Response to Athens Dialogues: Identity and
Difference
Κυρίες
και Κύριοι, Καλησπέρα . Good Evening. It
is an honor to participate in the first Athens
Dialogues conference that inaugurates the
impressive Onassis Cultural Center.
In my presentation, I shall begin with a brief
consideration of the views expressed in the
pre-published papers of social and political Greek
theorist Konstantinos Tsoukalas and British
psychologist Martyn Barrett. I shall then try to
relate some of the issues raised to examples of
literary and visual representations of the
cultural and ethnic self and “Other” in Greece.
Prof. Tsoukalas begins his learned account of
historically situated notions of identity with the
Heraclitean doctrine of perpetual flux,
Πάντα ῥεῖ , implicitly
introducing from the start the theme of the
fluidity and unpredictability of history that
permeates his ensuing analysis.
Tsoukalas offers a critique of the ideologies
that globalization fosters and sustains. He echoes
the Frankfurt School when he exposes the “pretense
of individualism” in the global capitalist order. He notes that in postmodern times, the
individuation of human beings is ideological. The
individual is now reproduced as “self-governed”,
free to choose her own cultural codes, and social
practices. In recurrent definitions of selfhood in
our times, he observes a certain “fetishism of
difference.”
Tsoukalas alerts us to the limitations of the
capitalist doctrine of the “freedom of choice,”
which benefits those with the most cultural and
financial capital in the production process, who
thrive in the security of a “neutral” free market
that the state-as-arbitrator aims to provide,
whereas the under-privileged are lagging behind
unable to participate in the “zero-sum games” of a
competitive, transnational, and integrated
capitalist market economy.
From the sociopolitical construction of identity
and difference and the shared belief that each
individual is the product of its historical time,
and conversely, each historical civilization gives
its own signification to its individual and
collective self, with Professor Barrett we were
given a psychological reading of the “individual
variability in patterns of social identification”
and in perceptions of difference. Barrett’s
cross-national projects with Eurasian children aim
at assisting the development of “effective
interventions for reducing prejudice towards
national and ethnic ‘others’” (abstract). His
focus on “identity threat” to collective groups
and individuals, and the construction of national,
ethnic, racial or religious stereotypes to
denigrate the out-group, honor the in-group and
maintain individual and collective self-esteem, is
an area I would like to linger on a little
further.
Greek antiquity is ridden with examples of
representations of the other in literature,
historiography, philosophy and art. In the
geometric period of frenetic overseas colonization
across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea
(900-700 BC), differences between the ethnic and
linguistic Greek subgroups (Ionian, Dorian,
Aiolian) were salient, employed to assert primacy
in invented foundation myths of city-states, or in
kinship diplomatic relations between mother-cities
on the Greek mainland and coastal colonies. Greek
cultural self-consciousness developed in the
eighth century BC with the pan-Hellenic
institution of the Olympic games, and was
consolidated by the time of the Greco-Persian wars
(492-449 BC), when a homogeneous image of the
Greeks emerged, urging for collective action
against a common enemy. We have here an example of
adjustments due to “identity threat” that
Professor Barrett identified, where “the social
group …is under threat … [is presented as
exhibiting] greater internal cohesion and
homogeneity...” At the same time a well-crafted
representation of the barbaric other was
constructed exhibiting “strong outgroup
denigration”: effeminacy, cowardice, and servility
were the salient features affixed to the barbaric
Persian enemy in Greek visual, literary and
historiographical sources.
“Reading” and “writing” culture are highly
politicized actions, as Said showed in his 1979
Orientalism . Herodotus
was Said’s first villain. His report of the battle
at Thermopylae in 480 BC between the Spartans and
the Persians, has recently been adapted on screen
in Zach Snyder’s 2007 block-buster “
300 ”. The film is imbued in
orientalist stereotypes validating U.S. President
George W. Bush invasion of Iraq, At the end of the
film, “Leonidas … lies below [the dead Spartans]
with arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross,
his body penetrated by arrows like that of Saint
Sebastian.”
I will quickly move to film representations of
Greek cultural and ethnic identity and difference. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century
Greece was seen as the ancestral homeland, cradle
of the western civilization and goal of pilgrimage
for the traveling members of the intellectual
élite of western Europe, but by the early 1960s
Greece was turned into a sensual vacation spot
offering respite from civilization.
Greece enters Europe unlike any other Balkan
state as the tenth member in 1981, due to the
constitutive role its culture played in the
formation of the western European self-image. In
the post cold-war era, Greece is viewed as part of
Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The influx of
immigrants from poorer countries to Greece since
1989, now forming ten percent of its population,
along with the investment of Greek capital in the
region, mark a historical reversal. Greece is
developing into a multicultural society. Each
Greek is now rehearsing a number of her multiple
cultural identities: Greek, European, Balkan,
Mediterranean, etc., which, as Barrett remarks,
“are never all activated simultaneously” (p. 5). In a concerted re-imagining of South Eastern
Europe, Greece looms as an influential leader of
the pack, which she also sees as an expression of
resistance to western hegemony.
Since the early 1990s, Greek identity is
dialogized in a negotiation of a new self-image. As people cross boundaries, insularity and
homogeneity cannot any longer sustain national
myths equating a culture and a space. If we move
beyond a nation-centric understanding of identity,
we can open up a discursive space which will
enable us to ask a different question, namely,
what kinds of lessons can we draw from the Greek
engagement with difference.
I will close with an excerpt from Tassos’
Boulmetis’
Touch of
Spice , literally translated as ‘Cuisine of
Constantinople’ (
Politiki
Kouzina , 2003), a story about a young
Greek boy growing up in Istanbul and learning the
secrets of mouth-watering delicacies by his
grandfather, a culinary guru and philosopher,
owner of a grocery store in the central market
place in Istanbul. At seven years of age, he
leaves for Athens, and 35 years later, he travels
back to his birthplace. His nostalgic journey
assists his realization that in his western
life-style he has neglected adding enough oriental
spices in his life.
The film is a critique not only of identity as
understood by nationalism, but also in terms of
its cultural work to shift understandings of
culture beyond identity. With respect to national
identity and regionalism, the memorable phrase in
the film, “the Turks chased us away as Greeks and
the Greeks received us as Turks” is used to refer
to people with a sense of ethnic identity but also
strong connections of belonging to the place of
dwelling. In other words, their affiliation with a
non-national space and the simultaneous
articulation of a national/ethnic/Greek identity —
a syncretism of sorts — is cancelled, neutralized
by the nationalist inscription of identity. Nationalist discourse does not, in fact cannot,
recognize multiplicities, ambiguities, and dual
cultural connections. As a result people are
uprooted, and subjected to the political violence
that nationalism sustains. In highlighting the
grandfather’s attachment to non-national place,
the director in a sense revisits the issue of
regionalism, the old counterpoint to nationalism
in the pre-nation Balkans.
Touch
of Spice is a statement that cultural
connectivity does not have to be associated with
national soil. This has important implications for
perceiving a multicultural Balkans where one can
be an ethnic Greek in Istanbul, Turkey, feel
connected with his city/place/Turkish culture, but
also sustain a Greek identity, in short, behaving
as a bi-national. We are moving towards a
segmented model where one is attached to specific
locales (in different nations) not an exclusive
national culture/space.
Touch of Spice brings
attention to practices and the performance of
practices, and thus stretches beyond identity. If
identity names practices and answers the question
what is a particular cultural practice (eating hot
dog is quintessential American) the film focuses
on how people behave — how they embody/perform
cultural practices. Thus, it is not so much what
people eat (Greek, Turkish) but how they cook it,
with whom, and how they eat. Similarly, the film
brings attention to issues of pedagogy, how you
teach a child about life — through the metaphor of
food. We have here an emphasis on an ethos (how
does one live a life — life must have salt) rather
than a list of identity traits. Here the
implications are important too. If the western
model of Hellenism forces a particular
performativity of Greek culture for the western
gaze (the traveler, the diplomat, the tourist),
the film unearths the performativity of everyday
practices, which define the ethos of a people. If
we take this as our starting analytical point —
how Greeks are in terms of an ever-changing
ethos
(“
anthropia ”,
humane feeling/modes of pedagogy/approach to food)
and how they imagine themselves to be — we bypass
to a large extent western interpellations of the
Hellenic. We also move beyond stereotypes and the
often-told narrative of Greek
corruption/cunningness/etc., and a discursive
space opens to define Balkans as particular and
intersecting
ethne that imagine life
heteroglosically vis-à-vis the West.
We now reach beyond the metaphor of culinary
syncretism to the concept of “polycentric
multiculturalism.”
[1] This is a type
of dialogical multiculturalism between permeable
entities and communities. “Each act of cultural
interlocution leaves both interlocutors changed,”
and there are multiple “dynamic cultural
locations” without privileging any particular
single vantage point, dealing not with ethical
universals (as in liberal pluralism) but “seeing
cultural history in relation to social power.”
Hence, in theory we may envisage the possibility
of replacing the discourse of margins, and
minoritarian communities with a multiplicity of
centers and a plurality of voices in a dialogue
between “generative participants at the very core
of a shared, conflictual history.” The transition
in practice is more difficult: People still
do perceive themselves and other
factions as marginal and minoritarian; when there
is power, there are hierarchies and asymmetries. As Prof. Tsoukalas cautions, “multiculturalism
cannot ever be perceived or function as a
pan-culture.” (ch. 5, p. 57).
[2] Still, as
engaged intellectuals, we may continue to uncover
hidden discursive structures of identity and
difference, and hope and work with Prof. Barrett
to improve individual “cognitive flexibility”
(Barrett p. 16).
[3] and strike
down some of the antagonisms that threaten to
unravel at the hem the intricate tapestry of our
global world.
Footnotes
On which Shohat and Stam,
drawing on Bakhtinian theory, insist in their book
entitled
Unthinking
Eurocentrism (1994: 46-49).
«όσο ακραία ανοικτός και
αν εμφανίζεται, ο «πολυπολιτισμός» δεν θα ήταν
ποτέ δυνατόν να νοηθεί και να λειτουργήσει ως κατά
κυριολεξίαν «πανπολιτισμός» (ch. 5, p. 57).