Name: Shefali Golchha

Roll No.: A019

SOCIOLOGY ASSIGMENT - III

Topic- Culture : Deconstruction of a problematic Construction

Abstract:

This paper revolves around Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s work, ‘Beyond "Culture": Space,
Identity, and the Politics of Difference’ and Arjun Appadurai’s contribution to the understanding of
culture amidst globalisation through his work, ‘ Modernity at Large’, ‘Fear of Small Numbers’ as
well as an interview he gave during the Vienna Humanities Festival of 2016.
The essay begins with highlighting the problem that lies in the understanding of culture in spatial
terms. It builds upon the meanings of culture as described by Raymond Williams in ‘Keywords’,
focusing on the connection of the word ‘protect’ with ‘culture’ and the way these connections play
out in issues related to migration and displacement, linked to general fear and anxiety. This is
discussed as being a result of one of the ‘naturalisms’, i.e, the ‘natural’ association between
cultures, people, and places that we have constructed. Therefore, it emphasises that instead of
considering these naturalisms as a given, we need to starting understanding how they were
constructed in the first place.

Keywords: Culture, space, identity, globalisation, spatial, protect, migration, displacement, fear,
anxiety, naturalisms.

Raymond Williams, in his work, ‘Keywords’, begins the section on culture by calling it ‘one
of the two or three most complicated words in the English Language’ (p.87) . The various ways in
which the term ‘culture’ has been interpreted has created disruptions in our understanding of what it
means to different people and what kind of implications does a specific understanding hold. One
common understanding of the term is that people belonging to different regions or nations have
distinct cultures, the forces of globalisation which, are bringing together. This kind of a simplistic
conception has been the underlining reason for several conflicts and crisis around the world. The
reason why ‘culture’ then becomes a problematic term is because of the implicit divisiveness it
carries.
This ‘divisiveness’ or ‘discreteness’ of cultures is questioned in Akhil Gupta and James
Ferguson’s work, ‘Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’. They argue in
ways that make us question whether difference is really at the heart of culture, or is it the way
in which we have come to construct and understand the term that created these differences.
Which is why the authors call upon the anthropologists to question their methodological
presupposition before they explore questions related to identity, community, displacement, etc. The
presupposition is based on the way in which humans have assumed space to be “naturally

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discontinuous” (p.6) in order to concretise their ideas of what ‘countries’ and ‘regions’ are. All of us
visualise the world map as fragmented pieces of land, consisting of several countries and societies,
each with their own ‘culture’ and ‘people’. However, it is when we question this idea of
discontinuity, that crucial debates can be reconsidered. For example, the debates about migration
and displacement, where the discontinuity of space takes a centre stage, can be revisited. If culture
is not spatially bound, then what is actually at stake and for whom. This debate then can be
understood in the words of Gupta & Ferguson, ‘the power of topography’ concealing ‘the
topography of power’ (p.8). To return to Raymond William’s Keywords, in the beginning of the
section around culture, he mentions how ‘cultura’ (Latin), the immediate forerunner of ‘culture’,
means to inhabit, cultivate, honour and protect. It is when ‘protect’ is connected to ‘culture’
that several problematic conditions surface. The interpretations and meanings that it produces
may not directly be visible, but are important. To locate this understanding in the current times, take
for example the attitude of some people from the host countries towards the immigrants, ‘protect’
and ‘culture’ become associated. Whose culture needs protection from whom? Why is protection
needed? What is being saved? These questions are at the core of the issues related to migration.
It also reflects the anxiety produced, within the people of the host country, as well as those who go
there, due to such an understanding. In an interview, during the Vienna Humanities Festival of 2016,
Arjun Appadurai talks about this anxiety too. To quote, “A sense of dislocation or lack of fit between
identity place loyalty and so on, has become somewhat part of everybody’s anxiety - the states,
migrants. No one is sitting as it were completely secure. In the US, the people who have just
arrived, let’s say the undocumented migrants from Mexico or elsewhere, as well as Donald Trump,
the most hyper privileged, are all anxious. What is the U.S? Who is the U.S? What is the wall? Who
is coming in?”
However, the realisation of this anxiety came late to many, including Appadurai. In the same
interview, he talks about his change in the way he thought abut globalisation, from writing
‘Modernity at Large’ to writing ‘The Fear of Small Numbers’ ten years later. Modernity at Large, as
critiqued by many, contains essays that are celebratory of globalisation. It is a reflection of
aspirations that people held of the cultural side of globalisation. A decade later came the ‘Fear of
Small Numbers’ which highlighted the darker, violent side of globalisation. There was a
shrinkage in the imagination as opposed to the imagination of social life that Appadurai had
spoken of earlier. Then, in 2013, he wrote ‘The Future as Cultural Fact’ that revolved around the
co-existence of both these aspects of globalisation and its implications on what we understand as
culture.
To talk about this ‘fear’ and the need to ‘protect’, in terms of politics, it can be viewed as a
global shift to the right. With leaders like Modi, Trump and Putin, this fear of the ‘other’, whether
its is religion or race or ideology, have become more evident than ever. However, to bring it back to
the concept of culture, these anxieties are a result of the way in which we understand how identities
are formed and highlighting the differences that exist in these identities. The ideas about protecting
the ‘purity’ of a nation, closing the borders, building walls are all reflective of the way in which we
understand culture and cultural differences. This is also one of the ‘naturalisms’ that is mentioned

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in Gupta and Ferguson’s paper, i.e, the association of citizens of states and their territories as
natural (p. ). In that way, when Appadurai questions “What is the U.S? Who is the U.S?” and when
Gupta and Ferguson write of anthropologists talking about ‘American Culture’ without really
understanding what it means, it is due to taking the connection between culture, people and
places for granted. These assumptions are the fundamental assumptions that they are asking us to
challenge.
In one of the class discussions, we spoke about how even people who had lived in a certain
region in their lives, felt their relation to the place being changed. This is also what was higgled in
the paper by Gupta & Ferguson. While the spoke about this ‘naturalism’, the mentioned how the
displaced were not the only ones experiencing a displacement. Often, people living in their ancestral
or familiar places find their connection to the place been broken. They term this connection as ‘an
illusion of a natural and essential connection’ (p.10) which further questions these association we
easily make between land and ‘its’ people, thereby ‘their’ culture. As mentioned in Gupta and
Ferguson’s paper, globalisation has been associated with the change in the way we understand
space and its relation to culture, we still fail to understand the fundamental problem in this
assumption. Which is why, they say, that there is a need to begin understating the way in which we
can deal with cultural differences, while we abandon the idea of the localisation of culture (p.
7).
Continuing from the point to globalisation and culture, there is a commonality in the way
that Appadurai and Gupta & Ferguson talk about its implications. Both point out that although
globalisation has led to the blurring of the idea of places and localities, the idea of the
distinctness of cultures and ethnicities have accented. On one hand, while the displaced come
together around idea of an ‘imagined homeland’, the others who feel disconnected from familiar
places talk about the idea of an ‘imagined locale’ and ‘nostalgic settings’ (p.13). Here they bring in
Anderson’s idea of an ‘imagined community’, which Appadurai calls ‘imagined worlds’, as a result
of globalisation. Therefore, we shift from talking about actual places to imagined places. But
this idea of what the imagination constitutes is also located in spatialise terms. There is an
imagination of a space, of distinct ‘spaces’. Therefore, homogenisation of cultures does not even
enter the realm of our imagination.
While we talk about the ‘naturalised’ conception of spatialised cultures, to get back to the
point of presuppositions that anthropologists need to question, Gupta & Ferguson say that the
problem lies in the starting point of these conceptions. When they say that we need to find a way in
which we deal with cultural differences, they mean that we need to understand them as
differences within shared, connected space and time. What is required is a “move away from
seeing cultural difference” and people “whose separate histories wait to be bridged by the
anthropologist” (p.16). The main problem occurs when the sorting point of understanding culture is
based on differences, instead of it being an end point. Therefore, instead of considering
difference as a given, we need to starting understanding the construction of these difference.
As Gupta & Ferguson say, when anthropologists start with the idea of differences, even while they
attempt to ‘represent’ distinctiveness, the power-relations at play are still visible. This is what they

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call ‘textual strategies’ that bring attention to ‘the politics of representation’ without really
addressing ‘the issue of otherness’ (p.14). While this is not exactly connected to the issue that this
essay is dealing with, but a parallel can be drawn with the argument that Janki Nair poses about
feminist historiography. She too, said that by highlighting the role and agency of women in history,
we have brought the attention to the ‘politics of representation’ but the actual problem remains
unaddressed. Since the categories are already linked with hierarchies and patriarchy, a
reconceptualising of these categories is important (Nair 1994, p.84). Similarly, to address this idea
of ‘otherness’ we need to rewrite or reconstruct what we mean by culture and reconsider what think
are a set of ‘givens’ and ‘naturalisms’. Once we understand that the world is already spatially
connected, the way in which power functions to produce our understanding of things will be clear.

References:

1. Gupta, A., & Ferguson, J. (1992). Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of
difference. Cultural anthropology, 7(1), 6-23.
2. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity al large: cultural dimensions of globalization (Vol. 1). U of
Minnesota Press.
3. Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Duke
University Press.
4. Vienna Humanities Festival: Arjun Appadurai "Flows of Globalization” (2016, October 06).
Retrieved April 12, 2019, from https://youtu.be/paGfRUTBTAM
5. Willams, R. (1976). Keywords. Ney York: Oxford University Press.
6. Nair, J. (1994). On the question of agency in Indian feminist historiography. Gender & History,
6(1), 82-100.

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