Culture and Dignity E-Book

Laura Nader

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 417

Beschreibung

In Culture and Dignity - Dialogues between the Middle East and the West, renowned cultural anthropologist Laura Nader examines the historical and ethnographic roots of the complex relationship between the East and the West, revealing how cultural differences can lead to violence or a more peaceful co-existence. * Outlines an anthropology for the 21st century that focuses on the myriad connections between peoples--especially the critical intercultural dialogues between the cultures of the East and the West * Takes an historical and ethnographic approach to studying the intermingling of Arab peoples and the West. * Demonstrates how cultural exchange between the East and West is a two-way process * Presents an anthropological perspective on issues such as religious fundamentalism, the lives of women and children, notions of violence and order

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 Introduction

Indignities

Naturalizing Difference and the Great Transformation

Comparison, Ethnography, and History

2 From Rifa’ ah al-Tahtawi to Edward Said

Introduction

Rifa’ ah al-Tahtawi and France

A Hundred Years Later: Edward Said

Concluding Comments

3 Ethnography as Theory

Introduction

Unstated Consensus

Defining Ethnographic Worth: 1896–2000

Ethnographic Audiences

An Outsider Looking In on Anthropology’s Ethnography

Concluding Comments

4 Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Control of Women

Cultural Hierarchy and Processes of Control

The Specificity of Eastern and Western Grids

Positional Superiority, Thought Systems, and Other Cultures

Ways of Seeing and Comparing – East and West

The Controlling Role of Ideas

The Use of Revolution in Gender Control

Multiple Systems of Female Subordination

Colonialism, Development, Religion, and Gender Control

Conclusion: The Need to Separate Identities

Acknowledgments

5 Corporate Fundamentalism

Introduction

Manufacturing Culture Bit by Bit

Fundamentalisms: Corporate and Religious

Marketing and Children: The United States

Drugs, Commercialism, and the Biomedical Paradigm: An American Example

When Corporate Profits and Education Meet: The Educational Testing Industry

Fundamentalisms: Economic, Religious, Political

Back to Corporate Fundamentalism: Future Directions

6 Culture and the Seeds of Nonviolence in the Middle East

Introduction

Disharmonic Westernization and Pilgrimage

Between the Stereotype and Reality

Little Worlds in the International Grip

Culture and Nonviolence: Who Stands to Gain From Peace?

Dignity Becomes Reality

7 Normative Blindness and Unresolved Human Rights Issues

Introduction

Early Constraints

Unresolved Issues

A Nonstate Human Rights Effort

Health and Human Rights

Human Rights and Commercialism

Concluding Remarks

8 Breaking the Silence

Introduction

Silence and Dominant Hegemonies

Desensitization

Mistakes Repeated in the Iraq Invasion

9 Lessons

Lessons Learned

Strategies of Subordination – In Reverse

Macro-histories

Appendix: Laura Nader

Index

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nader, Laura, author.Culture and dignity : dialogues between the Middle East and the West / Laura Nader.pages cmIncludes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-31900-0 (cloth) – 978-1-118-31901-7 (pbk.)1. Civilization, Arab. 2. Ethnology–Arab countries. 3. Arabs–Ethnic identity.4. East and West. 5. Western countries–Relations–Arab countries. 6. Arab countries–Relations–Western countries. I. Title. DS36.8.N324 2013303.48′25601821–dc23

2012015890

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Detail of mosaic, Umayyad mosque, Damascus, Syria, AD 705-715. © DEA / C. SAPPA / Getty Images.Cover design by Cyan Design.

In recognition of Donald Cole and Soraya Altorki,

ethnographers of the Arab East par excellence

In memory of Anthony Shadid,

journalist with an ethnographer’s eye

Acknowledgments

It is not possible to acknowledge all the colleagues, students, family members and others who over the years have enriched my understanding of a world without boundaries, the context for my work. First and foremost were the invitations from the American University of Cairo to deliver lectures that form the core of this book. Soraya Altorki, Donald Cole, Nicholas Hopkins, and Nawal Hassan were warm and generous hosts. The people of Egypt whom I met outside of the university community – the Minister of Energy, as well as Mrs. Mubarak who had studied anthropology at the American University, journalist Gamal Nkruma and others – enriched and broadened my understandings of political happenings in modern-day Egypt.

Support for preparing the manuscript came from the Middle East Center at UC Berkeley and the Committee on Research. The Rothko Chapel hosted my talk on human rights, which was later welcomed for publication in Brazil. My colleague Rik Pinxton of Cultural Dynamics saw my article “Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Concept of Women” (reissued as Chapter 4 of this book) through to publication in Belgium, a piece that was then considered “controversial” in the United States. Mohammed Hamdouni Alami provided the photograph of the Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, taken in 2007, for the cover of this book.

With regard to Chapter 4, I have also to thank Andrée Sursock, Seteney Shami, JoAnn Martin, and Saddeka Arebi, who were of enormous help in searching out and arguing with me about the comparative materials. The need to explore the idea of occidentalism first crystallized in a conversation with Professor Ashraf Ghani of Johns Hopkins University. Comments from Drs Mondher Kilani, Soheir Morsy, and Guita Debert were most helpful, as were the audiences at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, the University of Auckland, Harvard University, Claremont Colleges and other academic institutions where I presented those ideas.

Over the years at Berkeley I was primary thesis advisor to more than a dozen students working in the Middle East: Golamareza Fazel (Iran), Donald Cole, Soraya Altorki, and Saddeka Arebi (Saudi Arabia), John Rothenberger, Cathy Witty, and Osama Doumani (Lebanon), Seteney Shami (Jordan). June Starr and Ayfer Bartu (Turkey), Andrée Sursock (France), Rochelle Shain (Israel), Nell Gabian (Syria), Monica Eppinger (Ukraine) – I learned from every one of them.

My colleagues Elizabeth Colson, Roberto Gonzalez, and Salwa Mikdadi, as well as former students Saddeka Arebi, Seteney Shami, Ayfer Bartu, Andrée Sursock, Maysunn Succarie, Alberto Sanchez, Roberto Gonzalez, Monica Eppinger, Chris Hebdon, and others read, researched, and provided critical comments on this book. Claire Nader, Ralph Nader, and Tarek Milleron were the toughest of critics, forcing simplicity of style and intolerant of facile generalizations. Suzanne Calpestri and David MacFarland of the Mary and George Foster Library were ready to help in myriad ways. Gratitude is due to Shirley Taylor, Tarek Milleron, and Stephen Curtis for editorial help, to Kathleen Van Sickle for patience in typing and retyping various versions, to Chris Hebdon for hanging in to the end, to Rosalie Robertson my editor, always supportive and cheerful, and to the three anonymous readers for their encouraging comments.

Preface

Cultural anthropologists set their discipline apart a century and a half ago by formalizing a historical tradition of extensive observation carried out among peoples foreign to the observer either by distinct customs and practices or by more subtle differences. Through painstaking examination of another culture might come an ability to grasp and understand its honor and dignity – that is, to understand how shared culture may serve a people and how that culture may continue to do so, or where it may begin to break down thereby exposing its members to indignities small and large. But cultures are never as simple as bounded units changing in isolation. The anthropologist must also trace elements that fire across cultural groups and across geographic areas. In the same vein, the observer runs the risk of using imaginary yardsticks, often idealized from his or her own cultural group, to make comparisons unmoored from the real and very messy world. My work related to the Arab East – through field observations, decades of teaching, lecturing, and writing – covers half a century. During this time, I have observed a level of bounded thinking, sometimes referred to as ethnocentrism, that has only grown more rigid as the United States and Europe have become more embroiled in the Arab World and tried to define the East relative to their own societies. This book is my attempt to provide an anthropological sorting out, a sense of what the quality of our observations means for our own culture and dignity, and how thorough an exploration of culture might have to be in order to reach an understanding of another human dignity in relation to ours.

An overview of my work relevant to the Arab East includes fieldwork in south Lebanon in 1961, fieldwork in Morocco in 1980, teaching the introduction to the Middle East at the University of California at Berkeley for over two decades, book reviews and articles, invited public lectures and media invitations on a broad range of subjects often stimulated by the immediate need to counteract public ignorance among my fellow Americans. The subjects covered the status of women, violence, terrorism, Islamic law, and, more generally, Middle Eastern culture – the geography, language, and place of kinship, settled agriculturalists, nomads, and more. Invitations to deliver the distinguished lecture series at the American University in Cairo brought me to Egypt in early 1985 and again in 2005. Those lectures are the heart of this book. The subject matter for my first four lectures included power and the uses of ideologies as a stabilizing technique, the seeds of nonviolence in the Middle East despite stereotypes of a violent East, energy policies and expert knowledges operating in the United States, and a final lecture on covert control, or what I later called “controlling processes.” These lectures all illustrated a framework for analyzing the dynamics of power in the contemporary world, a world long recognized as anything but peaceful by Arabs and Americans. In other words, the lectures cut across themes that could be construed as of interest only to Arabs or the United States. Instead, they were themes of general interest that might enlighten our thinking about culture and dignity.

The lecture on energy grew out of my 1980 National Academy of Sciences report, published as Energy Choices in a Democratic Society, and a series of articles that followed on the politics of energy in the United States. The essay on power, the subject of my undergraduate course Controlling Processes, was later revised and published in Current Anthropology in 1997 as “Controlling Processes: Tracing the Dynamic Components of Power.” Thoughts on the seeds of nonviolence in the Arab East are embedded in several publications, for example, “Naturalizing Difference and Models of Co-existence” in R. Pinxten’s and E. Preckler’s 2006 book Racism in Metropolitan Areas of Europe. Because nonviolence and its opposite are so continual in today’s Arab East, I combined this topic with an earlier unpublished paper delivered in Saudi Arabia at a conference on social control under crowd conditions as in pilgrimages or the Haj.

Reactions to the 1985 Cairo lectures were anything but passive. The audience participation indicated immediate curiosity about the seeds of nonviolence in the Arab world, while the lecture on energy brought about an unexpected public confrontation between two Egyptians, an antinuclear scientist and a nuclear engineer who ­disagreed about nuclear power and the politics of energy. These experiences taught me a good deal about the workings of control in contemporary intellectual culture at an American university abroad, where the graduates – desirous of being modern and more developed – know more about the contemporary globalized world than about their own history and traditions. In this they are not today so different from American universities at home.

Between 1985 and 2005 a new century was born: much of consequence had transpired between the United States and the Arab and Islamic world, principally imperial wars: the first Gulf War of President George H. W. Bush in 1990–1991, the war in Afghanistan in 2001, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and ongoing US occupations. A few observers saw these events as a rupture, but many others viewed them as part of a story of holy wars, originating in the Crusades (1096–1270), if not before. Historians also remind us, in turn, that the then governor of Tangiers, Tariq ibn Ziyad, invaded Spain in April 711 AD and that the Ottoman Turks bombarded Vienna in 1529.

The 2005 Cairo lectures had an urgent tone. In 1985 I had emphasized connections between shadow or hidden power and the uses of ideology. By 2005 there was little shadow and many rank exhibitions of immense raw power. We had witnessed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the US Gulf War of 1990–1991 followed by the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the Shock and Awe of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A flood of ­stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims as either al Qaeda terrorists, insurgents, or suicide bombers flooded the West, while in the East the West was seen as imperialist, lawless, and hypocritical.

Few were, or are, examining the history of nonviolence among Arabs, the subject of my lecture in Cairo. Few in the Western mainstream media were writing about the absence of nuclear warheads in Arab countries and their now long-time threatening presence in Israel. Few reporting on the Israeli destructions in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 noted that the government of Lebanon had no effective military defense. The silences were and still are deafening. Once again, Western hegemonic ideas describe Islamic ideals as emotional and irrational and incompatible with Western democratic ideas. They highlight descriptions of Arab dictatorships (often supported by the United States) rather than report on the Arab masses whose opinion is often more democratic than views we find in some cosmopolitan centers elsewhere in the world. The 2005 lectures were an attempt to put imperialism – both cultural and military – on the front burner, the consequences of which might not be obvious to most concerned people and which commonly went unnoticed by social scientists.

The 2005 lecture topics involve a critical examination of two concepts often taken for granted. One concerns the use of area concepts (whether geographic or linguistic) used in organizing knowledge; the other takes up the importance of comparison, implicit as well as explicit comparison. Relevant to critiques of both area concepts and comparison is the question of who sponsors scholarship – government, the military, or philanthropists – because the interests of sponsors often constrain professional scholarship. Geographic organization of cultures may be a convenient form of ordering for some purposes, as in a focus on the “cultural areas” of Europe or the Middle East, although, at the same time, we know the falsity of such ordering because the borders of geographic areas are not clean, not precise. Area categories ignore the effects on Europe or the Middle East of contact with each other and with Asia and Africa. We know that culture spreads by continuous contact of peoples whether by population movements or through other channels. Thus, the idea of a bounded area, geographic or not, is illusory, and it often causes bad histories, bad ethnography, and bad politics. But such area concerns are deeply embedded, even in the marketing of books such as this one, a book that aims to cross borders in our thinking. The Middle East, while structured for the convenience of museums or the ­military, is a deceptive concept. Just as the concept of bounded communities is no longer acceptable for any scientific ethnography, so area specialties cut against acceptable and competent academic endeavors. The long-term alternative to area studies is world ­history, or some model that takes into account interconnections – opening us to the possibilities of a human history devoid of present parochialisms. But, for the moment, crossing area borders may give an untidy impression. We realize that air pollution stemming from New York State does not stop at the Canadian border, so why should culture? Why do we think there are clean boundaries between Islamic science and European science? Similarly, although colonial powers drew the borders of the Arab world, separating “Lebanon” from “Syria,” the Levant as a whole remains a cultural composite of extensively overlapping traditions.

Comparison is central for better understanding of mutual involvement over time by traveling back in time to gain perspective on how cultural difference and misunderstandings may be perceived. It is true that our earliest ethnographers may be found among the ancient voyagers. As early as the 1600s Arab travelers to Europe were varied and numerous: merchants, ambassadors, missionaries, spies, and more. They traveled to Spain, France, England, Italy, Holland, Russia, and wrote about the lands of the Christians, as is documented in Nabil Matar’s 2003 book In the Land of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century. Seventeenth-century travelers came to Europe from highly developed civilizations, quite the equal of those of the Europeans they met. They wrote down just about everything – what they observed, measured, or learned from interviews and their evaluations of their experiences. The time period and events of the moment of travel were reflected in what they reported. Because few Arab travel accounts have been translated, Western scholars often explain the paucity as due to lack of curiosity, yet some of this Arab travel writing, though not exactly ethnographic, is in some ways startlingly modern.

With the development of the discipline of anthropology and ethno­graphy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers became more self-conscious about writing about others and in the process developed some rules, some overt guidance, and some unstated recipes one might say, that limited the manner of writing. Free of disciplinary authority, these early Arab travel writers were not governed by such mannerisms as the need for scientific objectivity. Well ahead of their time, their subjective accounts now resonate with our own.

In 1963 anthropologist Jules Henry published Culture against Man, a book he called “a passionate ethnography.” His opening statement gives an idea of his views on the United States: “This book is about contemporary American culture – its economic structure and values, and the relation of these to national character, parent–child relations, teenage problems and concerns, the schools, and to the emotional breakdown, old age and war” (Henry, 1963: 3). Henry describes a materialistic society that may be dying emotionally. He reports on the state of nursing homes, elementary and secondary schools, advertising, and families suffering from psychosis. He mentions big and small businesses, and uses the words “giant corporations” sparingly. But his focus is on American culture writ large as if undifferentiated from corporate culture. Henry’s work was an admirable attempt to define a culture “dying emotionally,” yet his conceptual frame was that of national character. Similarly motivated but more broad-gauged work today, stemming from historical research in the 1970s, has zeroed in on the central institution of our time – corporate capitalism and the second industrial revolution. In the social sciences we have made some headway on Jules Henry’s courageous start.

At the present, parental powerlessness is felt worldwide, but such powerlessness needs to be better contextualized. In 2005 I called for an expansion of what Christopher Lasch did in Haven in a Heartless World (1977) for contemporary families in the United States. Lasch argued that the family has been supplanted by the state and the helping professions in the context of consumer capitalism, that the much criticized nuclear family did provide a haven in a heartless world, and that the family’s demise has left children exposed to a heartless world without a haven. I suggested there should be ­follow-up in the Arab world, in Korea, China, Peru, and over the planet more generally, to understand the effects on families of the externalities of corporate capitalism in this runaway world. Multiple experiences shaped my understanding: the raising of children, service on the Carnegie Council on Children, having grandchildren and, of course, thousands of students, many of whom were the young and socially abandoned. The question being, who is raising our American children? And what are the domino effects that connect the United States and the Arab world?

Business is implicated, but business is not one big thing. Corporate capitalism, as distinct from penny capitalism or regional capitalism, has wide-ranging consequences, whether these impacts be in the form of captive legislatures and agencies, digitalized technologies, factory farming, or the life experience of our children. If we are to make business socially responsive, assessments of consequences must reach the business world where CEOs might worry about business ethics.

It has been repeated ad nauseam that the history of the last 200 years has been one of the dominant influence of Euro–American expansion worldwide. Plentiful histories have been written about the foundations of American and European dominance and the assertion that no peoples have escaped from European influences – economic, religious, commercial, and more. Euro–American expansion has also been called a success by some, presumably because of an assumed exceptionalism inherent in this dominant expansion. But there is something incomplete in this spectacle of European and now American worldwide power. The words we use are defining. Expansion is a word that makes people think it has been one-way. The idea that there are boundaries between Europe and the rest is sharpened with the advent of nation-states, when in fact there have been no cultural boundaries that have held out against new ideas and cultural patterns across the board. There is selection. The essential point is that when one reads expansion in reverse we see a human history characterized by continuous chains of borrowings and interaction. Look at the spread of yoga, or sushi, or acupuncture from East to West in the twentieth century! The same historians may even speak about the expansion of other empires – Chinese, Islamic, Mongol, Indian, Aztec, or Inca – and in all these tales we hear narratives of rivalries, as, for example, between western or eastern Christianity and Islam. But stories about dominance, difference, conquest, contempt, and rivalries, could also be about barbarisms, fusions, borrowings, or co-existence, as Janet Abu-Lughod writes in her 1989 volume Before European Hegemony: The World Systemad1250–1350, a world characterized by multiple hegemonies. Amin Maalouf recounts in his 1984 history of The Crusades through Arab Eyes a different story than the one that appears in Western accounts. Or, in the case of the contemporary account of expansion, Victoria de Grazia’s 2005 book An Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth–Century Europe, is about how American industries sought to change European culture in less than one century so as to make Europeans more amenable to purchasing American products. The local and diverse gave way to mass standards of consumption in Europe and globally.

While one can hardly challenge the main thread of stories of expansion and influence, parochial descriptions distort our knowledge because they omit the exchanges, the spread of ideas. Agriculture has had an enormous expansionist success radiating out from the Tigris–Euphrates valley through Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and Africa. Technologies and discoveries, such as the uses of metals and building materials (well documented by archeologists) have spread throughout the world, independently of nation-states. Along with Christianity, Arab Islam has had an enormous expansionist success, with the largest number of believers today residing outside the Arab world and is, if the numbers are correct, currently the fastest-growing religion worldwide. All these developments have made and remade both Europe and the West.

These frames of reference inform my scholarship. They outline a twenty-first-century anthropology that focuses on the connections between peoples – what we are like, what you are like, what we have in common, our humanity, our survival, our children, our fears, our solutions to everyday problems – in the context of unequal power and corruption. The planet is a rich place because of diversity in plants and animals and culture. The diversity has enriched the human trajectory. Erecting bounded categories only makes social transformation in an old globalized world one of ­disconnectedness – a mirage. As many are beginning to recognize, notions of exceptionalism and hubris pose both short and long-run obstacles to survival for our shrinking planet. The Arab Spring and the Occupy movements are indications of a widespread rethinking of future directions.

References

Abu-Lughod, Janet (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World Systemad1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press.

De Grazia, Victoria (2005) An Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth–Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Henry, Jules (1963) Culture against Man. New York: Random House.

Lasch, Christopher (1977) Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: Basic Books.

Maalouf, Amin (1984) The Crusades through Arab Eyes. New York: Schocken Books.

Matar, Nabil (2003) In the Land of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Routledge.

Pinxten, R. and E. Preckler (eds) (2006) Racism in Metropolitan Areas. New York: Berghahn Publishers.

1

Introduction

The work in this book has an origin that long predates my formal training. Blessed as a first-generation American, I am the daughter of parents who came from the Levant, known by some as Syria, just as or just after Greater Syria was partitioned into Lebanon and Syria and as plans for partitioning Palestine were being invented. To be raised bilingual and bicultural offered a wonderful opportunity to be privy to multiple dialogues about the meanings of Arab and American cultures. Being culturally in-between sensitized me to the sufferings of peoples I might not have heard about in American schools. I grew up knowing about the starving Armenians, the British and French colonizers, the corruption of both Arab and Western leaders, and poetic expression in both English and Arabic. I learned about the yearnings of the Pan-Arabists to model their dream after the United States of America, along with their idealization of Americans, and especially their idealization of American democracy. The indignities faced by colonized and diasporic communities, the famous Arab leaders, especially the poets gunned down by colonialists who labeled them insurgents rather than recognizing them as nationalists, the divide and conquer tactics that pitted one religious sect against another – all of this, along with discussion of how to build a sewer system in our New England mill town, was daily conversation at our dinner table, and it instilled in me the importance of mutual respect in everyday life.