’s, as you say, ‘globally oriented’, is that it seems to start with a bunch of certainties, a bunch of assumptions – a kind of Western liberal common sense – that we know how countries ought to be organized. They ought to be democracies; they ought to respect human rights; they ought to guarantee the rule of law; they ought to be at peace with their neighbors. And then you look at, say, a country in Africa and all you’re able to see is a series of lacks – of things that should be there but aren’t. And you end up constructing huge parts of the world as just sort of empty spaces where things ought to be there but aren’t. And it leads to a kind of impoverished understanding, I think, because you don’t really understand what is going on here. How do people conduct their affairs? How is legitimate authority exercised? How are rules made and enforced? You know, all the kinds of questions that ought to be the starting place tend to disappear or recede into the background. So, I think the real challenge is to approach this whole question with a sense of openness, a willingness to be surprised and learn something new and not to be so deductive.

This is pretty much the criticism of “development” and the subsequent category of “development countries”, which was discussed here before. From this angle the analysis of social relations — using the analytical unit of the state — focuses on an abstract ideal that reality is supposed to be molded into. The strategy can be likened to a literature critic who trashes a novel because its is different from what the critic had expected. Such linear concepts often blur one’s vision on what’s crucial.

The term “Third World” is the issue of a post in an interesting new blog I recently discovered. Author Mar writes:

Hate the state in which your office bathrooms are kept? Liken it to a Third World country. Annoyed that your hotel only offers three varieties of cream cheese at breakfast? Call it a Third World diet. It’s an exaggeration, see? So it’s funny! Lawl and stuff!

Implicit in these comparisons is the realization that the speakers not only have no idea about the reality of life in the so-called Third World, but further, don’t give a crap. They’re able to so flippantly refer to the poverty and lack of opportunity in some of these nations because they’re comfortable – not with the actual state of things, of which they have only a vague knowledge, or none – but with the fabled state of things.

While I agree with much Mar says, I differ with her in that I think the generalisation ‘Third World’ is often used with apparent positive intentions, by politicians, aid advocates or in every other Sunday’s sermon. The inherent negative, patronizing and racially charged character of the word, however, is all the same.

Its division of the globe into three distinct “worlds” makes it particularly ugly. But replacing “Third World” with “Global South” or “underdeveloped countries” doesn’t make things much better.

One might wonder which term to use instead, and it seems like there is no solution because the problem is not the term itself but how it is charged. If a new, “politically correct”, term might arise of the discussion over the word “Third World”, it will soon be charged with the same demeaning and orientalist stereotypes as the former.

Is a generalisation like “Third World country” really necessary? There is no homogenous group of countries that can be classified with such a term. Countries with, say, a comparable GDP level, differ fundamentally based on their region, their political system, their cultural history, even their economic structure.

Writing a comparative macroeconomic study, it makes sense to group countries in relation to the indicator used: HDI, GDP, GNH, any other index (which all reveal quite different results, by the way). “An analysis of countries with HDI indicators between 0.35 and 0.40 reveals…” – this sounds like a promising start of a sentence. Using the term “developing countries” instead would be a pretty arbitrary step away from the former set.

From the perspective of dependency theory, it appears that “underdeveloped” vs. “developed” is a necessary dialectic to describe world systems. Yet it seems to me that it would make much more sense to focus on the system parameters that create dependency (terms of trade, political and military power) than to use detached and de-politicised language such as “Third World” or “Global South”.

To me, such a distinction is utterly useless for anything beyond grossest economic theory . There is no essential cultural, political or historical insight that can be derived from such a terminology. What’s the similarity between North Korea, Botswana and Colombia, please?

In the end, the classification of “Third World countries” or “developing countries” does not evoke anything more useful than obscure colonialist fantasies. So let’s drop it altogether.

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie shares her thoughts about how popular stories may create one-sided, single, images about places and individuals. These ’single stories’, she argues, lead to misunderstanding the complexity of the lives of others; it emphasises difference and robs people of their dignity.

She beautifully illustrates this with stories of her own life and argues that we need a balance of stories between the culturally and economically powerful and those whose stories often remain unheard.

This piece should be read by every Hollywood actor, adventure travel writer and aid-worker out there who talks about “Africa”.

Interestingly, the video was produced for (red)wire, the online plattform of Bono.

You must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment.

I wonder if Bono has ever read this text himself and if it made any impression on him, since his patronizing and neocolonialist “I am the voice of the starving Africa” posture  might well have been basis the for Wainaina’s text.

Thanks to renee and macon.

A great post by Robert Hariman published at Sociological Images. Hariman compares two photographs of the Iranian New Year celebrations in Afghanistan and Iran. Like I described in a previous post, this example also reveals how western orientalist preconceptions are reflected in photography:

Photograph 1:

Hariman writes that:

That image is one of throngs of working class men massed together in the street. What little business is there is in the open air markets lining each side of the densely packed urban space. We see small batches of everyday goods on display–probably to be bartered for, no less. The open baskets of food are a sure marker of the underdeveloped world.[...] Everything fits together into a single narrative, but the masses of men and boys make the scene politically significant. This is the place where collective delusions take hold, where mobs are formed, and where unrest can explode into revolutionary violence and Jihad.

Photograph 2:

Here he writes:

In this photo, there is no Arab street nor Iranian masses dominated by Mullahs and demagogues. A middle class tableau reveals that so much of what is in fact ordinary life for many people in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East is never seen in the US. And it isn’t seen because it doesn’t fit into simplistic categories, outdated stereotypes, and a dominant ideology. All that is shown and implied in the cliches is of course also there, but it is there as part of a much more complex and varied social reality.

Darkmatter recenty had an excellent post on a topic that has interested me for a while: it is about how sexual tolerance is becoming a tool that is used to present immigrant groups in Germany as inferior.

Darkmatter picks up a report from the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung on a report on the issue: 

According to Süddeutsche, the study showed that ‘migrant kids in particular strongly rejected homosexuality’, and that German kids were more likely to be weltoffen, that is, open minded or cosmopolitan. While on the one hand all migrant subjects are hereby constituted as a single category – that is, not German and hence not weltoffen – there is at the same time a hierarchy constructed within the migrant community through the problematization of religion.

and examines the report against the backgrop of the “integration discourse”

The question of open-mindedness (Weltoffenheit) is directly linked to the question of ‘integration’: those marked out by a religious identity are considered unable or unwilling to integrate. German values (symbolized, of course, by ‘cosmopolitan’ Berlin, the nation’s moral as well as political capital) are accordingly placed under threat by Islamic migrants. 

The conclusion is that

Homophobia is thus simultaneously nationalized and racialized. In an act of audacious historical revisionism, Germany becomes equated with gay rights (as an expression of its general regard for ‘human rights’), while Islam is constituted as homophobic (and thus outside a discourse of ‘human rights’). Gay rights are thus mobilized in anti-immigration discourse as a key signifier of European cultural superiority, as (white) gay Germans assert their membership of the national community through the construction of the figure of the homophobic Muslim.

[...] 

As gay rights become articulated to the nation and used as markers of European, Western or ‘civilizational’ superiority, they are simultaneously becoming detached from their historical relation to a left-wing politics. Borders and battle lines that were once thought set and certain in our wars of position are suddenly revealed to be in flux, as political antagonisms are more than ever before ‘being formulated in terms of moral categories’, and the seductive lexicon of liberation struggles is mined by a variety of dubious social actors intent on providing for themselves a veneer of ethical legitimacy. As sexuality has come to play a major role in shaping dominant Western attitudes towards cultural difference, scholars and activists the world over are becoming starkly aware of the normative racial bias in hegemonic forms of sexual politics.

Darkmatter adds an extensive overview of the connection between postcolonialism and sexuality in the context of counterterrorism and national assertion against multiculturalism. It reveals the ‘whiteness’ of theories on sexuality and the implicit racism that comes with it. It worth reading.

It notable in this context that anti-immigrant discourses from the right seem to be quite pragmatic in incorporating rather leftist political issues and constituencies for the purpose of creating a national identity against immigrants or cultural difference – not only when it comes to sexuality. Another example is the  the sudden embracement of animal rights against halal Muslim practices of slaughtering, or also the conservative flirt with women’s rights and laicism used to alienate Muslims  - by a party that calls itself “Christian Democrats” (see Jytte Klausen’s excellent book about it).

Over the Christmas holidays, Samuel Huntington died at the age of 81. Huntington, political scientist and US foreign policy advisor, became widely popular with his “clash of civilizations’ thesis. Time to look at the influence Huntington had with his writing, 15 years after the publication of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’.

In a Foreign Affairs article in 1993 and in a subsequent book three years later, Huntington developed the idea that in the post-Cold War world, conflicts will be based on cultural and religious difference. The end of political ideology will not lead to the ‘end of history’, he believed, but rather to a return of age-old ethno-religious conflict. He wrote that:

Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Especially after the 9/11 attacks on the US, Huntington was quoted time and again by political analysts, while some critics also regarded it as self-fulfilling prophecy. American neoconservatives as well as many radical Islamists quoted the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis at the time.

It is hard to judge what extent Huntington’s ideas predicted or influenced events like 9/11 or the Iraq war. Yet to me it seems undeniable that the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ subtly changed the way we perceive culture and the role it plays in world politics and conflict.

In the early 1990s, the time of ‘Great Power’ war was over at last. The idea that powerful states wage war with each other had dominated (Western) perspectives on international relations since since the Thirty Years War. In 1989, there was suddenly but one great power left. At the same time, civil wars plagued societies where post-colonial structures left a power vacuum.

It was tempting to believe in culture and religion to be the determinant of conflicts in the post-Cold War world. But what Huntington made of this idea was a more than questionable primordial view of culture and religion.

Huntington believed in culture and religion as something age-old and fixed. This primordial view stood against most analyses of ethnicity, culture and nationalism. It rejected the possibility that cultures and ‘civilizations’ are constructed by societies in the pursuit of unity, and it denies the option that certain aspects of individuals’ identities – be it religious, cultural, or other – can be emphasized or denied by leaders to rally people behind them or to exclude others.

Civilisations as depicted in Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’:

“The Clash of Civilizations” has entered popular wisdom and with it the belief that cultures and civilizations are static and it that sense irreconcilable. This belief led US neoconservatives into a war in Iraq, it guides Islamic fundamentalist and it informs what most white Europeans believe about Muslim immigrants: that they do not fit in because they are different and will always be.

Edward Said has formulated the most eloquent critique to Huntington in this regard in his essay “Clash of Definitions”. Here is a citation of parts of Said’s original text. It’s worth looking at it if you want to understand what Huntington is missing:

I would go so far as to say that what we today call the rhetoric of identity, by which a member of one ethnic or religious or national or cultural group puts that group at the centre of the world, derived from [ the] period of imperial competition at the end of the nineteenth century. And this in turn provokes the concept of “worlds at war” that quite obviously is at the heart of Huntington’s article. […]

In the related fields of political economy, geography, anthropology, and historiography, the theory that each “world” is self-enclosed, has its own boundaries and special territory, is applied to the world map, to the structure of civilizations, to the notion that each race has a special destiny, psychology, ethos, and so on. All these ideas, almost without exception, are based not on the harmony but on the conflict, or clash, between worlds. […]

At precisely the moment in the nineteenth century that a rhetoric of civilizational self-justification began to be widespread among the European and American powers, a responding rhetoric among the colonized peoples develops, one that speaks in terms of African or Asian unity, independence, self-determination. […]

In both the colonial and post-colonial context, therefore, […] civilizations are basically separated from each other. […] People like Huntington are products of that history, and are shaped in their writing by it. […]

Thus to build a conceptual framework around the notion of us-versus-them is in effect to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural – our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange – whereas in fact the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed and situational.

Said goes on describing how culture is defined within societies in a contest between authority and dissenting voices:

Defining a culture, saying what it is for members of the culture, is always a major, and even in undemocratic societies, a democratic contest. […] The official culture is that of priests, academics, and the state. It provides the definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries, and what I have called belonging. […] In addition to the mainstream, official, or canonical culture, there are dissenting or alternative unorthodox, heterodox cultures that contain many anti-authoritarian strains that compete with the official culture. […] From the counter-culture comes the critique of authority and attacks on what is official and orthodox. […] No culture is understandable without some sense of this ever-present source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the official; to disregard this sense of restlessness within each culture, and to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity, is to miss what is vital and fecund.

In this light it becomes evident what really is the legacy of the “Clash of Civilizations” and how it has shaped our view of culture in the last decade: it leads us to believe in fault lines and values as essential, and makes us think that changing these fault lines is impossible. Dissent to established authority is no option, if we believe Huntington.

I came across an interesting article by Okwui Enwezor on the power of photography in Africa. Enzewor laments that our image of Africa is shaped by Western photography, which “seems often to evoke pathological images of disease, corruption and poverty”:

“No other cultural landscape has had a more problematic association with the photographic medium: its apparatus, various industries, orders of knowledge, and hierarchies of power. The act of photographing Africa has often been bound up with a certain conflict of vision: between how Africans see their world and how others see that world. In a way, this is a clash of lenses, a struggle to locate and represent Africa by two committed but disparate sensibilities — one intensely absorbed in its social and cultural world, the other passing through it, fleetingly, on one assignment or another.”

Okwui Enwezor is curator of “Snap Judgements”, an exhibition of contemporary African photography. It was presented in 2006 in Miami. Here is a slideshow of some of the photographs that are part of the exhibition.

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung recently had an online photo gallery that presented the pity, infantilisation and paternalism Enwezor brings up. The gallery is juxtaposed with parts of Uzodinma Iweala’s essay “Stop trying to ’save’ Africa“. 

PS: Why this post on the image of Africa in photography? The IFA Gallery in Berlin currently displays a selection of the Bamako biennal “African Enounters of Photography”: Spot on … Bamako