Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen

Author:Amartya Sen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton and Company
Published: 2013-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

CULTURE AND CAPTIVITY

The world has come to the conclusion—more defiantly than should have been needed—that culture matters. The world is obviously right—culture does matter. However, the real question is: “How does culture matter?”1 The confining of culture into stark and separated boxes of civilizations or of religious identities, discussed in the last two chapters, takes too narrow a view of cultural attributes. Other cultural generalizations, for example, about national, ethnic, or racial groups, can also present astonishingly limited and bleak understandings of the characteristics of the human beings involved. When a hazy perception of culture is combined with fatalism about the dominating power of culture, we are, in effect, asked to be imaginary slaves of an illusory force.

And yet simple cultural generalizations have great effectiveness in fixing our way of thinking. The fact that such generalizations abound in popular convictions and in informal communication is easily recognized. Not only are the implicit and twisted beliefs frequently the subject matter of racist jokes and ethnic slurs, they sometimes surface as grand theories. When there is an accidental correlation between cultural prejudice and social observation (no matter how casual), a theory is born, and it may refuse to die even after the chance correlation has vanished without a trace.

Consider the labored jokes against the Irish (such crudities as “How many Irishmen do you need to change a lightbulb?”), which have had some currency in England for a long time, and which are similar to equally silly jokes about the Poles in America. These crudities had the superficial appearance of fitting well with the depressing predicament of the Irish economy, when the Irish economy was doing quite badly. But when the Irish economy started growing astonishingly rapidly—indeed in recent years faster than any other European economy (Ireland is now richer in per capita income than nearly every country in Europe)—the cultural stereotyping and its allegedly profound economic and social relevance were not junked as sheer and unmitigated rubbish. Theories have lives of their own, quite defiantly of the phenomenal world that can actually be observed.

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