No Rasto de Mandela - Simpósio em Evolução e Sociedade
Núcleo de Educação e Divulgação da Evolução da Associação Portuguesa de Biologia Evolutiva
Fac Ciências UL, 18 julho 2014. https://sites.google.com/site/norastodemandela/programa
Miguel VALE DE ALMEIDA
ISCTE-IUL e CRIA
Resumo: Pretende-se demonstrar que o racismo não é uma questão de atitudes e valores apenas, mas uma questão estrutural, ancorada historicamente, nos planos político, económico e social. Abordar-se-á o caso pós-colonial português e a sua herança colonial, demonstrando como as questões do emprego, da habitação ou da educação são cruciais. Em suma, como a discriminação positiva faz falta e como apelos a mudanças de atitudes são estéreis. Direitos humanos e igualdade de oportunidades são categorias fundamentais de ação prática e transformação política. Nelson Mandela, e o caso sulafricano, servem de pano de fundo para perceber isso mesmo: o Mandela"simbólico" do imaginário global não esgota, de todo, a ação de transformação política, económica e social encetada na África do Sul e confrontada hoje com enormes contradições.
The agenda of human rights was a latecomer in Anthropology. This may sound, and rightly so, as rather odd. Anthropology – social and cultural Anthropology – is, after all, the study of human social and cultural diversity and unity and so one would think that what we now mean by ‘human rights’ should have been paramount in the discipline. It was not, and for two main – and very different – reasons.
First of all, early Anthropology, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was associated with both racial theories (also known as scientific racism) and with the modern European colonialist project. A notion of radical difference as inequality between types of peoples was part and parcel of those endeavors.
But Anthropology was to revolutionize itself on the aftermath of an epistemological and methodological turn that, in the 20th century, led the discipline towards extended fieldwork with participant observation and a separation between ‘race’ and culture – eventually leading to the demise of the validity of ‘race’ itself.
This actually led to the second reason: notions of human racial and cultural hierarchy and evolutionism were replaced by a radical form of cultural relativism, stating the need to understand human societies/cultures in their own terms and thus locating concepts and values – such as human rights – in the specific historical and cultural contexts of their production. So human rights were seen by anthropologists, in the aftermath of WWII, as the product of a
Western, Euro-American view of the citizen, the individual, the nation, the state, and Humanity.
That is why the leading anthropological board of the time, the American Anthropological
Association, issued a statement in 1947 saying that it could not accept Human Rights as universal, since different cultures have different concepts of rights and such an imposition would be a case of ethnocentrism. This position was to change considerably only a few decades later.
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This was the beginning of what came to be the main issue of contention in anthropological discussions on human rights for most of the century: the debate between universalism and relativism. The question was: are human rights relative, that is, do they only apply and make sense to and in Western contexts? Or are they universal, regardless of cultural differences?
The main reason for this debate lies in the specific specialization of anthropological work throughout most of the 20 th century. Anthropologists became the sociologists of small-scale, nonwestern, societies, where participant observation fieldwork could effectively be done in order to understand the whole of a society’s structures and dynamics. Those societies tended to be illiterate, with moderate technologies for the appropriation of nature, with moderate forms of division of labor and with stateless, and kinship based, social and political structures.
Anthropologists no longer studied those societies in order to find the ‘origins of humankind’
(since linear evolutionist theories had been dispelled) but in order to understand the ‘mechanics’ of the functioning of society and culture as such, an endeavor that called for a holistic perspective. The result, however, was that each society/culture became explainable only in its own terms, thus increasing relativistic perspectives. Universalistic ones were frowned upon, since they needed a grounding theory, a method of explanation that almost always would be a theory based on the specificity of Western historical experience. In this scenario, human rights were clearly seen as the product of notions of the person, the individual, and the citizen that could only have emerged in a Western context of the creation of the modern nation state form.
This is not untrue. But as of the 1960s and 1970s anthropologists were confronted with new challenges. The first one was the disappearance of the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the classical anthropological project: so-called ‘primitive’ societies were either disappearing, becoming integrated into wider nation-states, especially the new ones resulting from decolonization, or changing fast. The second one was the acceleration, extension, intensiveness and the growing encompassing character of the current phase of what we now call globalization. Anthropologists stopped claiming to be the specialists of so-called ‘primitive’ societies and started claiming to be the specialists of the ethnographic qualitative method for understanding the production of social meanings, their transformations and conflicts around them – in any type of society, especially in hybridizing situations promoted by state integration, internal and international migrations and all sorts of flows of capital, ideas, persons, and objects.
This led to a shift in the universalist/relativist dichotomy. On the one hand, because processes of global hybridization should not be seen as perversions of cultural purity but rather as an instance of what human history always had been. On the other hand, because culture itself stopped being seen as an essence, a petrified set of qualities attached to a specific population and tradition, and started to be seen as a dynamic process of interchange, and also as a field of contention between
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different powers and interests and positions within societies – according to locations in the social structure and according to regimes of difference (class, caste, status groups, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ‘race’ , and other socially constructed markers of social difference).
In this sense, negotiations between different values became the object of attention, not a hindrance. We do not need to refuse the notion that Human Rights, as stated in the Universal
Declaration, are the product of a specific Western form. They are. What we need to do is to question whether that makes them applicable only to Westerners. If we take a close, ethnographically based look at any society in the world, including so-called ‘primitive’ societies, what we see is different people, groups, and entire societies negotiating the meanings, usefulness, and dangers of adopting Human Rights’ stances, and actually trying to enrich, enlarge, or restrict them. They can also find in their own historical and cultural traditions zones of negotiation, gray areas – take, for example, the way that many Muslim women in some countries actually empower themselves by becoming theologically involved, or the way that different trends of Islam clash with one another, from fundamentalism to liberal notions of the religion.
So, if the universalist/relativist dichotomy is increasingly seen as something of the past, it is being replaced by a different concern: that of individual versus collective rights. The individual/collective dichotomy is by no means new, it is actually foundational in modernist sociological thought and is a key element in our political philosophical debates on freedom and social cohesion. But in anthropology, and especially in what concerns human rights, it has a different twist. It can be summed up in the following question: should human rights be always based on the individual citizen as its recipient, an individual that is thus protected from the abuse by the State? Or should human rights be also collective when it comes to protecting specific cultural forms of living in society that are threatened by the State or by globalization?
If you look at the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007 this becomes clear: there is an ambiguous, and hard to conciliate, ebb and flow between the respect of the rights of the individual in, say, a Brazilian Indian society, that individual’s relation to his or her ‘tribe’ and to the Brazilian state, and the relation between the ‘tribe’ as a corporate group and the Brazilian state, namely regarding the historical loss of land and resources. Also, issues of internal differentiation can be seen, or can become, issues of internal inequality, depending on whether you (and the social actors themselves) look at them as part and parcel of cultural ‘authenticity’ or as the result of a necessarily historical unequal conflict – for instance the position of women in society.
On the other hand, if we look at the 1979 African Charter of Human and People’s Rights, drafted by the African Union, we can see how the signatory states manipulated it in order to guarantee the new states’ sovereignty over the necessarily ethnically diverse populations. The Charter does not mean ethnic groups when it uses “peoples”, it means the population of the state, in their
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endeavor to establish nation-states that supersede ethnic differences. In order to do so they could stress individual rights of the citizen, but since the authoritarian nature of many regimes would not allow for that, they use instead a collective notion of People in order to legitimize inequalities as based on essentialistic and ahistorical notions of ‘African culture’ – in what regards gender, sexuality, family and so on.
Let me know shift towards Mandela, and later come back to this point and conclude. Mandela is, of course, a highly mythologized character in our globalized imagination, and we should be careful about that. The myth stresses moral and character qualities, which he certainly had, but that obliterate context and collective dynamics. Mandela was not the product of his own selfmade-manness, so to speak. Mandela was also the product of the contradictory dynamics of the colonial process of the type of racism established in South Africa – not just institutional racism, in the form of apartheid, but the ‘banal’, everyday racism that preceded it. Both these racisms in
South Africa, as in all colonial situations in Africa, regardless of the minor differences in style according to the colonizing country, were based on a fundamental epistemological stance: the idea that different human populations are intrinsically different, that difference means inequality, that that difference can best be seen in phenotype, that it corresponds to cultural qualities, that these qualities are practically incommensurable and that they should be preserved
– whether in a hierarchical, vertical mode (racism, colonialism, evolutionism) or in an egalitarian, horizontal one (multicultural, democratic, parallel).
One of the characteristics of colonial, racialized situations, is that they allow for mixture and category border-crossing. Categories are products of the mind, not embodied realities.
Sometimes on purpose, as when there is the need for an intermediary group between colonizer and colonized; sometimes inadvertently, as when people have sex with each other, or fall in love, or create their own families; sometimes because the internal dynamics of local societies are changed by the presence of others and new groups are created – and they don’t have to be ethnic or ‘racial’, they can be professional, age-based, gender-based, etc. Colonialism produces hybrids while refusing hybridization. Mandela is as much the product of his Xhosa origins, as he is the product of his educational upbringing in a Christian setting, as he is the product of apartheid itself – think of how he became a lawyer and ‘manipulated’ (in the good sense) the law(s) in order to fight apartheid. His leadership in the post-apartheid period was so successful because he understood that the dichotomy between white colonizer/ruler and black colonized/ruled was not an effective description of the social and cultural situation. He knew that the racial apartheid divide was a way of essentializing in the bodies and in genealogy an inequality that could be found in other ways; between different ethnic and linguistic groups of Africans; between different ethnic and linguistic and religious groups of whites; between social classes and professional and status groups that included people of different backgrounds; between generations and genders, that could have reasons for complaint regarding their own group of attributed origin, and so on.
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Mandela was the product of the unexpected consequences of colonial racism. That is why he found his best allies among the people located in the interstices of the system: the so-called colored, the Jews, the English who did not identify with Boer nationalism, the progressive protestants, for instance; that is why he found in the (Western?)/now globalized rhetoric of citizenship, human rights, and multiculturalism the best script for a constitutional proposal for post-apartheid South Africa; that is why he was to have as worst enemies those – white and black
– who upheld the most essencialistic notions of cultural, ethnic and racial belonging; and that is why post-apartheid South Africa has been having such a terrible time in overcoming the structural nature of racism as a system that unequally allocates economic resources, geography, mobility, intergroup and interpersonal contact, cultural and educational capital, and subjective wellbeing.
If we take Mandela as a symbol, we see his legacy in the constitutional scaffolding of postapartheid South Africa. It is a brilliant construction that articulates universalism and relativism, individual and collective rights, notions of personal mobility and freedom with notions of collective linguistic and cultural protection, even the recognition of inequalities that lie in other social markers of difference, such as sexuality. It allows for the idea of a polity that harbors collective differences as long as they do not impose themselves on individuals and as long as they allow for the ongoing historical process of the constant creation of new collectives and the mixing of populations and cultural artifacts.
Or, as Boaventura Sousa Santos (1997:29-30) puts it: “…das diferentes versões de uma dada cultura, deve ser escolhida aquela que representa o círculo mais amplo de reciprocidade dentro dessa cultura, a versao que vai mais longe no reconhecimento do outro (…) (U)ma vez que todas as culturas tendem a distribuir as pessoas de acordo com dois princípios concorrentes de pertença hierárquica e, portanto, com concepções concorrentes de igualdade e diferença, as pessoas e os grupos sociais têm o direito a ser iguais quando a diferença os inferioriza e o direito a ser diferentes quando a igualdade os descaracteriza”, although I think that difference and
inequality should always be analysed together, in order to avoid the risk of isolating culture as culturalism.
But in the background, we see the gigantic difficulty of overcoming the social and economic inequalities that resulted from institutionalized racism as a form of essentializing and naturalizing inequality. That is why racism – which I take here as a prototypical example of a collective group ascription that affects individual rights - can never be successfully fought or overcome by the ethical and moral will of the mind, or by the wishful thinking change of mentalities. It needs to be fought in the field of affirmative action towards political, cultural, social, and economic equality. In the first stages of this process, strategic essentialism is needed, for you need to identify who and by what classifications were the categories most affected by
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racism (or culturalism, or nationalism, and so on); but that is an instrument, a temporary device
– for allowing for increasing individualization and citizenship, possibilities of hybridization, creation of higher levels of cultural integration. Cultures and societies have always died and have always been born and have always changed. They might as well be more inclusive.
I know that to the layman or the laywoman this might sound strange coming from a social anthropologist, but I believe that Mandela’s quote in the title – ‘only free men [and women] can negotiate’ – also means that we do not have the right to ascribe anyone to a population or a society or a culture, and that that is a fundamental individual human right for humans in all the collectives that they have not chosen to live in. And racism – in the very wide sense of a system of classification of difference based on criteria of descent and sociocultural belonging, entailing inequality at all material and symbolic levels – is the social structure (not the ‘human proclivity’ or the ‘moral flaw’) that prevents that from happening.
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