An interview with Zygmunt Bauman | CITSEE.eu - 0 views
www.citsee.eu/...urope-interview-zygmunt-bauman
economic adjustment structural neoclassical theory crisis social bauman
shared by Arabica Robusta on 18 Jun 12
- No Cached
-
A modern state needs a “nation” to “legitimise” itself, justify its demands for obedience from its citizens by invocation of a common past and shared destiny – whereas a “nation” needs the coercive power of the state to make its unity (“sharing”) real – to replace the multitude of local traditions or dialects with one history, one language. With the emergence of the modern state, the trinity of nation, state and territory has been established as the seat and holder of sovereignty.
-
every process has its discontents, and diasporization is no exception. Denmark or the Netherlands, until recently symbols of openness and hospitality, turned into pioneers of barring immigration and reintroduced boundary control. And yet such resistance to diasporization may well be a lost battle.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
Raymond Aron explained the emergence and the nature of modern anti-Semitism by the coincidence of the Jewish emancipation from the ghetto and the social turbulence caused by modernization.
-
Claude Levi-Strauss said that there were only two ways of dealing with the presence of difference, one was anthropophagic and the other anthropoemic. The anthropophagic strategy consists of “devouring” and “digesting” the stranger, transforming thereby an alien substance body into a cell of one’s own organism. In short, in “assimilation”: renouncing whatever distinguishes you from the “genuine stuff”. If you want to be a French citizen you have to become a Frenchman in your behaviour, your language, the way you act, your ideas, preferences and values. The other strategy, anthropoemic, means exactly the opposite: rejecting – “vomiting”, incarcerating people in camps or ghettoes, or rounding them up, packing them back into a boat or into a plane and sending them back “where they came from”. None of the two strategies are truly “working” in our globalised world. Assimilation makes sense as long as people believe (or are powerless to contradict such a belief imposed by the dominant power on the rest of the world) in a clear hierarchy – superiority and inferiority - of cultures, and one direction of progressive evolution – from “inferior” to “superior”… In our multi-centred world however few people are daring, adventurous or arrogant enough to maintain that there is a cultural hierarchy and to enforce such an idea upon reality.
-
I think it is one of the merits of Europe that it does not promote one model Europeans are obliged to adopt. On the contrary - Europe thrives on the very diversity of its population, on diversity of ideals, customs, traditions, cultures… This is precisely the secret of the unique European creativity.