There seems to be a widespread fear among the white majority nations that the twenty-first century will witness extensive ethnic conflicts. Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University has been one of the eminent proponents of this view. While one need not underestimate the dangers of cultural conflicts, the very definition of ethnic and its manipulation by Western anthropological thought needs to be examined thoroughly. Ethnos in Greek was used for indicating a community which need not have been a tribe or a community of civilizationaly simpler kind. The ancient city of Athens in the golden age consisted of twelve major ethnoi. They were not only equal citizens of the polis, they were also civilizationally equal insiders to its cultural milieu. However, their differences of descent, lineage, cults and wealth did not prompt them to make separate political groups within the urban and rural areas of Athens. An ethnos was consanguine group which could exert political pressure for its interests but which never thought of itself as a political entity. The best parallel to the Greek ethnos, is the Sanskrit idea of jati , which denotes a subcommunity within a larger culture, having distinct qualities on account of economic, professional or ritual differences. The ancient Greek word , ethnos, acquired a very different
connotation when it was used by modern European anthropologists
and sociologists for describing civilizations under colonial
domination. Ethnos, came to denote a nonEuropean, civilizationally
less complicated community (as in South America, Africa or Australia),
or a less technocratized society (as in Asia or China), which
also objectified as the Other of the white man.
As the colonial
powers had approached other cultures primarily to ensure their
political subjugation, they developed a methodology of giving
cultural definitions that relied, not on cultural parameters,
but on political and administrative premises. Cultural was seen
as means of marking out and limiting group entities. For the
facility of administrators, behavior patterns of the administered
cultures were stereotyped by historians and sociologists and
the colonized people were expected to behave according to these
patterns. To help the maintainence of social and political status
quo, it was postulated that by and large the non-European cultures
were centripetal by nature and they made their people inward
looking, groupish, traditional, and ritualistic. Therefore, the
prime purpose of an ethnos, or a jati, was defined as preservational
and promotive of culture by self-enclosure. It is no wonder
that historians like A. L. Basham repeatedly asserted that
caste in India was During the colonial period ethnography helped to contain and
manipulate the populations, but after its end, ethnography was
used to perform new functions. Most colonizers succeeded in
propagating that the territory held by them could not be administered
by the indigenous people as they were not one nation but a conglomerate
of many nations. It was postulated that the basis of nationality
for the non-Europeans was the ethnos. And that every ethnic group
is either actually a nation or has the potential of becoming
one, and therefore, should have its own sovereign government.
So, while it was alright the British to be a nation (with all
its Scottish, Welsh and other minorities) and to rule India,
on their withdrawal, India had to be divided into two distinct
'ethnic' groups, India, the Hindu majority nation and Pakistan,
the Muslim nation. Long after the end of major colonial governments, ethnography is still in big business. Once an ethnos is well demarcated by the Eurocentric scholarship from the populations of the Asian or African regions, it does not take very long to convince its people that their ethnos is not just a tribe or a sub-group but a nation which should be and can be a sovereign state. If the cultural distinctions of language, religion or customs were the basis of nationalism in Europe, it should also be so for the rest of the world. (Even the modern Greeks have acccepted ethnos as a synonym for nation and ethnikismos for nationalism). Nowadays a centripetal image of the ethnic way of life is
highlighted and sometimes projected as superior and more rewarding
than the centrifugal, rationalist, and open minded European societies.
The mutual dependence of the ethnic groups or communites, within
their broad cultural expanse is under-played and the common conceptual
ground of their diversified beliefs is also pushed out view.
As a result, many cultural groups, which under the precolonial
order, never thought of claiming any distinct ethnic individuality
on grounds of minor differences, are now being made to believe
in their uniqueness and thus claim separate political identities
out of the erstwhile homogenous and interactive regional populations. Similarly, the hypothetical existence of an Aryan race, that supposedly swept down from the Nordic North, first into Greece, then into Iran, and finally into India to oust from the Gangetic plains the Dravidian inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, has had a disastrous impact on modern Indian politics. Even though there is hardly any evidence of a distinct Dravidian race in terms of physical anthropology, nonetheless on the basis of linguistic diffferences, the South Indian Tamils have used the Aryan-Dravidian theory to practice an aggressive Tamil nationalism that has spawned terrorist strife in Ceylon and hysterical provincialism in Tamil Nadu. One can go on citing innumerable examples of the divisive impact of Euro-American ethnology on the sociopolitical life of colonized cultures which under Euro brainframing have totally reconstructed their histories (now called factual accounts) in opposition to their indigenous mythic constructs. Whereas the economically weaker regions of the world are breaking into ehnically reorganised states, the technologically superior and financially stronger nations of Europe and North America have quite successfully resisted the fissiparous demands from within (such as those of the French Canadians or the native Americans, the Spanish Basques) and have progressed towards a consolidated Europe. The breakup of the Soviet Union into a number of Central Asian nations has been hailed as freedom for the erstwhile ethnic groups living under the Soviet yoke. But a proposal to make half a dozen independent nations for the American Indian natives out of the territory of the USA and Canada for the sake of the utterly oppressed peoples living in the suffocating confines of Reservations will be interpreted as a plot to dismember North America. It is obvious then, the whole construct of the ethnic is only
for categorizing non-Eurogenic cultures, and that an ethnic population
is entitled to sovereignty only if it exists outside the Euro-American
territories. Within Euro-America it has no such rights. There,
it is supposed to find a niche for itself under the grand cultural
mosaic, where the white hand arranges the diverse colored pieces
into the pattern it deems best. In other words, nationalism,
like older technology, is now for the consumption of poorer
nations. For the leaders in technology and economic power, there
is the post-national intermixture of global commerce. At this
point it may be relevant to point out that in the eyes of the
so- called ethnic peoples, the culture of Euro-Americans is just
another ethnic group, which can more appropriately called be
leuko-ethnic. If all those premises which are used to categorize
an ethnos in Asia are used upon Euro-Americans, there is no
reason why they cannot be categorized as peoples with well demarcated
behavior patterns that which constitute the Other of the ethnic
population of the world. In other words, it is also important
to realize that if we persist in the present methodology of ethnic
categorization, the world will end up getting divided into two
major categories, the ethnic and the leuko-ethnic. Already the
signs of this divide are looming large. Perhaps the likes of
Professor Huntington have already sensed this divide but are
not admittting it. Their predictions of ethnic strife, are perhaps,
a euphemism for an impending confrontation between the Euro-Americans
and the remaining societies of the world, between the possessors
of advanced technologies and the techno havenots. The ethnological categorization of the non-European cultures would have ended very well for the Leukoethnics, if the migration of the work force from the so-called ethnic world into the West had not taken place at a very large scale. Moreover, the ever-growing impact of information technologies has created new equations that are taking an unpredictable course. The "natives" are no longer out there in the lands where the white man could have borne their burden at a safe distance. They are now permanently lodged in London, New York, Paris, Chicago and in so many other bastions of Western commerce. What is significant, they have brought with them not only the cultural Other, but also a host of political conflicts that rage in their lands of origin. The redistribution of populations is taking place not only on account of the adventurous seeking greener pastures but much more so on account of populations getting displaced by war and internal strife. There are an estimated one and a half million refugees, mostly from Asian countries, now residing in Europe, says a report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. There is little doubt that in coming years, though the developed nations may close their doors on immigrants, they would not be able to contain the number of refugees which is going to increase as internal conflicts within the nations on their borders or even across sea straights are on the rise. Not only the wealthier nations but the the poorer ones are also going to receive refugee populations. A slow trickle of migrants from Bangladesh into India has been an irreversable trend in the last two decades. If the Sind province of Pakistan flares up very badly in the near future, refugees can even pour into India . As the older notion of national loyalty is breaking, in the coming years people would not hesitate to apply for refugee status when the going gets tough or insecure in their motherlands. They will depend more and more on members of their community settled in better off nations to support them directly or covertly. Formatiom of NGOs at a large scale, with infotechs at their command has begun to play a major role in private and non-governmental group communication. This has rapidly brought about a politicization of the ethnic communities who are paying less attention to updating the practices of their living cultures but more to institutionalized agitation to seek advantages within a Euro-centric cultural milieu of standardized and individualized consumerism. Power of the information technologies has provided new political strategies. The latest strategy is the tendency of the politicians to globalize local issues. Nowadays, a local issue only needs to be splashed repeatedly on the media to make it global. And if the issue concerns a regional strife, violent acts are the best means of drawing attention. As modern tastes go, acts of violence make the most media friendly news. Little wonder that terrorism is becoming increasingly popular and so called ethnic strifes like in Bosnia, or Turkey, Sri Lanka or Pakistan are getting less controllable. Terrorism now flourishes, not only because of the big ammunition trade, but because it is also the cheapest way to seize attention. There is no escape now from evolving a new cultural anthropology
for global harmony, the premises of which would have to come
from nonEuroAmerican cultures. We now need to turn away from
the modern habits of individualism, sensationality and mass
indulgence. In this endeavour of forging new values, nothing
can be more helpful than the pre-Aristotelian Greek and the Upanishadic
Indian thought. These philosophies can help us to prepare a
new ground through Ethical courage (arete areth), metaphysical
humility (eulabeia eulabeia), self-analysis (atmanavesana), and
unpossesiveness (aparigraha). More than any others, these are
the values now needed to evolve new cultural constructs and
balanced social structures. But more than just choosing certain
values we need to revise our whole analysis of human nature and
values. Contemporary disbelief in the possibility of any universal
substratum for human behavior has pushed us into a morass of
private and individual choices. The consequences are obvious
in the form of loneliness and emotional fragmentation that has
very nearly ended all communication. As a schizophrenic move,
escape is being sought in globalism which is being looked upon
as physical approximation to universal behavior. But it is not
the present day globalism based on leukoethnic hegemony that
can bridge the gap between so called ethnic societies, or avoid
"a clash of civilizations," but an attempt to create
a world culture which is affirmative of global diversity. For
this we need a fresh theory of studying cultures, arts, philosophies
and ways of life, that are prevalent now and those that have
achieved great heights of refinement in the past. In short, what
is required is a fresh theory of cultural comparison and exchange.
The comparative-culture enterprise is still not a mainstream activity and is beset with many difficulties in spite of the present day hype on pluralism and information explosion. The big talk about global culture is totally deceptive. It is becoming exceedingly obvious, that there is no real attempt at creating a new global way of life that aims to draw from all the cultures of the world. On the contrary, there is the unstated expectation that the American way of development is a model that should be emulated all over the world, and with the help of the latest weapon called "information highway," the Euro-American culture should engulf the entire globe. The process of uniformizing and packaging is reducing the diversity of cultural symbols into mechanical signs that function as lowest common denominators. Local cultures are reduced to a grist to be consumed by the mill of global business. Cultures are now considered useful only if they provide minor and safe variations to the monotony of mass production. They are patronized only so far they can lend themselves to appropriation by global business. The strategies of appropriation are given attractive names and justifications and propagated as paradigms of emerging cultural harmony. For instance, in the the United States, the paradigm of the Melting Pot was once pushed very actively. The Melting Pot theory presumed that cultural diversity can easiliy be melted away to forge a harmonious life of the future of America. But this strategy was resisted by the non-white Anglo-Saxon components of the American society as it threatened their identity. When it created too many tensions, a softer strategy was proposed, namely that of the Cultural Mosaic. Ostensibly the Cultural Mosaic theory was designed to protect and promote the identities of non-white societies. The anthropological thrust of this period of theorizing was to revive in-depth studies of the Asian and African societies which were projected as unchanging, closed, "struct-ured," i.e., fixed identities contrasting with the dynamic, evolving and evoluting Euro-American societies. The very term "structure" (whether referring to the "deep" mental substratum or the "outer" physical organization of societies and their behavior), was meant to denote fixity. And the theory of the Cultural Mosaic was supposed to allow a restful space to the many Others, the many colored unchanging pieces, to survive within the American continent so that the Mosaic makers could play with the coloured pieces and patternize them at their will. Whereas the Melting Pot, dealt with differences by promoting uniformity, the Mosaic theory aimed to contain them by the inverse strategy of promoting self-centeredness and structured identity of the ethnics. Nevertheless, the glorification of the ethnic, also came to a dead end, as it was found to be a backward looking, museumizing and an expensively ornamental enterprise. Fortunately for the West, the info technologies have provided a new opening which has revived the Melting Pot theory in a new packing. It has replaced the American Continent with the globe itself, and American nationalism with hyper-Internationalism, of course, covertly taking for granted that Internationalism cannot be but just another kind of Americanism. Adding to the phenomena of globalization and commercialized ethnicity, there is something much more: an unabashed emphasis on what may be called a post-modernist 'presentism' which creates a frame of mind which in some ways harkens to the Romantics. Despite a devaluation of Humanistic anthropocentricity by recent Continental philosophies, the post-industrial societies are not willing to accept the bleak limitations of the human condition which were once taken for granted by classical cultures. The brash optimism of the nineteenth century based on fetishes like 'progress,' 'utopia,' or 'new frontiers,' is still haunting the Euro-American cultures in the shape of globalization and market economy. This optimism endows the present-day human achievements with a teleology that is quite at variance with the preferences of ancient cultures which are nowadays regarded as fatalistic or other-worldly. For the modern man, studies of the past societies have often been exercises in reconstructing the past according to the prejudices of the present. History, thus, often becomes a story rewritten , a mythos retold, to serve new values. For example, in the nineteenth century, European historians thought of ancient Greek culture as the progenitor of a rationallist, scientific and democratic values that gave birth to the city states. In reality, this writing of Greek history was more to buttress the European faith in modern nation states, colonialism and the philosophy of natural sciences(1). Similarily, in order to provide a predecessor for European theatre, Greek theatre was imagined to be a logocentric performance by post-Renaissance Europe(2). To take another example, modern Indian historians in their nationalist fervor portrayed ancient India as somewhat of an egalitarian and democratic society and underplayed its acute hierarchies, while the Marxist section of Indian historians wrote on the same period highlighting its class struggles and economic disparities. The task of the comparatist, therefore, is to make the best effort to overcome the prejudicial impact of the present and view the past in its own terms of reference. This is a tall order considering that major trend of thought nowadays propagate that all signs, including language, have no core of meaning that can survive time or the user's subjectivity. There is not only the bias of time as a pitfall for the comparatist
but also the bias of space that separates the objects of comparison.
In space, the local is always evaluated as superior to the cultures
beyond the territory of the local. The Greeks looked down upon
the 'barbaroi', the Indians upon the 'mlecchas' of the various
kinds, while the Europeans have a history of devaluing 'natives,'
'savages,' 'primitives,' and now the 'ethnics.' Sometimes these
'other people' are regarded as inferior in order to provide a
justification for one's military, colonial or monopolistic designs.
At other times they are denigrated in cultural terms. The emphasis,
in any case, is always on the differences and thus on the inferiority
of the other. No wonder 'xenophobia' is a much used word, but
'xenophilia' is hardly ever used. The bias of space is agonal.
New technologies notwithstanding, it has turned the present
day cultural pluralism into a global strife as pluralism today
is made to rest on promoting and asserting differences. As a
result pluralism has helped more than anything else, sale of
armaments and trade monopolies. The samvada theory rests upon the postulation that differences
are born out of a common ground, not by themselves. In other
words, the One creates the many, the Scale creates the notes.
Identities are meaningful only so long as they interact , as
do the musical notes in relation to one another. Cultures are
vibrant only when they reveal their consonances. Otherwise, they
stagnate or become violent, leading both ways to self-destruction.
The comparative task needs to the fresh outlook of creating
consonances , and calls for harmony, as opposed to hegemony which
has been our cultural purpose for so long. Notes 2. For a detailed discussion on this refer to Dramatic Concepts: Greek and Indian, Delhi : D.K.Printworld, 1994. pp 6-12.
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