FOREWORD
Of the many curious political strategies in global politics early in the twenty first century,
one merits special comment: the conscious choice of a symbolic politics that hampers the
advancement and progress of individuals from disadvantaged groups rather than one that
will see them prosper. This symbolic politics, a politics of cultural localism, particularly as
practised in New Zealand, is the central focus of this timely and forthright volume.
The central tenet of culturalist politics is to insist on the ‘profound difference at the SelfOther border’ (this volume: 95); that is, to base the politics on the irreducibility of
difference. This tenet has become commonplace in culturally sensitive policies the world
over, but there have been troubling precedents. Throughout the history of Western
colonialism, culturalism of a certain kind has been the politics of choice, especially for the
British who with Lord Lugard refined ‘divide and rule’ policies to a nicety, co-opting local
elites and cultural traditions, and governing with an iron fist in a velvet glove of limited selfrule. This is one thing in a culturally homogeneous developing country, but culturalist
policies in a heterogeneous modern polity create an unbridgeable gulf in the demos,
between citizens who enjoy full democratic rights and subjects who are placed under the
double yoke of tradition and disadvantage. Such dual systems cultivate monumental
resentment and always end badly, a fate Mahmood Mamdani shows for the Hutus and the
Tutsis in contemporary Rwanda, for instance.
But there is more to the story, as Elizabeth Rata shows. We are not dealing with a crude
ideological ruse, which would not work for very long. To understand what is at stake one
must also confront the fatal attractions of a politics of autonomy and identity in a
fragementing world, the deep hunger for familiarity and belonging in the burgeoning
networks of cosmopolitan homelessness, a politics of symbolically anchored goods that
cannot be alienated.
History tends to simplify these things. Take the historically recent case of apartheid and
Bantu Education in South Africa. The architect of Bantu Education, one Dr William Eiselen,
was an anthropologist and linguist of African languages. Son of Berlin Missionary Society
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parents, Eiselen rejected scientific racism. The principal scourge of traditional
communities, he thought, lay in the symbolic abrasions inflicted by ‘white (Western)
civilisation’, and responsible rule demanded protections from them. Otherwise put, unless
positive measures were taken to ring fence traditional languages, cultures and traditions,
they would succumb to the homogenising forces of modernity. The policy of Bantu
Education was crafted to do just that.
This sort of argument held and holds powerful attractions not only for anthroplogists like
Eiselen and Levi-Stauss who took the same view regarding the Nambikwara of Brazil, but
crucially for traditional elites as well. The main philosophical wellsprings of culturalism after
Rousseau are to be found in the nineteenth century German romantic tradition; Herder,
Hammann, and Fichte are among the best known neo-Kantians who first spelt out the
cultural logic of this view. But a remorseless dialectical realpolitik soon put paid to the
lighter, sentimental side of German idealism – cultural belonging and self-determination –
and it was swallowed up by a darker side, blut und boden racial supremacy and the death
camps. Eiselen’s ‘positive’ apartheid in similar fashion was swallowed up by Verwoerd’s
separate development.
A partial grasp of this dualism remains one of the better reasons for the contemporary
revolt against the Enlightenment. But its simplistic Manicheaism will not do. When the light
swings to the dark, as it will, it is always the disadvantaged and dispossessed that bear the
brunt. Elizabeth Rata’s solution, the modernist and realist one, is to provide them with the
only tool that can be relied upon to provide autonomy, innovativeness and independence
of thought and action – what Michael Young calls ‘powerful knowledge’. Yet this is the tool
which, by a cruel twist of fate, is systematically denied to the disadvantaged by the cultural
politics of localism.
This denialism follows from the logic of cultural localism. If all cultures are local, and all
cultures can only be inhabited and fully understood by locals, then it follows that all forms
of knowledge, a sub-set of culture, are local and are similarly tethered to the concerns and
interests of some locals rather than others. Since interests differ with locality, knowledges
and cultures are bound to be antagonistic, and other knowledges and cultures should be
resisted lest they undermine and colonise your treasured local symbolic goods. History
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then becomes a succession of more or less succesful struggles against colonisation, and
one only affirms one’s place in history by taking up the struggle.
This form of struggle politics is undeniably heroic. It is also self-defeating when it takes root
in the education policies of a nation. Conceptually powerful knowledge is assigned to an
other local, its people and interests – usually to ‘the West’ – in a foundational act of selfdipossession that fatally conflates the tools of mastery with the tools of the Master,
powerful knowledge with the knowledge of the powerful in Michael Young’s apt phrase.
There is an alternative tradition of radical cultural politics, one stemming from the work of
Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci, which is strangely out of fashion today. Gramsci was
acutely alive to the canny and subversive potential of local traditions and wisdom, as were
Rabelais and Bakhtin before him, but he was also unusually aware of the straightjacket
that local commonsense can be. Without discounting the valuable resource potential that
local knowledges could provide, Gramsci also thought that to reach its true potential, local
‘commonsense’ should be re-fashioned into ‘good sense’ by means of the conceptually
boosted powerful knowledges of modernity, particularly literacy, mathematics and the
sciences. The institution that should do this was the ‘common school’, an institution that
should teach a common curriculum to all children, so that each might have access to the
powerful tools of modern decontextualised knowledge. It was for this revolutionary
proposal, amongst others, that the Italian state jailed him for the rest of his short life.
Contemporary cultural politics eschews the Gramscian route because the cultural logic it
follows demonises modern scientific knowledge as knowledge of the forces of colonisation,
that is, as intrinsically contextual. Elizabeth Rata shows persuasively that this confuses
historical origins with epistemological status. Powerful conceptual knowledge cannot be
the birthright of any local people because its epistemological status stands or falls by its
universality. It is only by virtue of this status that conceptual knowledge can be a tool for
projecting entirely novel possbilities hitherto unthought of. And it is this capacity that
cultural politics refuses for the next generation when it insists on local rather than universal
knowledge in the school curriculum.
Along with the rest of the rugby-loving world, I was priviledged to watch the recent rugby
World Cup so successfully hosted by New Zealand. Along with millions of others, I thrilled
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to the grunt and grind, the dash and inventiveness, the opening and closing ceremonies
that stirred the atavistic soul to a pride long pushed to the margins by the routines of daily
life. Watching the fearsome haka in its intricate variations performed by the three nations, I
considered and then rejected the thought that this noble ritual had been commodified and
commercialised for the consumption of the jaded global televison lumpen cultural
proletariat. It struck me as they performed this ritual, simultaneously for the opposing
‘enemy’ team and for the watching world, that this was a way of announcing that this team
might be participating in a global game with global rules, but they were doing it on their
own terms; a claim to the universal, but on local terms. It was heroic and stirring, and it
seemd to me and many of my rugby loving countrymen that it was only just that the All
Blacks lifted the Webb Ellis trophy. But the reason they won was not principally due to the
haka. It was because of superior tactics, superior fitness and a training regimen that had
more to do with science than with local knowledge. This is the message this book drives
home.
Johan Muller
University of Cape Town
Cape Town November 2011