April 18 Reading Response, Part II

To clarify and reiterate: I don't think that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra or any similar cultural exchange programs are bad ideas, or wasteful, or that the money & efforts would be better spent elsewhere. I simply think that we should be cautious with our expectations, and we should be cognizant of the political implications (or lack thereof) of such programs.

Because (and here I tie this to the rest of the readings) images of Other-ness are powerful and entrenched so deeply in the collective (and individual) psyche that it takes a huge amount of counter-programming to overcome those ingrained images and perceptions.

Stereotypes rule how we think and how we react, even when we deny it (see Fiske, et al 2002. "A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype Content: Competence and Warmth Respectively Follow From Perceived Status and Competition." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Morton, et al. 2006. "We Value What Values Us: The Appeal of Identity-Affirming Science." Political Psychology). Our ingrained preconceptions are powerful, and often determine how we'll react and perceive others. So we're pre-conditioned by all of our experiences and knowledge to act sympathetically (or not) to people outside our own (perceived) group. Certainly for the participants in cultural dialogue programs (including the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra), the exchange deconstructs some of their ingrained stereotypes. But how much do programs like these affect people outside the program?

And, to complicate things a bit further, there's evidence to suggest that what is happening to participants in programs such as these isn't necessarily a dismantling of stereotypes of Others, but in fact a rearrangement of perceptions of who is part of the in-group, and who is part of the out-group (see Dovidio & Gaertner 2008. "Commonality and the Complexity of 'We'" Social attitudes and Social Change." Personality and Social Psychology Review and Fischer & Roseman 2007. "Beat Them or Ban Them: The Characteristics and Social Functions of Anger and Contempt." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). In other words, quite often when we're talking about "breaking down barriers" between groups, it's not about actually deconstructing stereotypes, it's about taking some people of a perceptual out-group and turning them into members of the in-group. We see this in the Parallels and Paradox extracts, where Israeli and Arab musicians are portrayed as excluding each other from their group, or their conversations. After some time and interaction, the Israelis and Arabs include each other--but this isn't necessarily any tremendous breakthrough, any re-organization or destruction of stereotypes. What is more likely is that the musicians re-organized how they perceived the "Us vs. Them" grouping. For the Lebanese musicians who excluded the Israeli from their Arab jam sessions, they didn't see the humanity common to all people, Lebanese or Israeli: they saw the Israeli as part of the Orchestra, a musician like them. If the Israeli musician had a friend who wanted to sit in on the jam session, it's not very likely that the Lebanese musicians would feel very welcoming. The out-group/in-group dynamic had changed from "Lebanese vs. Israeli" to "Orchestra musician vs. other."

I don't mean to trample all over the successes and meaning of the Orchestra, but to instead frame the mission of the Orchestra against harsh reality. I'm reminded of what Stalin said when warned that he might run afoul of the Vatican. Stalin said, "How many tank divisions does the Pope have?" So, despite the powerful influence of the Catholic church, the realipolitik boils down to who has the most guns.

To bring this bad to Said, geographers trade quite heavily one two (related) concepts from Said's works. They're deceptively simple when you look at them, but they're very deep, and the influence of these on our thinking is even deeper. First, is the notion of the Other. The idea that we group people into "Us" and "Them" is pretty facile. Sociology and psychology affirms this grouping: to shorthand it, we tend to sort people into groups in order to save brain processing power, to simplify the world and our reactions to others. We have positive feelings towards our in-group, and negative towards the Others. Edward Said articulated all of this in his seminal work Orientalism, but he applied it specifically to the knowledges ingrained in Western history and cultural studies, and delved deeply into the implications of this Other-ing process.

To put it in a nutshell, Said argued that we define ourselves in and by the very act of defining Others. That is, we don't form a concept of ourselves and our in-group in a vacuum, and then perceive Other-ness. Instead, through our encounters and interactions with others, we discover and define difference, and create a Self from this difference perceived among the Other. Then, we ascribe all sorts of positive traits to "Us," while ascribing their opposites, their negatives, to Others. The Other, for Said's work, was the Eastern world--the Middle East in particular. This Other-ing allows for and justifies all sorts of violences against the Other: not just physical violence, but the cultural violence of "writing out" of history subject peoples.

The second idea of Said's that geographers use is the notion of "imaginative geographies." This is plainly put: imaginative geographies are the mental, imaginary terrains we populate with people--people whose traits and characteristics are determined by what we have learned via acculturation from our schooling, our peers, and our culture. Thus, the average American populates her/his imagination of the "Middle East" with turban-wearing zealots. These imaginative geographies color our actual geographies: Derek Gregory has written at length (see his The Colonial Present for a brilliant example) about how imaginative geographies are transformed into geographies of violence.

Finally, the last bit I have time for is a commentary on Noura's thesis. I know that time & space constraints limited the breadth of her argument, but I can't help but think that yes, it's possible to construct the notion of "homeland" without exclusion, without creating in-groups and out-groups that vie for territory in a zero-sum game. But is it likely? Especially when the exclusionary narratives established by each side are rooted in and justified by the violent conquest of the land?

David Newman is a giant in my field, and he has published a lot about these notions of territory and attachment, of nationalism and its expression on the land. Ghazi Falah (who was the chair of the session I presented in at my conference last week; I chaired a session he presented in at our national conference in 2007) is very forthright in his application of these notions in the Israel/Palestine dispute--Falah reads the landscape as an exercise in Israeli nationality and Palestinian dispossession. Derek Gregory knits together Newman's base, Falah's reading, and Said's fundamental notions of Other-ness (particularly in his 1995 Progress in Human Geography piece, "Imaginative Geographies," which was an intimate portrait of Edward Said and his dislocation from his homeland), and the result is a damning indictment of Orientalism and its direct descendant, imperialism.

To boil it down, geographers sometimes joke about "the geography of hope," but the joke conceals something geographers feel very acutely: the geopolitical realities we analyze and critique are very powerful, entrenched, and continue to do their violence upon the world (especially the disadvantaged). We can rail and research and posit alternatives, but in the end, we're whistling past the graveyard, aren't we? The alternities that we posit are fractional and subject to the inertia of the world, and the prejudices of power. So yeah, we can posit possibilities and we can light those candles instead of cursing the dark, but I would be happier if we could make those possibilities happen.