Friday, December 04, 2009
Multiculturalism, "hybridization", "cultural hybridity", a new theoretical illusion in the social sciences, by Francis Chartrand
We mention below some excerpts of a text by Pierre-Andre Taguieff, research director at CNRS.
Hope elites, fear of the masses
We know that globalization is a complex global process whose first characteristic is to accelerate exchange, transfers and mixtures, and thus to undermine the substantial collective identities, making them unstable and temporary, fueling fears and uncertainties territorially in the masses, and gives rise to hope in the world of transnational elites.
[...]
The magic word miscegenation
The speech of praise globalization or globalization, ignoring the growing anxiety caused by the dissolution of social institutions and national specificities, foregrounds these supposed positive characteristics that seem healthy to oppose racist attitudes of rejection racial mixtures, reification of collective identities and closing exchanges between cultures or "dialogue of civilizations." The globalizers happy to see an overall advancement of tolerance and "openness to the other, the promise of a universal rapid reciprocal listening cultures, processes that ordinarily renowned as "rewarding".
The positive assessment of the phenomena of cultural syncretism has increased among theorists of globalization using the metaphor of "hybridity" of the "hybridization" or "miscegenation" (Clifford, 1994; Pieterse, 1995 ; Werbner, 2004). Idea seemed simple, even light: globalization is a "hybrid", it would be in itself a racist mechanism, in that it tends to remove the specter of miscegenation that form the core of modern racist thought in same time it would erase the ethno-racial entities improperly erected in absolute or a species-time.
[...]
Hybridity valued at extreme
Hybridity is so valued in the extreme, as human experience, method of invention and creation, and also as a lifestyle characterized by its "wealth" and "openness". That suggests that there is "mixed" is the highest form of human existence. The "blend", metaphorically general, tends to be a method hello. The word "miscegenation" itself is a magic value: it is invoked as a driving force.
Simplistic metaphors racialising
The metaphors chosen and indefinitely sought by critics, sociologists and anthropologists have all the connotations biologizing or racialist "mixture", "crossing", "hybridization" or "hybridity", "miscegenation". They presuppose the existence of a first or original state, a state of non-judged blend happily exceeded (this is even a "progress"), characterized by the "purity" of the entities in question (the "race" to "culture" through the "ethnicity"). A state of nature, we can say "wild" that animal husbandry and horticulture were the first eliminated by breeding techniques voluntary "races" and "varieties, and the practice of a controlled cross. As shown by Robert Young (1995), uses the concept of cultural hybridity presupposes the existence of a cultural past that is "pure", something like a state of natural culture, without mixtures. Sociologist and political scientist Stuart Hall argued against such use of the term hybridity in that it refers to a "process of bringing together cultures initially autonomous unit which would then be combined to give rise to hybridization "(Hall, 2009, p. 29). Despite intentions "racist" declared their users, these metaphors mixtures racialisent what they refer.
[...]
Postmodern myth of mestizo beauty
Mixophile discourse presupposes the existence of "races", to "cash" or "cultures" originally "pure" first state that would virtually "passed" by the state resulting mixtures, alloys or amalgams. In the contemporary praise the "beauty of the mestizo (Hocquenghem, 1979) refers the echo of that of" race "the most beautiful," Caucasian "as Blumenbach (1795 and 1804), expressing a the obvious aesthetic of his time (Bindman, 2002, pp. 190-201; Baum, 2006, pp. 73-92). The aesthetic ideal is certainly now quite different: the beauty of the mythical "pure races" has given way to the mythical beauty of "mestizos". But in the celebration of the mixture or mixed it receives remanence uncontrolled old fascination with pure or homogeneous. In praise of impurity echoes that of purity. An echo is an echo reversed.
[...]
From mixophilie to Francophobia and self-hatred
In his book in praise of "mestizos" Hocquenghem marie denunciation of homophobia to Francophobia assumed, as evidenced from the subtitle of his pamphlet: "Reflections of a Francophobe. Explicitly linked or not to a form of sociocentrism negative or inverted patriotism (philoxenia), praises the "progressives" of the "France Métis" were commonplace in the 1980s. Thus Jacques Chirac, during a trip to the Caribbean, saw fit to launch his audience supposedly "crossed": "We are all mestizos" (quoted by Le Monde, September 15, 1987). Using the rhetoric of unanimity is an expensive form of collusion at all demagogues. Two anti-racist slogans, posing as mixophiles definitions of the French nation, have been widely broadcast during the second "March for Equality" (1984): "France is like a moped. To move forward, he must blend of "Super, France march in the mixture (Taguieff, 1988, p. 381). The French anti-racism, hitherto blind to color in the name of egalitarian universalism of republican tradition, has evolved into an anti-racism mixophile advocated miscegenation as a standard major (Taguieff, 1995, pp. 53-81). But there are mixing and blending. Ideally mixophile was actually set on the type of mixed race White / Black, incarnating par excellence in the face of the Afro-American (or "too black" or too "white").
[...]
Some have ventured to include President Sarkozy in the circle of miscegenation happy, describing it as "a little French blood mingled. But the absence of "African roots" now appears to be a handicap, at least in the media space dominated by the standards of pop-ethics of "miscegenation".
[...]
Praise naive fusion redeeming reason Métis
But in many contemporary authors celebrate cultural hybridization, we found a rather naive praise of redeeming the merger and a merger by stealth, which often takes the shape of a eulogy of creative confusion. Measured in his analysis, Stuart Hall advanced the proposition that "cultural hybridity" is changing British society in a positive way: the simple fact that a process of mixing affects cultural production leads him by the British company to reflect on the fact that it is not culturally homogeneous (Hall, 1995). This would be a "progress". Other theorists mixophiles less cautious ahead of the hi "heterogeneity mestizo," where they think they see an output of "continuous reconstruction" (Nuss, 2002, p. 111).
We can go further in the neo-religion of redemptive miscegenation. Some anthropologists militants, followers of "the image blend of Magic" (Cunin, 2001), calling for the adoption of a "reason mestizo (Amselle, 1990), leave to withdraw a few years later the" fantasy "or the "trap" of miscegenation (Amselle, 1999 and 2000).
[...¸]
Behind the scenes: cosmopolitanism, a source of anguish
Behind the scenes "crossed" is that these cities "cosmopolitan" is an inexhaustible source of fears or anxieties, fueling a "paranoia mixophobique" (Bauman, 2007, p. 119). And products "mixed race" are part of the decor companies globalized market: the new "cosmopolitanism merchant" is a high consumption, especially because of its effects "sleeping" or "tranquilizers" (Canclini, 2000a), hybridity in his speech advertising in bars and trendy restaurants ( "hybrid") in its cultural industries (the "hybrid music" are everywhere) (Hutnyk, 2005).
[...]
The mixing product uniformity and conformity
Hence the paradoxical result: it is through the global spread of normative cultural hybridity that is made a cultural homogeneity that does not meet very little resistance. Hybridization is the global juggernaut that produces homogenization and leveling of cultures, the final abolition of cultural diversity. Opposes the hybridization process supposedly "progressive" if the big concepts of identity or cultural difference, disqualified for "racism", "nationalism", "essentialism" or "communalism"? The battle seems lost. What is certain is that in this world "crossed" in perpetual motion, the new elites' hybrid and transnational, and mobile deterritorialised "nomads" without definable identity, are like fish in water (Spivak , 1999). This world is made for them, not for the people attached to their languages, their landscapes, traditions. Their celebrations are surinvités professional media, with the implicit ideology which they are ill. The speech of praise exchanges, and mixtures of perpetual change is reputed to be "modern", that is to say current and contemporary, therefore inherently good. This is an expression of intellectual conformism of our time (Taguieff, 2007, pp. 595-620).
Miscegenatry speechless at the refusal of cultural hybridity
Moreover, the racist who had converted to the religion of "cultural hybridity" are speechless before certain forms characterized by "denial of cultural hybridity, for example Muslim women in many European countries (including France and Great Britain). How to interpret this rejection of normative mixophile supposed seductive, especially for Muslim women?
[...]
Advertising discourse and conceptual poverty sociologists
The epistemological lesson we can draw from such an over-employment of contemporary vocabulary of "crossing" and "mixed" (the "mixed" and "diversity" to "blend" and the "hybridity") overemployment which brings out a tongue of wood used by the celebrations of globalization as input in a brighter era is that the metaphorical uses of words in the attractive economic situation does not replace the difficult conceptual elaborations, or the patient building of models theoretical assumptions rebuttable. The language of advertising, it must be remembered, should not be confused with the constructed language of scientific knowledge. If it should not "take the straw words to the grain of things" (Leibniz), do not take the sparkle of metaphors for scientific theorizing. The "crosses" to "connections" through the "hybridization" and "mixing" does not attend it not a vain display of misleading metaphors, unthought, dangerous effects of uncontrolled senses, expressing impotence conceptual sociologists and anthropologists face the consequences of cultural globalization?
Link
Labels: Francis Chartrand, Human mistake, Islam, Multiculturalism, Religion and fanaticism
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 9:21 AM 
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]