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...puts it, 'grounded a common sentiment' (de Man 1986:21). A more common approach to the intercultural is activity that occurs 'between cultures' or 'between two worlds'. This relies on a view of culture as relatively hermetic, self-referring and discrete. Here, 'culture', the effect of human interaction, produces 'cultures', human society as an artefact. While cultural interaction can certainly thicken into relatively stable configurations, to talk of 'a culture', is to use a noun without referent since 'the culture', I argue here, doesn't exist as such. It is a construct of the modernist mode of thought brought to explanatory efficacy in a particular political climate. How we view culture, and the interaction of presumed cultures, governs our approach to intercultural politics in areas such as appropriate governance and the recognition of cultural rights. The practical implementation of cultural rights in appropriate political expressions has arrived at a dead-end because of the application, explicitly or by absorption, of modernist views of social functioning which produce, on the one hand hermetic cultures with rights, and incidentally, a problematic space between them. By critically interrogating the construction of this space as to its historical production and its own consistency we can question the construct of the 'cultures' themselves which intersect in this theorised intercultural space. Ultimately we should be able to open up a new discourse on approaches to political rights drawing on alternative conceptions brought to prominence by the critique of cultures and the intercultural.
Alternative views tend to go by terms which simply say what they are ranged against, for instance post-structuralism, postmodernism or deconstructionism. These terms cover a range of theorists and a wide variety of works, but they have common characteristics. According to Henrietta Moore this
new work in anthropology figures culture as a series of sites of contested representation and resistance within fields of power. The notion of culture as an autonomous entity has been undermined, and that critique has inevitably resulted in a challenge to other spatialized entities and the identities predicated upon them: for example, the nation-state (Moore 1999:11-12).
These could be called 'relational' theorists, as a way of distinguishing them from modernist modes of thought, because their concern is more with exploring the relations of phenomena which produce a 'culture effect' in any given instance than the mechanism of a distinct artefact, the 'culture' and its intersection with other distinct cultures.
It is useful here to briefly outline what I mean by modernist modes of thought and the place of the relational theoretical orientation in the development of anthropology. Postmodernism has had at least one useful consequence. In the fight-back of neo-modernism (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:ix-xi; see Knauft 1996:9-39), which aims to counteract the perceived nihilism, value-neutrality, incapacity for assigning value and indeed frivolity of post-modernism, it has become necessary to interrogate the idea of modernity itself (Knauft 2002:13). Modernity, as Friedman notes, is more complex than 'contemporaneity' or simply being part of the current (modem) world. Nor is it the adoption of apparently modern traits and practices (Friedman, 2002:289, 291). Modernity is a complex of factors which arise at a certain historical conjuncture and inform each other, a Deleuzian assemblage (Deleuze and Parnet 1987 [1977]:52, 69 see below). Most commentators agree that modernist assemblages have also come together at other historical periods (Lyotard, cited in Sim 1999:14; Friedman, 2002:298). Friedman understands modernity to be 'a cultural space, a regime of social experience' (2002:289) and both he and Knauft refer to Trouillot whose view the latter paraphrases as 'modernity is a geography of imagination that creates progress through the projection and management of alterity' (Knauft 2002:18; Friedman 2002:289). This allows us to move beyond the simple dichotomy 'modernism/post-modernism' and admit the possibility of modernism existing side by side with, or embedded in, the pre-modem, post-modern or simply non-modern (Latour 1993). By identifying the modernist tendency in anthropology in this essay I do not wish to irretrievably label any particular contributor as falling within one or other of these camps, but to point out the limits of an aspect of a mode of thought with its origins in enlightenment rationalism, which here, as a shorthand or portmanteau, is labelled modernist.
At least since Gluckman's critique of Malinowski's analysis of social change (see below) anthropology has been informed by these two traditions, the relational and the modernist. Gluckman argued for the analysis of relations between the various groups within colonial Africa as occurring within the same 'social field' or 'field of interdependence' (Gluckman 1949:6, 7, 20). His analysis of the constitution of social fields is relatively undeveloped in his essay, although it remains a productive approach, and its terminology is sometimes taken up today (e.g. Wright and Shore 1997:14). Strathern also questions whether the concept 'society' (she explicitly links her argument to the concept 'culture' also) is theoretically obsolete suggesting:
To think of society as a thing is to think of it as a discrete entity. The theoretical task then becomes one of elucidating 'the relationship' between it and other entities. This is a mathematic, if you will, that sees the world as inherently divided into units. The significant corollary of this view is that relationships appear as extrinsic to such units: they appear as secondary ways of connecting things up. (Strathern, in Ingold 1996:61).
While rejecting 'society', Strathern nevertheless wishes to retain 'sociality'. Both Gluckman and Strathern call in question Malinowski's methodology. Yet Malinowski prevailed. My concern in this paper is to uncover his lineage, question its naturalness and efficacy and contribute therefore to the reaffirmation of the line of thought that leads from Gluckman to Strathern. Henrietta Moore's reference to the nation-state in the quote above is useful, since it is also my contention in this paper that the modernist concept of nation and the birth of structural anthropology went hand in hand. This is the explicit conclusion of Gellner who shows how Malinowski was influenced in his formative years in Krakow by nationalist ideologies and methodologies (Gellner 1998). More will be said on this below. Here I intend only to foreshadow that it is Malinowski's concept of intercultural that will be questioned, since it is an exemplar for a widespread view that is extremely influential.
The paper, then, questions modernist and structural approaches to the imagining of a culture as 'autonomous entity' by looking at this approach's historical origins in early 20th century nationalism, its explanatory power, and logical conclusions or extensions. One of these extensions is the need to conceptualise an intercultural space and the anomalies this conceptualisation produces. At the conclusion of...
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