Self, Other and the Challenge of Culture
Working Paper No. 140 Self, Other and the Challenge of Culture by Ananta K. Giri Madras Institute of Development Studies 79, Second Main Road, Gandhi Nagar Adyar, Chennai 600 020 December 1996 SELF, OTHER AND THE CHALLENGE OF CULTURE In its essence, literature is concerned with the self; and the particular concern of the literature of the last two centuries has been with the self in its standing quarrel with culture ... This intense conviction of the existence of self apart from culture is, as culture knows, its noblest and most generous achievement. At the present moment it must be thought of as a liberating idea without which our developing idea of community is bound to defeat itself. - Lionel Trilling (1955), Beyond Culture, p.118. The essential view of culture was modelled on an essentialist view of person, both of which assume a monolithic identity defined in terms of difference vis-a-vis other cultures and other persons. The essentialist concept of "culture" was, so to speak, an expanded version of the western person, i.e., an identity concerned in terms of invariance, boundaries, and exclusion. Paradoxically, a truly "postmodern" personhood means a radicalized individualism, in that it implies greater openness, i.e., a greater capacity to "bracket'' one's own reference points and to relate to specific others in creative, non-stereotyped ways. - Alf Hornborg ( 1994) "En com passing En com passment: Anthropology and the U-Turn of Modernity," pp.234-235 {emphases in the original) . ... the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity.
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