Writing Against Culture - Elizabeth Harrison

I was very excited to read Lila Abu-Lughod’s piece “Writing Against Culture” after having read the chapter “Identifying Ethnography” in Fictions of Feminist Ethnographies where Abu-Lughod is frequently quoted. This blog will center upon my reading of “Writing Against Culture”. “Writing Against Culture” picked up nicely where Decolonizing Methodologies and Fictions of Feminist Ethnographies left off for me. It further delves into concepts of objectivity, positionality and power in research. This particular reading also clarified for me some of the concepts discussed in class last week – how decolonized ethnographies need to highlight nuance, complexity and multiplicity (rather than looking for generalizations and patterns) while always analyzing power relations.

A central theme of Abu-Lughod’s chapter is the violence inherent in constructing fixed categories of “self” and “other”. She highlights how the construction of these categories collapses both “self” and “other” into over-generalized, essentialized constructions of culture. These categories erase the contradictions, nuances and multiplicities within the identity of both self and other, in favor of the creation of neat, discrete categories. Importantly, the creation of a self/other division always involves power – and usually in such a way as to construct the “self” into a position of domination over the “other”.

            The idea of “culture” is the primary means of constructing this division between “self” and “other”. Even ‘reverse Orientalism’ and feminist approaches tend to conform to essentialist over-simplifications of cultures. For example, where patriarchal systems of domination have cast “female culture” and “femininity” as weak, subservient and lesser, some feminists argue that there is indeed such a thing as “female culture” and “femininity” – but it is positive and characterized by nurturing, listening, socializing and so forth. While in some ways such discussions of feminine culture have been useful to the feminist movement, they maintain the idea that culture is a fixed, timeless entity that is common across all women. This idea of recasting cultural values in a positive light is also apparent in the disability community. Where dominant able culture has negatively portrayed disabled people as weak and dependent, many disabled scholars have turned this around to valorize interdependence. Instead of rejecting the idea of a unified disabled culture, some scholars have merely redefined disabled culture in positive terms.

            Abu-Lughod suggests three tools for writing against dominant conceptions of timeless, fixed cultures. First, discourse and practice must focus not only on generalizations and patterns, but also on contradictions and complexities. Second, anthropology must not only study cultures as discrete entities, but also the connections (national and transnational) between cultures. Ethnographies of the intersections will be important. Finally, Abu-Lughod highlights the importance of “ethnographies of the particular”. These ethnographies focus on the minute specifics of a particular person or family, rather than seeking to generalize about a whole group. These ethnographies of the particular will allow for greater understanding of the ways that culture is complicated, flexible moment-to-moment, and changing over time. The concept of ‘ethnographies of the particular’ feels related to Visweswaran’s argument for first-person narratives and autobiography, and also possibly related to case studies in medical research.

            One final note that I appreciated in Abu-Lughod’s writing is her description of the importance of writing in accessible language that can be read by the communities being researched. She points out the ways in which professionalized, academic language serve to create separation and power hierarchies between the researcher and the researched.

            Abu-Lughod’s concepts will be very useful to my own work. In reading her chapter, I have been particularly thinking about the work I do with LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers. I have been working with the community for about three years now. When we do conference presentations (usually myself on a panel with several asylum seekers or refugees), I am in the habit of acknowledging my position as a non-immigrant, white person in a position of privilege. After about the third time I did this, a community member (an asylum seeker) expressed his frustration, “If you refer to yourself as an outsider one more time, I am going to scream! You are one of us now.” This was a striking moment for me that I still reflect on one year later. My professional training taught me to always be careful with boundaries between client/therapist and researcher/researched, and my social justice training made me careful about acknowledging my privilege. But here, the community member felt offended that after years of working in community with them, I still felt myself to be separate. Abu-Lughod’s writing clarified this for me somewhat – in creating such a clear boundary between myself and the “other”, I was not only creating judgments about the difference between our cultures, but also constructing a power hierarchy between us. I think it is essential to acknowledge my privilege and be careful not to speak over immigrant voices in my advocacy work, but I also need to be careful in imagining myself to be so different from community partners. “Does difference always smuggle in hierarchy?”(p. 146)

            This critical examination of divisions between self and other brings to mind the quote (often attributed to Lilla Watson): “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” In being an advocate, we must examine whether our conceptions of ‘difference’ and ‘boundaries’ are separating us from our community partners, or whether we truly believe our liberation is bound up with theirs.                     

Questions:

1.      In what ways does the “We are all immigrants” dialogue used by many activists and politicians in the wake of the “Muslim Ban” erase cultural difference? How might this be productive? How might this be dangerous?

2.      How can scholar-activists responsibly acknowledge their positionality (and privilege) while minimizing the dangers of creating strict divisions between “self” and “other”?