The Inner Lives of Cultures Eva Hoffman
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The Inner Lives of Cultures Edited with an introduction by Eva Hoffman Counterpoint carries out research and promotes debate around the most pressing issue of our time: how to live together well in an interdependent world. This book is available to download and re-use under a by-nc-sa Creative Commons license ported to UK law. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work, and make derivative works, in a non-commercial context, as long as you credit Counterpoint and the author and share the resulting works under an equivalent license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ The Inner Lives of Cultures This electronic version of the work does not include the glossary in chapter 10. This is included in the print version of this document (ISBN 978-0-95682-250-5), by kind permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. Also in chapter 10, ‘Unwritten rules’, draws on the author’s paper, Unwritten Rules: How Russia really works, published by the Centre for European Reform, May 2001, http://www.cer.org.uk/pdf/e246_ unwritten_rules.pdf. The chapter also draws on an article forthcoming in the journal East European Politics and Societies. Published by Counterpoint 2011. Some rights reserved. Counterpoint, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA, United Kingdom www.counterpoint-online.org ISBN 978-0-9568225-1-2 Copy edited by Julie Pickard Series design by modernactivity Typeset by modernactivity Set in Transport & Scala Edited with an introduction by Eva Hoffman Contents Acknowledgements 3 Introduction 5 Eva Hoffman 1 Barbarism, Civilisation, Cultures 15 Tzvetan Todorov 2 B r a z i l 31 Nicolau Sevcenko 3 China 47 Shu Sunyan 4 E g y p t 61 Hamed Abdel-Samad 5 India 85 Pratap Bhanu Mehta 6 Indonesia 121 Azyumardi Azra 7 I r a n 135 Ramin Jahanbegloo 8 Mexico 165 Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo 9 R o m a n i a 177 Carmen Firan 10 Russia 195 Alena Ledeneva 11 Uzbekistan 223 Hamid Ismailov 1 Acknowledgements It was a privilege to be asked by Dr Catherine Fieschi, Director of Counterpoint, to work on the ‘Inner Lives’ project; and a pleasure to work on it with the Counterpoint team. I am grateful to Catherine for her unfailing collegiality and energy during our collaboration. Great appreciation is due to Nick Wadham-Smith, Deputy Director of Counterpoint, who was involved at every stage of work on the conference in Brussels, and who is responsible, with Eve Jackson, Counterpoint’s researcher, for the production and co-editing of this book. My warm thanks also go to Claire Llewellyn, for her courtesy and efficiency in helping to coordinate the conference during her tenure as Communications and Project Manager at Counterpoint. 3 Introduction Eva Hoffman At the beginning of the twenty-first century, what does it mean to talk about relationships between cultures? What, indeed, is meant by ‘culture’? How do we conduct cross-cultural conversations which lead to mutual understanding, rather than its opposite? And – perhaps most saliently – what do we need to understand about each other in the first place in order to talk across national and cultural lines? These were some of the underlying questions which prompted a conference entitled ‘The Inner Lives of Cultures’, from which the essays in this collection emerged. That conference, convened in Brussels in 2010, by Counterpoint and its director, Catherine Fieschi, was part of a larger project by the British Council, to rethink its mission of cultural relations. This, clearly, is both a daunting, and a most worthwhile undertaking. Cultural exchanges are perhaps more central to our dealings with each other today than ever before; in a sense, they are a basic part of the realities we inhabit. For one thing, issues of cultural identity – understood in ethnic, or religious, or historical terms – are often in the forefront of contemporary political discourse, and sometimes, of conflict. But also, we live in a world in which various kinds of cross-national movement – migrations, travel, various kinds of both enforced and voluntary nomadism – are ever on the rise; and in which flows of fast communication are multidirectional and constant. If we are to meet with each other on the basis of 5 The Inner Lives of Cultures Introduction trust rather than tension or insidious indifference, we need diverse; indeed, the speed of change is a major fact of to have ways of getting acquainted with each other which cultural life today. And yet we each come into a specific are more than cursory, or purely instrumental. But how can culture; and each culture gives us our first existential this be accomplished? What kind of knowledge is needed to map, so to speak, and our earliest templates for the basic feed meaningful cross-cultural contacts? elements of experience: what constitutes personhood, In considering such matters, we held two assumptions what is beautiful or disturbing, how family relationships to be self-evident: that within our intermingled and are structured, or how happiness is envisioned. It was the simultaneously multicentred globe, it is no longer possible formative lesson of my own emigration (to be personal for to think of cultural relations in terms of promoting ‘our a moment) that culture is not only something outside us, culture’ abroad, or exporting culture from a few privileged that we use or respond to; rather, culture exists within us, centres to the putative peripheries; rather, we need to and it constructs our consciousness and subjectivity – our envision cultural exchange as a two-way – or perhaps perceptions, ideas and even feelings. Different cultures even a multidirectional – process, which happens through may have varying predispositions towards not only dialogue and mutual participation, and which hopefully moral values, or forms of group affiliation, but towards leads to reciprocal and fertile forms of engagement. And different states of self – say, the degree of self-sufficiency second, that our definition of culture needs to include not or interdependence which seems desirable; how much only the articulated and formal expressions of literature, or spontaneity or self-control is valued; whether it is intensity music, or artistic artefacts – important as these are – but or serenity which feels good, or cognitively consonant. that whole fabric of social forms and meanings which What is considered healthily assertive in one culture may constitutes the lived and daily experience of culture. be seen as aggressive or hostile in another; certain kinds of At the same time, we also started from an personal disclosure which may seem quite unproblematic awareness that on that broader plane, dialogue is hardly in one society may be seen as embarrassing or entirely easy or straightforward; and that the kind of insight and unacceptable elsewhere. Cultural attitudes can inform comprehension it calls for does not come automatically not only the obvious parameters of behaviour, but very or instantly. These days, we do not lack information particular social forms and rites – and even responses about other societies and countries – although that which may seem purely physiological. For example, within information often comes in sound bites, and confines an admittedly minor anthropological niche of alcohol itself to the current moment. But to enter into the studies, it has been discovered that not only are drinking subjective life of another culture – its symbolic codes, its habits different in different cultures, but that people overt beliefs and implicit assumptions – requires, as any experience inebriation in quite various physical ways. immigrant or nomad can tell you, a considerable effort of Such deep values, or literally incorporated beliefs, can consciousness and imagination; a kind of stretching of be very surprising or perplexing from the outside – partly self towards the other, and a gradual grasp of differences because they are often taken as given, and therefore which are sometimes imperceptible and subtle. remain unarticulated from within. But it is such deep Of course, cultures are neither static nor monolithic values that I think we need to understand in order to organisms – they are complex, changeable and internally engage in cross-cultural relations which are more than 7 The Inner Lives of Cultures Introduction superficial. How, then, can we talk to each other across point from which differences can be perceived in the first such differences – how can we come to know each other place. But also, a superficial accommodation to beliefs one better, or collaborate in ways which are productive and doesn’t really agree with violates the dignity of the other, as possibly creative? I think it almost goes without saying that well as one’s own. One wants to give one’s interlocutor the openness and mutual respect – a recognition, on the part of respect of truthfulness – however tactfully expressed – and each interlocutor, of the other’s legitimacy and dignity – is the possibility of an equally truthful response, whatever a prerequisite for cross-cultural dialogue; without that, risk this incurs. nothing much can happen. But it also seems to me that a But more often, I believe, cross-cultural dialogue can full and rich engagement calls for something more risky lead to a kind of interweaving of languages – to a discovery and entangled – something closer perhaps to the process both of difference, and of underlying similarities, or of translation. Like literal translation, cross-cultural back who knows, perhaps even certain human universals. and forth requires a simultaneous receptivity to the other’s After all, just as textual translation would not be possible subjective language, and a strong sense of one’s own. And without some shared linguistic structures, so we could like literal translation, it calls for a kind of cross-checking not understand our cultural differences without having between the two ‘languages’ or forms of sensibility – some commonalities from which to communicate across keeping conscious of what needs to be understood about them – some shared language of subjectivity.