Inner Lives of Cultures, The, Page 2

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  To begin reflecting on such questions, and at the same time, to embark on an experiment in intercultural dialogue in vivo, we decided – perhaps in the British empirical tradition – to start with specificities; and we asked a number of leading thinkers, cultural observers, commentators and interpreters from various parts of the world, to give us some guidance and insight into the inner topographies and the subjective languages of their societies and cultures. At the same time, in order to avoid a sentimental or reified view of culture, we asked our participants to reflect on the ways in which cultural values in each context intersect with the contemporary realities and political arrangements.

  As the reader will see, the responses to this admittedly challenging assignment were fascinating and varied. To provide an Ariadne’s thread to the themes of the conference, Tzvetan Todorov, in his opening address, gave us a wonderfully illuminating anatomy of the word ‘culture’ – its meanings, implications and historical derivations. The other essays collected here are in effect informed reports from within particular cultural contexts, probing and decoding different aspects of cultural experience. In their particularity, they are difficult to summarise; rather, they should be, one by one, pondered and relished. They range (to give a very rough guide to their themes) from reflections on the repressive hold of religious and political authority against the need for reform (‘Goodbye Orient: Resisting Reforms in the Islamic World’ by Hamed Abdel-Samad), to the tradition of tolerance, and the possibility of incorporating religious diversity into politics (‘Cultural Pluralism in Indonesia: Local, National and Global Exchanges’ by Azyumardi Azra); from the loss of a uniting national idea or positive self-image in Mexico (‘Goodbye to All That’ by Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo), to memories of personal resistance, ranging from irony to strong friendships, in Cold War Romania (‘Surrealism and Survival in Romania’ by Carmen Firan); from analysis of the subterranean links between linguistic structures, spatial imagination and cultural/political attitudes in the Caucasus (‘Uzbekness: From Otherness to Ideology’ by Hamid Ismailov), to the opposition between theocratic fundamentalism with its foreclosures of dialogue, and the pluralistic, ethical space of civil society (‘The Intercultural Imperative and Iranian Dreams’ by Ramin Jahanbegloo); from a close reading of the invisible practices and hidden codes of discourse which enable an ‘alternative’ system of economic and social transactions in post-Soviet Russia (‘Unwritten Rules, Open Secrets, Knowing Smiles’ by Alena Ledeneva), to the tracking of the vicissitudes of ‘identity’, as well as various linkages between culture and politics, and distinctions between diversity and difference (‘Culture in Modern India: The Anxiety and the Promise’ by Pratap Bhanu Mehta); and from the tension between abstracting structures of modernity, and the vitality of grassroots inventiveness in Brazil (‘From Tristes Tropiques to Tropical Treats: Savage Imaginaries in Multiple Brazils’ by Nicolau Sevcenko), to the importance of Confucius, and the dialectic between imposed harmony and violent conflict in China (‘China in Search of Harmony’ by Shu Sunyan).

  But such sound bite summaries cannot do justice to the multiple themes or the powerful insights of these essays. They are rich examples of what classical anthropologists and these days, airport advertisers, call ‘local knowledge’ and their interest is to be found largely in the detail. Nevertheless, part of the excitement of the conference was to see how fruitfully its participants could talk across geographical boundaries and cultural, as well as historical, differences. Amidst the distinctiveness, certain common concerns began to be evident: how to understand ‘identity’ without being reductive; what real tolerance might look like; or what, beyond democratic forms, constitutes responsible and accountable politics. Moreover, what such conversations strongly suggested is that the old divisions which have governed our world – between East and West, the advanced and the Third World, or even between the coloniser and the (post)-colonised – no longer hold, or are at least losing their relevance. In the laboratory, or the microcosm of the conference, it was clear that we live in a multicentred world, and speak to each other across criss-crossing lines of affinity and mutual influence, from multiple points of reference, as well as sites of legitimacy, importance, and even power.

  As it happens, quite a few of the participants in ‘Inner Lives of Cultures’ are in effect bicultural – that is, they live abroad from their country of origin, or move back and forth between two countries. In one or two cases, this is because it is not possible to speak freely, or to do critical work, from within their countries of origin; but in most instances, it is a kind of overdetermined coincidence. Overdetermined, because people with hyphenated identities are often very adept at cross-cultural translation; indeed, from their position as simultaneous outsiders and insiders, such translation – whether overt or internal – is an intrinsic part of the bicultural condition. It was therefore perhaps not coincidental that one of the implicit – and sometimes explicit – thematic currents of the conference had to do with the sensitive question of what an external or an ‘outsider’ gaze can bring to the understanding of each society, or culture. Can such gaze ever be salubrious and heuristic, rather than cold or condescending? The possibility of allowing ourselves to be seen and sometimes even criticised by others is, of course, crucial to the possibility of dialogue. Admittedly, opening yourself to the perceptions of outsiders can be a psychologically difficult gesture to make; but what the laboratory, or the microcosm, of the conference made clear is that in the newly configured world no one can any longer assume that they come to such exchanges from a position of putative superiority, or hegemonic centrality, or triumphalist certainty. Rather, faced with the difficult problems of our time, and the hyper-speeds of change, we all find ourselves in positions of equal uncertainty. The need is clearly to ask questions of each other, and to try to grasp the shape of our fast-metamorphosing world in common. It is in such intermingling that sources of creativity, solidarity – and perhaps even peace – can be found.