College aantekeningen

Cultural Interactions Notes

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Universiteit Leiden (UL)

Boek
Cultural Interactions

Notes compiled used during the open book finals (includes lecture notes, case studies and additional information from the book); make sure to know where the information is, have noted down examples, and have a cohesive argument

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Geupload op 24 september 2024
Aantal pagina's 46
Geschreven in 2023/2024
Type College aantekeningen
Docent(en) Dr. g.n.t.j. van engelenhoven
Bevat Alle colleges

self vs others
nation state
culture
civilization
affective economy
community
alienation
routes vs roots
translation
animal selves
technological selves

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CULTURAL INTERACTIONS: CONFLICT & COOPERATION
BLOCK 1 RECAP: How and why do people organize themselves culturally?
● Nation-state: Cultural organization based on the myth of nativity
○ Myth of culture > trespassed from generation to generation
○ Ex: yugoslavia > ethnic differences > too many people claim birthright in one place
● Society: Cultural organization based on a relation of interdependency
○ Culture and economics come together
○ Ex: Iroquis's material changed by the conquistadors > different currency and value
● Civilization: Cultural organization based on the claim to superiority
○ Civilization and such like things helps us understand societal clashes
○ Ex: colonialism > affective economy
● Community: Cultural organization based on the acceptance of obligation
○ Referring to family
○ Can be used by the government to make people sacrifice their own lives for society
● World: Cultural organization based on the desire for coherence
● They all overlap → Different insights to the same phenomenon

Block 2: Cultural selves
● Construction of selfhood implied the construction otherness
● Self/other dichotomy often implies a hierarchy
● Made it ok for the self to penetrate into the others community
● Examples of Self other dichotomies
○ Politiccal hierarchy: strong vs weak
○ Legal Hierarchy: rightful vs unrightful (Borders shifting)
○ Moral (religious) hierarchy: good vs evil // deserivng vs undeserving
○ Economic: modern/self sustaining vs deve[pomg vs dependent
○ It is the difference between better vs lesser than
● Cultural (culmination of all the above): Better than vs. lesser / More vs. less human?

Self-hood: Self-identity vs. social identity; Otherness: Cognitive dissonance (dissonance
alienation between self and social identity); roots vs.
routes

Self vs other: Communication vs. understanding vs. translation
● Good vs Evil // Civilized vs Savage
● Rulers vs ruled // Rightful inhabitants

Disabled/abnormal/deviant: Cultural affordance Less/non-human
Animals selves: Tropes: metaphorization;
VS personification;
anthropomorphism/animalization
Able-bodied/normal
Machines: Tools and language as prosthetics;
technological cultures

1

, L1: CULTURE AS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
Culture: set of practices, expressions + artifacts by which people organize their lifeworlds; to indicate
domains life (sculpture, music, literature, cinema, and architecture)

1.1 In what sense is culture a matter of life and death? → How is culture a matter of
life and death
● Membe: “organization of life and death is not only a cultural concern but a governmental and
legal issue” → Perpetual war
○ Ex: current circumstances of political and legal actors decide who is to die and who is to life
→ immigrants trying to cross the Mexican borders or the Mediterranean sea
● The value that people attach to their culture is not fixed
● Culture may be so quintessential to humans that they cling to it as if it were life itself
○ Willing to give their lives for a culture/religion → refuse to give in a suppressive power /
willing to give their lives for the greater good → ‘Altruistic Suicide’
● Life without culture is not possible.
○ Ex: transatlantic slave trade → human beings were enslaved + robbed of their culture and
meaningful lifeworld. Despite this depravation, they started to reshape their lives culturally
in the new, enforced circumstances (Korsten, 21-22)
○ Oppressed/displaced people are driven "to a point where they would rather die than give up
on what organizes their lives meaningfully, affectively, sensibly: own culture

Culture will not be experienced as a matter of life and death. People live their culture.
● Desire to die / give up on what organizes their lives meaningfully, affectively and sensibibly →
willing to risk their life in a struggle or battle for their own culture. […]
○ Ex: Gandhi’s killer → Both fighting for their culture; but his killer (Hindu nationalist) believed
that Ghandi’s agreement to the serpatation of India and Pakistan was favorable to Muslims
→ Sacrafic his life to fight for a dominant hindu culture.

Culture is a form-of-life; people live it, and this is why they are so attached to it. (p.23)
● Darstellung: Culture is present only through representations → The struggle about what is being
represented is so immensely charged → loop of culture
● Paradox: any culture uses multiple sets of representations, but at the same time the entire set of
representations also embodies a culture
● Culture is related to collectives, from relatively small to bigger ones

1.2 What is the definition of Culture? → How can we define culture (within the context
of this course)?
● Culture is not a rational construct → a bottom-up organization of life that is not immensely
defined by power → Culture = empowerment
● Culture is palpably made by and done to people → suspends them in a self-made web
● It is not something people simply have, but it drives them and shapes their lifeworlds

Culture is a form of life, embodied in how collectives of beings performatively shape all aspects of
their life and world, in communal existence, as a distinct, partly arbitrary, affectively charged,

2

,meaningful expression that is transferable through time and space, that can produce and change, can
resist change or can cope with change.
● Form + Shape = media and representations
● "a form-of-life” → Culture is something you live
○ people prove to be extremely flexible in adapting themselves culturally or innovating; while
willing to give their lives for the preservation of their culture
● “embodied in how collectives of beings performatively shape all aspects of their life and world”
→ Culture is something you do
○ culture becomes what people repeatedly express in their actions and doings
○ Ex: celebrate/stay silent for 3 mins on a specific day as a commemoration of war
● “in communal existence” → Culture is something you do/live together with others
● “as a distinct, partly arbitrary, and affectively charged, meaningful expression” → Culture is
something you feel
● “transferable through time and space” → communicated through time and space
○ Oral stories/ folk stories told by ancestors to describe a lesson or a tradition
● “produce change, can resist change, or can cope with change." → Culture can be our weapon,
shield or shelter

Case study: The Moluccan Community (NL)
1945-1949: Indonesian National Revolution
● Moluccans fought for Dutch colonialism and against Indonesian independence due to religious
reasons (Christianized by the Dutch) + difference in Culture
○ Due to social status: Moluccans were more privileged
○ They became soldiers for the colonial army + worked higher up in the social status
○ They were separatists: They wanted Moluccan independence, with the hope that the Dutch
would set up a territory just for them
● The Dutch lost the war
● Indonesia gained independence in 1949
1951: Establishment of the Moluccan migrant community in the Netherlands
● However, placed in transit camps → The idea was not to integrate them into society
● Received the quaza- status → Received Dutch passports

How is Moluccan identity articulated?
● Legally/politically, Moluccas are neither Dutch or Indonesian
● To identify ad Moluccan is therefore a cultural practice
○ It is to prioritize felt experience above legal/ political consensus
○ Imagination > ITS SOMETHING YOU FEEL (AFFECTIVE)
● Culture can be political > felt experience of Moluccan identity started a separatist war in 1950

Moluccan separatism: cultural identity → political action
● Moluccan violent activism in the Netherlands → occupation in consulates + embassy / hijacking
○ “You can’t frighten those who have decided to die for freedom”; “Sometimes violence is
‘necessary’”
● 15 deaths in total, of which 7 Dutch people by Moluccans, 6 Moluccans by the military, 2
hostages by the military (accidentally)

3

, L2: CULTURE & POLITICS
2.1: What is the paradox of self-determination?
● Relation between culture and politics can be seen from the construction of the
nation-state, propelled by the idea of self-determination
○ Ex: UK + FR reorganized an entire region → kurds were left in no man's land and
would come to be dispersed over four different territories: IRAN, IRAQ, SYRIA and
TURKEY → Kurds live in conflict with ruling parties → None of the 4 artificially
created states are willing to accept a separate kurd state
○ Ex: US Russia and China's refusal to take part in the ICC is both politically and
culturally motivated → How culture has been used for political purposes in a
criminal way? → China: forcefully destroying the culture of Uighur people
● People’s self-determination → establishment of own state → Destruction of people →
Genocide
○ Ex: Yugoslavia (CASE STUDY) + WW2 Croatian fascists had also committed genocide
on Serbs whom they considered to be culturally inferior > influenced by nazi ideas
about cultural superiority > echoed through the civil wars of 1990s

What is Politics? How does it relate to culture?
● Politics comes into being when these groups decide to regulate the distribution of power
that differences of interest can be negotiated peacefully and with fierce struggles →
Exposes the “Paradox of Self-determination”
○ Different cultural groups can negotiate their differences and take part in the
distribution of power // People do not feel the way in they want to organize their
lives is being done justice
● A matter of the execution of power + a regulated and distributed form of power
○ Ex: Women, Culture and politics (1989) on racial and gender relations in daily life
● A matter of negotiating frictions, disagreements and imbalances
● A positive ground in the material conditions that allow a people to establish their lives →
Politics is not instrumental but concerns the ways in which people are able to organize
their own lifeworld (Ex: Food and clothes)
● A matter of regulation and a prefiguration of any form of political and legal order
● Culture = prepolitical
○ Power becomes a matter of negotiating the differences in a regulated way with the
participation of all parties involved > becomes a matter of politics and its aim will
either be to preserve the status quo or to change things

“Almost all battles for freedom concern this opening up of an enclosed space of power into
one of negotiations and promised openness: a space of doing politics. Still, if the dynamic
between a closed and open system of power-distribution is central to all struggles for
self-determination, we encounter a pivotal paradox: […] opening up space of one’s to entail
the closing down of that space for others.”

4

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