In his book, Culture and Imperialism, Said brings us many insightful and provoking ideas. However, among all the concepts and discussions he presented, the one that most caught my attention was his statement that there is no such a thing as ‘purity”. If we consider the core definition of this word as “the condition or quality of being pure; freedom from anything that debases, contaminates, pollutes” we can clearly understand why Said’s is completely against the notion of it when it relates to culture and race. He graciously remembered us that every population is mixed, therefore, impure.
Said opens by claiming that “[…] if everyone were to insist on the radical purity or priority of one’s own voice, all we would have would be the awful din of unending strife, and a bloody political mess […]” (p. xxi). For him, the human notions of identity through history are tightly related to acts of segregation, expropriation, and exploitation.
By performing his work on comparative literature, Said assertively states that ideas, culture, and histories cannot be understood apart from configurations of power. Therefore, the relationship between the East and the West is a relationship of power, because imperialism can be defined as “a policy of extending a country’s power and influence through diplomacy or military force”, in human history, it often occurred through brutal force and bloodshed.
Second, based on the assumption that culture and identities are mutually constructed by a political process, Said inform us how often this fact used to be overlooked “Since Greek writers themselves openly acknowledged their culture’s hybrid past, European philologists acquired the ideological habit of passing over these embarrassing passages without comment, in the interests of Attic purity” (p. 16).
Said states that the ideological concern over identity is understandable, he wrote: “Before we can agree on what the American identity is made of, we have to concede that as an immigrant settler society superimposed on the ruins of considerable native presence, American identity is too varied to be a unitary and homogenous thing; indeed the battle within it is between advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex but not reductively unified one.
This opposition implies two different perspectives, two historiographies, one linear and subsuming, the other contrapuntal and often nomadic. My argument is that only the second perspective is fully sensitive to the reality of historical experience. Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic” (p. xxv).
Although culture reflects a structured power and, often times, a consensual social order, it is also a dynamic field that incorporates conflicts of meaning through which human aspects are reproduced and experienced. In any not totalitarian society, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others are.
This form of cultural leadership known as ‘hegemony’, produced along the centuries forms of identification that supported structures of authority and power over different societies. These structures, nevertheless, could be challenged by acts of resistance. Culture does not appear as a closed system of meanings, but instead, it is immersed in practices of conflicts that end up configuring possibilities of a plurality of meanings, also submitted to dynamics of power.
The open character of Said’s theories seeks to deconstruct the definitions of the truth of Western knowledge about modernity, especially universal ideas of a generic science. The nexus between knowledge and power is well established and created the world as we know today. Interrelating experience, culture and interests, the different forms of knowledge stand out in such a domain.
The diagnoses and analyzes elaborated by scientific institutions, intellectuals, and philosophies of the central countries, which reflect a ‘policy of secular interpretation’, played a fundamental role on this domain and cultural hegemony.
The simple-minded dichotomy and the idea of “others” an “I” rely on basic notions of identity and ethnocentrism. It dwells on the roots of prejudice and discrimination. The concept of race is a social construction, and it finds no explanation on biological sciences. Even for other fields of knowledge, it still has no justifications.
The American Anthropology Association, for example, released a document basically stating that there is no difference between ‘races’ around the world in everything they have ever looked at, along with all anthropological lines: there is no ‘racial difference’, we are all Homo sapiens. Differences among the racial categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed at Africans, Indians and Europeans were separated species, with Africans the least human and closer taxonomically to apes.
The nativist tendency implied by Said is in the core of a ‘naive foundationalist ideology’: “[…] Latin American fabulists whose texts demonstrate the manifest impurity, the fascinating mixture of real and surreal in all experience. As one reads ‘magic realists’ like Carpentier, who first describes it, Borges, Garda Marquez, and Fuentes, one vividly apprehends the densely interwoven strands of a history that mocks linear narrative, easily recuperated ‘essences’, and the dogmatic mimesis of ‘pure’ representation” (p. 276).
One of the modes operations of the imperialist imagination is the definition of a different and competing alter ego. From historical, political and intellectual processes, partial identities were developed. Implying on the establishment of oppositions, more particularly of the singularity of a society or community versus ‘others’. Contrary to being mere abstractions, such identities support the creation of a definite concrete policy, among other characteristics, by orthodoxy, by excluding laws, by the legitimation of violence, and by a foreign policy of domination.
Imperialism, based on the practices developed by Europeans at the end of the 19th century, works in cultural forms, although always based on the general idea of the need to subordination and victimization of the native or the ‘other’. Within its characteristics, there is always a pleasure in the use of power, particularly the power to observe and control. Another characteristic is the ideological principle of reducing and then rebuilding the native as an individual to be governed. The third mode would be the diffusion of the idea of redemption through the liberating Western civilizing mission.
Since this paper is being written in the context of a cultural analysis course in a graduate program in sociology, it seems necessary to remember that Said´s approach to imperialism is based on examining the ways in which forms of social and political identification are manifested in one side, and can be contested, on the other. International migrations and social inequalities, products of economic globalization, illustrate the weakness of cultural purity claims. The current plural societies bring concepts such as culture, nation, and identity to the forefront and its bias to reject ideological fictions.
In this sense, the profound argument of ‘non-purity’ develop by Edward Said through his book is useful because it reminds us about the groundless of the theory where some principles of modern society were based on. In closing, Said raises and reiterates the violence perpetrated by imperialist practices is not always perceived so that the ills and consequences of its power cannot be observed. Finally, one should note the process by which the history of the natives is rewritten as a function of the hegemonic history that uses a narrative to disperse other memories and conceal its own power, having the focus of treating domination as an unavoidable historical necessity.
