Argumentation and self: the enactment of identity in 'Dances with Wolves.'(Special Issue: Argument & Identity)

• Author: Lake, Randall A.

An intellectual historian of the year 2010, if such a person is imaginable, may even look back on the first two-thirds of our century and observe that this was a time when Western intellectuals were preoccupied with grounds of meaning and identity they called "culture" and "language" (much the way we now look at the nineteenth century and perceive there is a problematic concern with evolutionary "history" and "progress"). I think we are seeing signs that the privilege given to natural languages and, as it were, natural cultures, is dissolving. These objects and epistemological grounds are now appearing as constructs, achieved fictions, containing and domesticating heteroglossia. In a world with too many voices speaking all at once, a world where syncretism and parodic invention are becoming the rule, not the exception, an urban, multinational world of institutional transience-where American clothes made in Korea are worn by young people in Russia, where everyone's "roots" are in some degree cut-in such a world it becomes increasingly difficult to attach human identity and meaning to a coherent "culture" or "language."

- James Clifford (95)

As the human sciences in the twentieth century have turned increasingly to theories of the symbol as the "new key" (Langer) to understanding social processes and products, basic categories of analysis have been transformed from things into meanings. Indeed, "culture" itself has been recast as the entirety of the "webs of significance" which humanity spins, and within which it entraps itself (Geertz). The broad spectrum of forms of popular communication, including film, music, television, advertising, public discourse, magazines, and so on, become media that individuals and groups consume, constructing personal identities and cultural identifications in the process. Notions of self ("me") and society ("us") are built up and embedded in these practices.

Under pressures from critical theory, post-structuralism, post-colonial cultural criticism, and other post-modernist currents that have problematized "essentialist" conceptions of culture, human agency, and meaning itself, particular attention has been paid to the manner in which notions of self and society are achieved only at the expense of an Other ("them"). "Our" identity, the general argument runs, is neither given nor natural, but is defined in opposition to what is alien and threatening (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.), a condition typically disguised by our hegemonic impulse to universalize or totalize our own individual and collective identities by displacing, marginalizing, silencing "their" voices. (Or, if suspicious of attributions of agency, one might say that this condition is disguised by the hegemonic power of oppressive "discursive formations" - to borrow Foucault's phrase - that we reproduce.) The function of critique then becomes to unmask these totalizing visions, to reveal the manner in which supposedly "natural" and "given" forms of life are in fact representations that, born of conflict, suppress competing alternatives and oppress those who would live them.

While the postmodernist challenge has fomented a "crisis of representation" (Marcus and Fischer) in the human sciences generally, in anthropology - where "culture" is an especially important construct - this crisis informs what James Clifford calls the "post-colonial crisis of ethnographic authority" (8). Clifford argues that cultural identities should be seen as "conjunctural, not essential": "Because discourse in global power systems is elaborated vis-a-vis, a sense of difference or distinctness can never be located solely in the continuity of a culture or tradition" (11). There are no autonomous, "pure" or "authentic" cultures whose boundaries can be marked independently of their opposition to yet other cultures in which, in the opposing, they are implicated. Thus, Clifford says:

Questionable acts of purification are involved in any attainment of a promised land, return to "original" sources, or gathering up of a true tradition. Such claims to purity are in any event always subverted by the need to stage authenticity in opposition to external, often dominating alternatives. (11-12)

In his view, authentic cultures do not exist as things or essences to be redeemed; instead, so-called "authenticity" is in fact relational, and cultures are a local tactical invention developed continually within and against the context of colonial histories (12).

This view of culture poses a crisis of ethnographic authority because it compels ethnographers reflexively to confront their complicity in constructing cultural "facts." No longer can they report on an "alien" culture from within the secure confines of their own. Instead, they necessarily find themselves in what Clifford describes as "a pervasive condition of off-centeredness in a world of distinct meaning systems, a state of being in culture while looking at culture, a form of personal and collective self-fashioning" (9). No longer can hegemonic Western ethnographic discourses presume to speak authoritatively about other cultures; instead, ethnography reckons with new questions "of global significance," including:

Who has the authority to speak for a group's identity or authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and other clash and converse in the encounters of ethnography, travel, modem inter-ethnic relations? What narratives of development, loss, and innovation can account for the present range of local oppositional movements? (8)

For Clifford, this position of "off-centeredness" (or displacement) is an "inauthentic" one: "Intervening in an interconnected world, one is always, to varying degrees, 'inauthentic': caught between cultures, implicated in others" (11). However, such inauthenticity is to be affirmed and embraced, not shunned, because this stance is liberating: attempts to preserve a natural culture are nonsensical and oppressive, interfering with "syncretism and parodic invention," holding persons hostage to a constraining "tradition" rather than freeing them to construct individual and collective identities out of multicultural resources (of which the young Russians who wear American jeans made in Korea are emblematic).

This essay is a cautionary tale about key aspects of this "Cliffordesque" view of culture and identity.(1) For there are any number of "native," "indigenous" or "first" peoples across the globe for whom participation in the emerging "urban, multinational world of institutional transience" remains an open question at best and a tragedy at worst. Seeking to preserve their traditional forms of life, their "natural cultures," in the face of tremendous pressures to assimilate, it is unclear whether the essentialist view of their traditions is oppressive or emancipatory.

On one hand, syncretism can be a crucial strategic move for groups of native peoples who are implicated in Western cultures through intermarriage, jobs, education, religious conversion, language, or a host of other markers of "assimilation"; while their cultural identifies may no longer be "pure," syncretism may refute the claim of Western discourses that, having "assimilated," they (in a "pure" sense) no longer exist. For example, if to be authentically "Indian" means to roam the Great Plains hunting buffalo, then those thousands of Native Americans living on reservations and in urban centers from North Dakota to Oklahoma (not to mention those other thousands whose traditional homelands lay elsewhere than the plains) do not exist, and the EurAmerican narrative of the "vanishing red man" has become a conveniently self-fulfilling prophecy.(2) Clifford's own account of the Mashpee struggle for tribal recognition - to be acknowledged as "Indian" - is itself a compelling case for syncretism (277346).

On the other hand, many thousands of Native Americans believe in the purity of their traditions and are trying desperately to recover and preserve them, even including buffalo-hunting (see Castillo 20; Lake, "Enacting" 129-32; Lake, "Last"). The authenticity of their traditions is precisely what is most vital to them, and to occupy an "inauthentic" space might itself mean their end. Put another way, in maintaining that pure traditions are illusory, syncretism may itself promote assimilation of indigenous peoples by severing what they thought were their roots. If authenticity is illusory, then on what grounds do native peoples contest New Age appropriations of their beliefs and practices? Worse, is theorizing the death of native "pure traditions" so different from pronouncing their "savagism"? The distance from "freeing" people from a "constraining" tradition to forcibly suppressing that tradition in the name of civilization or progress may be short, and the knowledge that "civilization" and "progress" are themselves false essentialisms may be cold theoretical comfort.

This essay opposes an overly simple reading of identity as either essentialist or conjunctural, i.e., either determined by an unproblematically "given" tradition or a playfully self-fashioned "fiction." Such an opposition misses the degree to which the purity of a tradition is valued even as it is revised. Instead, I argue that identity is better understood as a dialectical site where these tensions mediate each other. Further, the self is an arguer, always engaged in both internal debate and in dialogue with others about the proper balance between these tensions. Or, if suspicious of this personification, we might say that one's self is the argument in which one engages about identity. One's life is thus the enactment of one's self, which is to say the performance of this argument. By this formulation I hope to explain how it is possible meaningfully to constitute oneself in saying "That's just the way I am" or "That just isn't me." In still other terms, I hope to show that identifies are both...