Colluding and Colliding with the Orientalists
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
190 Essay and responses critical friends. If there is to be a counter- future. Such a project is indeed demand- vailing force strong enough to call the ing. It cannot be carried out only by West- bluff of anodyne, corporate, Western, erners, and will necessarily require mater- science-and-technology-led accounts of ials from many cultures. It will be a pity if the future, then futures people of different this is persistently seen as mere ‘appro- backgrounds and cultures need to locate priation’. common interests and work together. In short, I support the thesis in part, In my view, the world futures but reject the a priori notion on which it is community can only benefit from the based. Some of the more dismissive voices active involvement and leadership of in the text are not helpful and should be people from non-Western cultures. As seen for what they are-substitutes for a their participation increases, I expect to more sophisticated and inclusive outlook. see a real flowering of different traditions of futures work. As it is, the futures enter- prise is anything but monolithic. It already Notes and references contains critical, visionary, enabling and multicultural perspectives that are not R. Slaughter, ‘An international overview of futures- education’, (Paris, ‘owned by anyone, and certainly not by Future Scan UNESCO). 7(l). 1992. oases 60-79. dominant interests. R. Slaughter, iuturei kokepts and Powerful So instead of railing against some of /deas (Melbourne, Futures Study Centre, those who have tried to work against the 1991). dominant tradition and to support the J. Mander’s book In the Absence of the emergence of others, a more constructive Sacred (San Francisco, CA, Sierra Club, and creative strategy should be con- 1991), is a fine example of an approach sidered. Criticism is certainly part of it, but embodying both the critique of Western it is only part. The more important need is assumptions and the valuing of non- Western cultures. Such work provides a to recognize cultural differences, but then strong, durable and ethically viable position look beyond them to the shared interests for futurists and others. of humankind in comprehending the past, R. Slaughter, ‘interviews with Asia/Pacific dealing with the present and actively futurists’, 27C (Melbourne, Commission for working toward a more just and viable the Future), 9, 1993. Colluding and colliding with the orientalists A response to Zia Sardar’s ‘Colonizing the future’ Sohail lnayatullah Zia Sardar’s ‘Colonizing the future’ asserts nation, region and generation. If we do not that the study of the future is following the create the future, others will. With land, much travelled trail of the orientalist path wealth and history already colonized, the of development. His paper echoes a much last frontier is time. What Zia Sardar has earlier piece by Jim Dator entitled, ‘Deco- suggested is that this is precisely what has lonizing the future” in which Dator argued occurred-futures studies has increasingly that the future must become increasingly become Western-dominated with the participatory across gender, ethnicity, source of their evolution based on their relation to the Other, in this case, the non- West-the raw materials of Western Sohail lnavatuliah can be contacted at 555 development. Non-Western sources are 12th Avenue, Honolulu, HI 96816, USA (Tel: only used when they comfortably fit into +l 808 732 6039; internet: Sohail @ uhunix. Western cosmology either in agreement uhcc.hawaii.edu). or as loyal opposition. FUTURESMarch 1993 Essay and responses 191 What is there to colonize? in the West who can speak universally about global megatrends. However, when The Western bias of futures studies is an Indian discusses global trends, we call partly mitigated by the fact that futures this an alternative view of the future or the studies is not an academic discipline, Indian view of the world. It should not although Sardar thinks that it is a nascent then be surprising that Western futurists field. For example, inasmuch as there exists often fail to see their own paradigmatic no professional newsletter listing employ- boundaries even as they predict a coming ment vacancies, it is not a field. Neither paradigm change. Since the worldview academe and government, nor the private they speak from is presently universal, the sector have job categories called ‘futurist’. boundaries of their discourse are invisible.3 There is also no particular area that futures This is partly because the idea of the studies attempts to dominatethe future future in the West has developed in con- itself is too grand a concept to be easily junction with the idea of progress. Follow- controlled by a particular interpretive ing Comte, the West believes itself to have community, especially since among the entered the positive scientific era (post- key components of the futures perspec- industrial, consumer, and so forth) while tive is that the future be made open and the non-West remains in the philosophical accessible to all. Finally there are few foun- (speculative) or theological (religious). dations giving grants to set up futures Within this linear evolutionary model, studies centres-only UNESCO has man- how can the backward offer visions of the aged some limited funding for travel and future? They can only be educated and bibliographic research.2 transformed, not solicited for alternatives. Furthermore, even if futures studies is a field, there is no dominant paradigm that Of course, one can argue that there are defines it. While this is also the case in few sophisticated versions of futures stu- other disciplines, however, they do have dies in the non-West, since futures studies schools of thought and areas of concern, are not taught there, but this point forgets as for example is the case in political that the non-West is filled with compelling science, which has schools of thought alternatives to modernity, with alternative such as behaviouralist, critical, develop- images of time, with different construc- mentalist and areas of concern such as tions of the ideal, even if they are not political theory, comparative politics, and couched in the language of modern or government studies. developmentalist-oriented futures studies. Nonetheless, ‘colonizing’ is still not In the non-West, the future occupies too strong a word even if there is little at different spaces, often those that emerge stake (as seen from the strategic instru- from cyclical and transcendental theories mentalist perspective) in futures studies. of social change. The boundaries of the For instance, in both the World Future universal and the particular are con- Society and the World Futures Studies structed along less exclusive lines. But Federation, individuals by and large par- where linear theories are dominant, then ticipate because of personal idealism not the future remains penetrated by the push because they seek financial, political or of progress (or during the middle ages, the psychological gains. pull of GodL4 Thus we should not be surprised at efforts like Robert Bundy’s Images of the Futures. Of 20 essays that comprise this Progress and the future edited volume, only four are written by Still, the Western vision of the future-its females and there are no essays from a categories, its framework-has become non-Western perspective-a Chinese hegemonic just as the West has become vision, an Indian vision, an Islamic version, universal-a particular ‘civilization’ has a Pacific islander vision do not exist in this defined what it means to be civilized, what collection. As Bundy writes, Western civil- is important and what is trivial. Thus from ization is the obvious focus of all that is a Chinese individual, we seek to gain said. But the drama we are engaged in is insight into Chinese visions of the future, global, therefore an important underlying from an Indian individual of Indian visions assumption in all the essays is that what of the future-but it is only those who live happens to the West will significantly FUTURES March 1993 192 Essay and responses shape what the world will be like in the struct the future. Certainly, non-Western second millennia’.j nations can learn from the idea of alterna- I hope Bundy will be disappointed tive futures instead of constantly parroting and that the new visions of the future will the one future, one leader, one text vision emerge less from the spiritually tired and of the God and the nation-state. Western materially ‘exhausting’ West and more perspectives can be enriched by different from other sources of insight. Obviously, approaches of what it means to be devel- he and others who offer us the future have oped and the place of humanity in the not read the futures visions and theories of cosmos. Indian Sarkar or Muslim philosopher Al Still there are culturally synthetic Shariati or the struggles of the various efforts, primarily through the efforts of the social movements-Sarvodaya in Sri World Futures Studies Federation. Confer- Lanka for example-or recent efforts by ences are structured so as to maximize Hawaiian activists to use ancient Hawaiian diversity. One has come to expect the cosmology to articulate a new sovereign voices of Islamic futures, Japanese utopias, Hawaii. Fortunately, there is a wealth of African models, Indian visions and other sources available-the UNESCO women’s images, to mention a few diver- futures orientation programme has gent perspectives.9 hundreds of citations of futures studies in But the problem for most writers on South Asia, East Asia and South-east Asia. the future is that marketing is the key. To World Future Society proceedings present the Orient as other than the land tend to be particularly culturally myopic. of exoticism and eroticism (as in the case In the 1989 proceedings, there is only one of the recent Aladdin, a movie that steals article that examines the Third World, and dreams from the non-West by cannibaliz- again as a source of potential colonization.