Tag: Identification

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Strategic Images

CE Ethiopian Virgin

How can people portray revered figures, like the icon of Mary and Jesus above from Ethiopia? News reports from Jharkhand in eastern India have described a conflict over a statue of the Virgin Mary. (View an image of the statue here.) Some leaders of the Sarna community, what is often labeled a “tribal” community in India, have complained that the statue depicts her in the traditional dress of the Sarna and with a dark complexion. Some have speculated that the image is designed to confuse the local population into associating the statue with the local goddess Sarna Ma, thus encouraging conversion to Christianity. Sarna who identified as Christians assert their right to present Mary in dress that they associate with their heritage. Subsuming local divine figures into a different configuration to facilitate conversion is often described as a common practice in different historical and regional contexts. Continue reading “Strategic Images”

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Bayart on Contextual Identification

edgebayart“Historical experience shows that an individual’s act of identification is always contextual, multiple, and relative. For example, someone from Saint-Malo will define himself  as a resident of that town when dealing with someone from Rennes, as a Breton when dealing with someone from Paris, as French when dealing with some from Germany, as a Continue reading “Bayart on Contextual Identification”

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Bayart on Processes

edgebayart

“Whereas culturalist reasoning posits the existence of a permanent inner core peculiar to each culture that confers on the latter its veridical nature and determines the present, analysis reveals a process of cultural elaboration in the areas of ideology and sensibility that speaks to us of the present by fabricating the past…. For the culturalist believes Continue reading “Bayart on Processes”

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Bayart on Fabricating the Popular

edgebayart“Popular cultures themselves — whose definition by intellectuals was, as we have seen, a highpoint of the movement of identity-related closure — have never been as homogenous as they were supposed to be by the theoreticians of the invention of tradition, and in particular by the nationalists of Central and Eastern Europe. Continue reading “Bayart on Fabricating the Popular”

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Bayart on Ethnicity

The cover of the Illusion of Cultural Identity“A great many anthropological and historical studies have shown that pre-colonial societies were almost always mutli-ethnic, and included a great diversity of cultural repertoires; that the principal forms of social or religious mobilisation were trans-ethnic; and that ancient Africa most definitely did not consist of a mosaic of ethnic groups. This does not mean that ethnicity is a pure construct … produced by colonising powers that sought to divide the better to rule, as African nationalists — and, paradoxically, some ethno-nationalists — still like to believe. Colonised peoples took part in its ‘formation’ by appropriating the new political, cultural and economic resources of the bureaucratic state. In one of the many working misunderstandings, ‘Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; [whereas] Africans built tribes to belong to’, as John Iliffe brilliantly expressed it.* The political importance of ethnicity proceeds precisely from the fact that it is an eminently modern phenomenon connected to the ‘imported state’, and not a residue or resurgence of ‘traditional culture’.” (29-30)

*John Iliffee, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 324). The role of African middlemen, especially the literate ones, in the process of colonial ‘imagination’ of ethnicity is now better understood than a few years ago, when emphasis was placed on the intervention of European administrators and missionaries….

[This is one of a series of posts, quoting from Bayart’s The Illusion of Cultural Identity, that further documents the theoretical basis
on which Culture on the Edge is working.]