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- 1. AXL3400F Week 5:Challenge of Culture Ayanda Manqoyi
- 3. Recap Last week we looked at Bourdieu’s “Habitus”: as embodied symbolic capital = embodied knowledge. Habits (unconscious) which inform and are informed by the fields/environments we exist in and which ultimately serve as strategic systems of navigating these overlapping fields in order to achieve dominance/ power / status. the institutions/ fields and practices which contribute to the production, legitimation and contestation of culture, and by extension, habitus. School as a Microcosm of Real Life Nyamnjoh andYamada’s theories on colonial education. Theories on how to de-colonise education
- 4. ThisWeek This week we discuss: “the nature of identity as an anthropological concept” and “the relationship between culture and identity, and the strategic ways in which culturally informed identities are mobilised to claim or deny access to power, privilege and resources by individuals and collectivities.” Texts Anderson, Benedict, 1983, ‘Imagined Communities’ Jenkins, Richard, 1996, ‘Social Identity’ Thornton, Robert, 1988, ‘Culture: A contemporary definition’ Biko, Steve. 2004 (1978). ‘Chapter 6:We Blacks’
- 6. How DoYou Identify Yourself? Nation African? South African? If not, where are you from? Why do you identify as ….. ? Linguistic/Language English? Afrikaans? isiXhosa IsiZulu? Any other languages? Is your language a defining part of your identity?Why?
- 7. How DoYou Identify Yourself? Spiritual belief Christian? Muslim? Jewish? Other? Ethnicity Zulu? Chinese? English? Portuguese?
- 8. Socialization What is your level of education? What music do you listen to? What gender do you identify as? What race do you identify as? So each of us has a particular identity which is made up of our subscription to and acceptance in/ or non-acceptance in particular communities This week we are talking about identity, how we identify ourselves, how we identify others, how this interplays with our understanding of culture.
- 9. Selfhood and social identity Jenkins defines the “self” as being both social & cultural but definitely individual (Habitus – individual) Also defines the self as a “process” and not a “thing” But what does this mean? We are constantly adjusting and assessing our sense of self in relation to our surroundings and others, in relation to our acceptance in or exclusion from our surroundings and others, and our own acceptance or rejection of surroundings and others.
- 10. Selfhood and social identity Thus, there is a delicate interplay between self (Agency) & social (External Agency) which is both simultaneous and perpetual. “Agency is central to selfhood” And “Mind and selfhood, then are cultural and social, they operate within the Individual” But as Jenkins points out: 1) Selfhood is realised vis a vis others – external are necessary foils (oppositions) to self knowledge 2) Selfhood is an ongoing internal/external dialectic of acceptance, rejection or not) 3) Self identity draws on a wide palette of accessories in the environment – family, spouse, work, relationships (social capital)
- 12. Forming community Thus according to Jenkins, the interplay of similarity and difference to the EXTERNAL is the logic by which all identification, both individual and collective, is formed. We define ourselves based on the claims we can make to belonging OR NOT to communities (family/friends/ethnicity/nation/belief) etc. And we define others by the claims they make , and our perceived validity of those claims. This is the basis of acceptance, but also denial/discrimination. How are these communities formed? Communities are formed when a group of people come together over a shared set of values, memories, stories, resources, institutes, schools,
- 13. Nation and identity But Anderson proposes that communities are “imagined” Using the concept of NATION as an example: He suggests that ‘nation’ is a political/social community That largely we never encounter all the members of the communities we claim belonging to Our claims are built on an ‘imagined’ knowing of connection and kinship It is only mobilized in relation to other “communities” – nations are limited in that there are boundaries on the border of which other nations exist. Nations are sovereign in that they have freedom to self-regulate Nations are imagined as community even if internally there is exploitation and inequality
- 14. Thornton- Imagined borders • Nations and national borders are a largely modern concept, and evershifting. • A product of accurate time, longitude, latitude, war and conquest. Consider countries that: ❖No longer exist ❖Have been absorbed into others ❖Are newly formed • Anderson andThornton both point out that within these communities are tensions and ruptures – they claim homogeneity where there is none - because communities are not homogenous • Additionally, the very nature of claims to a particular community essentialises and stereotypes it - creating something static Thorton uses the examples of British/Boer and Zulu as classifications. • The conflation of ideas of identity, culture, nation, society, community creates boundaries -Yet these boundaries are arbitrary and not objective.
- 16. How is Identity Mobilized? We activate/mobilize notions of identity to conform or resist whether consciously or unconsciously. But, as Anderson, Jenkins and evenThornton allude to, identification/ categorization, in as much as it is aimed at defining, also essentialises. In the process of defining something transient, we also essentialise and “stereotype” it.
- 17. Diaspora Living in host communities has encouraged ways that collective identities can be/or are strategically essentialised. Originally, diaspora was used to refer specifically to scattered Jewish communities outside of Israel. But it now also refers to populations of people outside of their original “homeland”. How do diaspora’s operate? Often a collective of people adopt and essentialise aspects of their perceived identities and traditions in resistance to their locales, to maintain a sense of “individuality” of “difference” to not lose their identity. Often diasporas end up creating entirely new traditions that they claim as traditional, but which when viewed by the “homeland” are completely un-relatable.
- 18. African collective Both Biko and Nyamnjoh talk about the collectives ofAfrica. If we refer back to last week, we recognize that Nyamnjoh calls for the mobilization of the collective identity of Africans, African intellectualism,African academia, African knowledge as a means to resist or contest colonial education. Biko does similar – he calls on the collective identity of blackness, specifically African blackness to produce, reconsider, reinvest in black consciousness as resistance and contestation to the undeniable damage done to the “collective” black psyche, humanity, spirituality and sense of self done by apartheid. In both cases we see the mobilization of a collective identity, but also an essentialising of identity in order to strategically gain purchase, include, exclude, motivate, contest, inspire. To move from pre-colonial – colonial – p0st-colonial – Decolonial.
- 19. NextWeek - Culture, Cultural Rights and Human Rights we critically examine how culture is used in global discourses of human rights.We think critically through ideas of universality in order to explore anthropological understandings of the right to be different.