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Anthropological Theory

DOI: 10.1177/1463499604045568 2004; 4; 329 Anthropological Theory

Fran Markowitz Talking about Culture: Globalization, human rights and anthropology

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Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

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Talking about cultureGlobalization, human rights andanthropology

Fran MarkowitzBen-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheva, Israel

AbstractCulture talk, when analyzed from and within the powerful combination ofglobalization and human rights discourses, is not exclusively or necessarily a gloss forracism or xenophobia. Rather, as the universally accepted criterion for humanbelonging and the rights that it confers, culture emerges as the primary means forgaining positive recognition and a valuable place in the emerging global community.People everywhere, as they contend with global flows, express desires for dignity andclaim human rights, are therefore invoking, manipulating and solidifying their cultureto accord with contemporary discursive demands. Conversely, recognizing itsfragmented, invented and historicized nature, many anthropologists are rejecting thereification of culture as they search for alternative ways to express cultural process andhuman creativity. Following a contextualized analysis of Russians’ talk about theirculture, and the Black Hebrews’ assertions of their once-lost, now-found heritage, thearticle ends by suggesting that anthropologists reinsert culture into the center ofanthropology. But now, instead of an impossibly metaphysical concept or reified traitinventory, culture and its genealogy should be interrogated and studied both as it isdescribed and practiced from the natives’ point of view and as embedded within widersocial processes of discourse, power and history.

Key Wordsauthenticity • Black Hebrews • culture • globalization • human rights • liquidity •Russians

At the end of a century of ethnographic endeavors culminating with a shift in focus fromsmall-scale, seemingly pristine societies to the fast-paced, ever changing, globalized latemodern world, anthropological theory has sharpened its cutting edge by deconstructingthe culture concept. Change in destination of the ethnographic gaze, coupled with anattendant demand to account for power differentials and the workings of history, haveresulted in a conceptual shift in anthropology from understanding cultures as holistic,coherent and homogeneous to accounting for multiplicity, fragmentation and internal

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contradictions (Appadurai, 1996; Hannerz, 1992; Werbner, 2002; Wright, 1998; cf.Friedman, 1994). Warning against the reification of culture – that it reflects an earlier,less critically attuned anthropology intrinsically connected to Eurocentrism, colonialismand nationalism (Clifford, 1988; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Gilroy, 1993, 2000;Herzfeld, 1997; Wolf, 1982) – by the beginning of the 21st century the culture conceptin anthropology had ceded central place and explanatory power to a terminology thathighlights constructionism, dynamism, fluidity and power. ‘Culture’, a bounded andautonomous noun, has all but given way to the ‘cultural’, a modifying adjective that slipsand slides, refuses confinement and can never stand alone (Appadurai, 1996; Keesing,1994; Kuper, 1999; cf. Sahlins, 1999).

While continuing to acknowledge that ‘people are always trying to make sense of theirlives, always weaving fabrics of meaning’ (Ortner, 1999: 9) that serve as ballast and ashared sense of predictability (Yengoyan, 1986), many anthropologists have discon-nected these cultural processes from the seemingly timeless trait inventories that areusually conjured up by the word culture (e.g. Tylor, 1871; Boas, 1964 [1888]; Benedict,1959 [1934]; see Wright, 1998: 7–8). Pointing to global cultural flows, the liquidity andhybridity of late modernity, they remind each other that discretely packaged cultures aremore the scholarly result of demands for closure than empirical reality, and that suchreification and its popularization may have caused more harm than good (Stolcke, 1995;Trouillot, 2000).

As fate would have it, at the very moment that many anthropologists are losing faithin their discipline’s key theoretical concept, people the world over have been embracingculture (Dunn, 1998: Ch. 5; Hannerz, 1996; Keesing, 1994). For many of them, cultureis a thing – or a package of traditions – that defines individuals and groups of individualsand an agent that shapes them in certain and predictable ways. Pointing to the matchbetween particular peoples and particular languages or accents, foods and smells, homedécor, dress and hairstyles, art, music and dance, postures, movements, reactions andinteractions, people on the streets – and via the media – are insisting that their cultureis solid, permanent and real (Eriksen, 1997; Hall, 1990: 223–4). And so too are thecultures of others (Stolcke, 1995: 1; Olwig and Hastrup, 1997: 3). Eric Hobsbawm hasnoted that ‘never was the word “community” used more indiscriminately and emptilythan in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find inreal life’ (1994: 428). The same may be said of culture in its original anthropologicalsense, for whether celebratory or derogatory, much of culture talk pivots on the ‘predilec-tion to define cultures according to their presumed “essential” characteristics’ and howthey produce certain kinds of persons as a result (Mamdani, 2002: 766; see also Helman,2002).

Certainly this is not the first essay to delineate or mull over the contemporary cultureparadox that pits anthropologists in the ‘no culture, thank you’ corner versus people-on-the-street proclaiming culture to be alive and well (see Sahlins, 1999). Criticalsociologist Robert Dunn (1998: 4) explains the new popular emphasis on culture asresulting from ‘changes in the structural and institutional conditions of advanced capi-talist society’. In western Europe, that most modernized part of the world, once exoticblack and brown people are now visible everywhere, transgressing colored boundaries ofplace and disrupting a centuries-old geography of identity, culture and civilization (Hall,1997; see also Carrier, 1992). European ‘hosts’ often experience these immigrants as

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invasive waves of strange noises, odors and religions that threaten (an imagined)national, if not pan-European, cultural unity (Gilroy, 2000; Gross et al., 1994; Stolcke,1995; Werbner, 1997). In Europe’s eastern parts, culture, including language, is thedefinitive criterion for creating new states and dividing old ones (see, for example,Isakovic, 1992).1 During the Yugoslav wars, the policy of ethnic cleansing manipulatedculture to a new level of distortion to create on-the-ground differences that matchednationalist ideologies (Bringa, 1995; Denich, 1994; Hayden, 1996). If, as many scholarshave been arguing, ‘culture’ in its latest European manifestations has become nothingmore than a code word for racism and a reason for waging war, then certainly anthro-pologists should continue their deconstructive course and look beyond culture for theirdiscipline’s conceptual base and subject matter (Barth, 2001; Kuper, 1999; Trouillot,2000).

Theories of practice, however, indicate that people are not blind consumers ofproducts and ideologies (Bourdieu, 1977; de Certeau, 1984), and culture could not beinvoked as the foundation of identity and self-esteem or the rallying point for nation-building or war-mongering if it failed to resonate in daily life. By placing culture’smeanings and manifestations into the wider discursive fields of our times, this essay’saim is to spur a historically contextualized understanding of why it is that so manypeople out on the streets ‘want culture . . . in precisely the bounded, reified, essential-ized and timeless fashion’ and why this is the concept of culture that several leadinganthropologists now reject (Brumann, 1999: 511, emphasis in the original).

This analysis begins by situating the culture paradox within two increasinglyuniversal motifs – globalization and human rights. Both are understood as broadsemantic fields that hold descriptive and explanatory power and as political, juridical,economic and cultural processes and institutions. Offering promises of liberation fromconstraining national boundaries and alternatives to caste, gender and racial hierarchies,the discourses of globalization and human rights provide avenues for resisting localstructures of power and asserting identity claims via supranational organizations andthe state (Preis, 1996; Soysal, 1997; Winthrop, 2002). Yet at the same time, these veryprocesses and promises can and do reinscribe postcolonial relations of inequality. Forexample, the potential of globalization to provide a liberating vista of stylistic andexpressive options accompanies and affirms a slew of media images and advertisingslogans that ‘enlarge the hegemonies of Northern centers even as they incorporateperipheries’ (Tsing, 2000: 344). In the Northern centers, those (once) complacently athome in the nation often experience the global flows of migrants and media occurringin their backyards as a disruptive and invasive like-it-or-not multiculturalism. Theystruggle with, categorize and castigate the different lifestyles they encounter by talkingabout cultures as bounded, discrete and inherently incompatible. Such culture talk,often legitimized by referring to ‘culture in an anthropological sense’ (Wright, 1998) –and not talk about the people themselves – serves as an acceptable linguistic strategythat solidifies difference while masking the more insidious xenophobia or racism ofdominant groups defending their position (e.g. Helman, 2002; Mamdani, 2002;Stolcke, 1995; Trouillot, 2001). Backed by very real structures of power, the looselyoptimistic and multifaceted messages of globalization also generate the means of objec-tifying and misrecognizing many persons and peoples, despite an intertwined discourseof human rights asserting the inherent value of everyone.

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This essay argues that it is from within the discursive overlap of globalization andhuman rights that culture emerges as something that everyone wants, indeed, thateveryone feels compelled to have (Cowan et al., 2001). Insistence on culture, I will show,is not only or primarily a polite masking of prejudices and positionings but a proactivepolitical project for recognition and a social plea for valorization (Bauman, 2001; Dunn,1998; Taylor, 1992; Turner, 1997). Despite all kinds of fragmented and traveling culturalphenomena found the world over, it is culture in its reified form that demands consider-ation in global processes and that underwrites the notion of human in human rightsdiscourse. Culture talk, we will see, emerges as a practical response to an increasinglymonolithic discursive field in which recognition and value are precluded to all but self-defining, historically deep cultural groups (see Blu, 1980; Clifford, 1988; Eriksen, 2001;Malkki, 1995; Nederveen Pieterse, 2001).

This argument rests on a deceptively simple irony. Born of Marx’s vision of the poten-tial of European modernism to free individuals from the constraints of blood, soil,religion and privilege, liquidity has become an increasingly pervasive naturalizingmetaphor for describing contemporary social conditions (Bauman, 2000). Flows ofglobalization, coupled with the idea that individuals’ identities are fluid, offer great liber-atory promise, especially to ethnic and sexual minorities, postcolonial peoples, and deter-ritorialized diasporas. Yet these symbolic attempts to supersede artificially createdboundaries by offering a more mobile, hybridized and authentic world of inherentfairness and dignity have done very little to forge an apparatus for dismantling the veryreal conditions of economic inequality and physical want. Nor have these discoursesovercome the seemingly ‘natural’ political monopoly of nation-states (Malkki, 1994;Soysal, 1997). As Radhakrishnan (1996: 161) has noted, ‘In a world where intellectualstalk about transnationalism and diasporic subjects perhaps do it, the nation-state stillholds a monopoly on representing political and economic interests and geographicclaims of sovereignty.’ Some analysts challenge the absoluteness of this monopoly bypointing to the increasing influence of supranational and non-government organiz-ations, but even those indicating post-national models of citizenship (e.g. Soysal, 1998)agree that sovereign nation-states remain the grantors and implementers of rights,belonging, and opportunities.

Moreover, on the streets, while enveloped in the sounds of music, televised sights andconfrontations with migrants from around the world, discourses of mobility and hybrid-ity have not done much to detract from ‘the native concepts of culture as a thing and ofthe nation as a bounded community’ (Eriksen, 1997: 117).2 Indeed, this essay suggeststhat the opposite has occurred, for as it is invoked to support claims for recognition andto push against, direct and dam the flows of globalization, culture is solidified. And,since culture as the arbiter of humanity and animator of human rights is central to thisdiscourse, an on-the-streets desire is spurred for eternal and unchanging cultures. At thesame time, reacting against those homogenizing tendencies that constrict and compresscultural processes into a monolithic, reified notion, critical anthropologists on a decon-structive course are seeking to replace ‘culture’ with an as yet undetermined, partial andfluid something else.

The next section of this essay delineates globalization and human rights as increas-ingly pervasive naturalizing discourses and reveals how their convergence ramifies in thearticulation of culture. I follow that discussion with two cases of culture-rallying to


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demonstrate how people at all levels of political organization (from large nation-statesto stateless minorities) are invoking and solidifying their culture in reaction to felt experi-ences of marginalization and misrecognition within the human rights-based, globalcommunity. By way of conclusion, I will reinsert the vexing politics of hybridity intothe discussion of globalization and human rights to contextualize the contradictory waysin which people on the streets and anthropologists are talking about and acting outculture.

GLOBAL FLOWS AND NATURAL RIGHTS, THE POWER OF STATESAND THE DANGERS OF LIQUIDITYAs already noted, anthropological theorizing and talk in our time – high modernity(Giddens, 1991); postmodernity (Harvey, 1989); liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000) –are increasingly shaped by and fall into two overlapping discursive fields. Interestingly,both discourses conjure up, describe and define ‘natural’ phenomena. Underwritten andbolstered by metaphors of flow and flexibility, globalization, especially in the sense thatthe world is becoming a single social and cultural setting (Tomlinson, 1999: 10), impliesthat the particularities of contemporary social, economic and political conditions arepart of an unremitting historical process, inevitable manifestations of the humancondition. Human rights also rest on a discursive base of naturalness. The 1948 UnitedNations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that, ‘All human beings are bornfree and equal in dignity and rights’ (UN General Assembly, 1948). Underscoring thesepoints several years later, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and CulturalRights (UN, 1966) declared that all those rights ‘derive from the inherent dignity of thehuman person’.

Both discourses offer people everywhere promises of personal security, economic pros-perity and political inclusion. Globalization’s key image of flows – of money, media,ideas, people and things – along natural currents and global streams encourages theimagination of endless possibilities in an open world (Appadurai, 1996). Liquidityrenders barriers moot, makes all boundaries porous, and evokes the idea that movementand alterity are constant. Carrying the metaphor to its logical extreme, even if one wereto stand still in one place, it would be ‘penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influ-ences quite distant from [it]’ (Giddens, 1990: 2 in Tomlinson, 1999: 52–53). Everycorner of the world, so it seems, is both source and destination, a confluence of globalflows.

By the same token, declarations of inalienable and equal human rights offer allpeople everywhere freedom and dignity. The natural rights and inherent dignity thatconstitute the core of human rights discourse provide a strong foundation for self-esteem and expressiveness while encouraging appreciation of others. By discursivelyequating millions of unique individuals with one another under the canopy of acommon humanity, the stigma of otherness and privileges of position are canceled out.So too is the historical tendency to deny humanity to those deemed racially, religiouslyor linguistically beyond the pale of civilization. With the ever-increasing invocation ofhuman rights and reliance on globalization discourse, the world becomes envisioned asone home for everyone, all people equally endowed with value, united througheconomic, political and social processes on an even playing field where each place andfolk is source, site and destination of global flows.


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Precisely because this multireferential use of globalization-as-a-natural-process opensup imagination-based possibilities for creating identities, shaping selves and sharing ina common humanity, when the notions of flexibility and fluidity that it evokes areblocked by solid economic and cultural impediments this rhetoric can be experiencedas deceitful and oppressive. People everywhere have already begun to notice that despitethe indeterminacy implied by ‘global flows’ (Appadurai, 1996: esp. Ch. 2) these seem tocome and go in stable and predictable ways. Certainly satellite television and radio wavesmove ideas, images and musical styles around the world, blending cultural productionsand sending them back again (e.g. Gilroy, 1993, 2000). But along with this seeminglyfree-floating movement of culture, most economic and political capital is accumulatedin a handful of global cities situated in a few select nation-states (Sassen, 1991). Post-national modes of belonging (Soysal, 1998), nongovernmental organizations and inter-national trade agreements notwithstanding, the predictability of the movement ofmoney, media and migrants and their effects results in a rather sinister sort of socio-economic reproduction, poised as it is against the background of a rhetoric andaccompanying expressive options that proclaim the opposite. Globalization withoutglobal justice and open borders can therefore take on odious and ominous implications(Graeber, 2002a, 2002b). Phrased in the naturalizing language of streams and flows, notmuch can be done to reverse or equalize the tides. Within such a discourse, the only wayto divert the global is to imagine, invoke, and stand up for a particular local, and theonly way to counteract the determinacy of nature is to rally and solidify culture.3 ‘Iron-ically,’ notes Winthrop (2002: 115), ‘the forces of globalization have intensified ratherthan diminished the demands to protect local cultures and traditions.’

In like vein, human rights discourse can also grate against felt experiences. Unlikeearlier treatises advocating human rights, no moral philosophy or political theory isadvanced in either the United Nations’ 1948 Declaration of Human Rights or its 1966Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Instead, these documents simplyposit a natural ontology of human rights.4 Charles Beitz critically notes that ‘naturalrights are supposed to be pre-institutional; they are supposed to belong to people“naturally” – that is solely in virtue of their common humanity; they are supposed to betimeless. But international human rights don’t meet any of these standards’ (2003: 40,emphasis added). This gap between theoretical declarations and practice gives rise to thedistinct possibility of human rights converse. If, as UN documents and global humanrights enterprises declare, people are equally vested in rights by virtue of an inherenthuman dignity, then maybe those who are deprived of human rights are that way becausethey are not human, or not human enough – or at least deemed not human or humanenough. And what constitutes humanity? Culture.

Although the original focus of human rights crystallized around the notion of theindividual – a pan-cultural, if not pre-cultural, ‘everyone’ – as the works of the UN,UNESCO, the Council of Europe and similar international organizations make clear,‘culture, language and standard ethnic traits are now seen as [necessary] variants of theuniversal core of humanness and selfhood’ (Soysal, 1997: 513). Consequently, withinthe purview of human rights each person is viewed as the bearer of a particular culture,part of a broader collective identity.5 Likewise, in its declaration of the right of self-determination to all peoples, the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social andCultural Rights implies an inherent connection between a people, a territory and all its


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resources. Throughout the document the words ‘peoples’ and ‘countries’ are used inter-changeably, implying that, like peoples without cultures, peoples without countries donot necessarily warrant the right of self-determination.

Over and above the administrative apparatus of human rights adjudication, moralphilosopher Charles Taylor (1992) underscores the ‘need’ for cultural belonging andcollective identity as he argues for a universally participatory multicultural politics ofrecognition. Curiously, despite the liberal-humanistic approach that he takes to theseissues, Taylor explicitly excludes ‘partial cultural milieux within a society, as well as shortphases of a major culture’ (1992: 66) from what he delineates as ‘traditional culture’requisite for participation (1992: 68). Groups of individuals lacking such a culture mighttherefore not even ‘count’ as (a) people (Clifford, 1988; Eriksen, 2001), making themvulnerable to the misnaming and misrecognition that Taylor seeks to eliminate.

Thus, while globalization as a descriptive narrative explains the malleability of culturalforms and their consequent partiality and mergers, it has not opened discursive orpolitical space for valorizing cultural hybridity. This may be because despite the equal-izing rubric of human rights, the benign interconnectedness that globalization appearsto offer, and a preponderance of international organizations committed to these goals,at the beginning of the 21st century, states assiduously police their borders while main-taining a virtual monopoly on the granting of identity (Bloemrad, 2000; Malkki, 1995)and the implementation of human rights (Soysal, 1997, 1998). Strong states can damthe ebb-tides of globalization while generating out-flows of media, migrants, technologyand munitions to bolster a position of prominence in the world. Weak states, especiallythose fraught with shaky economies and ethnic turbulence, can be swept away by theforce of global tides.

Peoples without states are doubly vulnerable – to the homogenizing influences of thenation-states in which they reside and to being ignored or misrepresented in the widerglobal sphere. Peoples deemed to be without a culture, that is, whose cultural heritageis viewed as partial, the result of mergers and overlappings, have little chance forfounding a state. They are overlooked or overrun by stronger national or internationalpolities and economies. Within the increasingly pervasive and monopolistic discursiveconvergence of globalization and human rights, having a culture and demonstrating itsunique contribution enables groups, no matter how politically unstable or economicallyinsecure, to prove authenticity and longevity, demand recognition and value, and stakea claim in the worldwide ‘Family of Nations’ (Malkki, 1994). Whereas anthropologistsare suggesting that their long cherished notion of culture be amended to reflect thecontemporary reality of cultural fragmentation and mixtures, people on the streets arereacting against inequality, fragility and misrecognition by asserting their place in theworld as they solidify, talk about and enact their culture (Cowan et al., 2001; Nagen-gast and Turner, 1997: 269–70). The following two examples, first of Russians’ culturalclaims for a post-Soviet starring role on the global stage, and then those of the BlackHebrews for recognition as a rights-vested cultural group, show how ‘having a culture’deeply matters in the global flows of history and destiny.6

RUSSIA IN THE FAMILY OF NATIONSAfter five years of glasnost and attempts at perestroika the Soviet Union ended as 1992began.7 Western observers, recovering from their shock at the demise of the USSR,


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breathed a collective and self-congratulatory sigh of relief as they sat back and waitedto see how Russia would fare in the free world of market capitalism and democracy. Yetthe transition from central place in the mighty Soviet superpower to a rather bedrag-gled Mother Russia was, during the 1990s, experienced much less enthusiastically inthe daily routines of millions in the capital city of Moscow (Humphrey, 1995; Ries,1997), the regional hubs and industrial centers of Siberia (Pesman, 2000), and Russia’sfar northeast (Grant, 1995; Humphrey, 2002). Most people’s primary concern focusedon the basic demands of getting by – food, shelter, work and comfort – in a ‘new forus’ economy remarkable for its instability (Markowitz, 2000). Products from Finland,Germany, France, Turkey and Australia poured onto the shelves of local shops,drowning Russian goods and all they stood for in a global wave of new tastes, packag-ings and values. The inflated prices that accompanied the new products quicklydampened initial thrills as Russians came to realize that this enticing world (market) offashion, film, music, news and information held little or no value for the products ofRussia – or its people. Televised reports of faulty nuclear reactors and sunkensubmarines (Chernobyl in 1986; the Kursk in 2000), the closure of once prestigiousresearch institutes, the elimination of countless jobs, and daily shopping at localmarkets filled with high-priced imported consumer goods felt demeaning, if not threat-ening, to many Russian people.

‘You!’ a weather-beaten man called out to me during my first visit to Moscow in April1993. Standing on the Square of the Revolution, flanked on one side by cigarette-smoking men hawking fur hats and stout women sitting behind their tables of lacquerboxes and matrioshki [nested dolls], and displays of ‘independent’ nationalistic literatureon the other, I was surprised to hear someone single me out. ‘You!’ he shouted again ashe drew nearer. ‘I know who you are. You’re one of those who left here at a young ageand now you’ve come back to see what it’s like.’ Recognizing the West in my dress anddemeanor yet confident that he had also identified something in me as Russian, helaunched into a litany that described the troubles of these times. After working fordecades as a technician in a war industry factory – and it had been a good life, lived withdignity, pride and a sense of purpose – just a few months ago he found himself unem-ployed. Factories had closed everywhere; prices went up, and salaries disappeared. Theonly ones with money to buy all the new products were those who had gone out to sell.A disgrace. He explained this turn of events by accusing first Gorbachev and then Yeltsinof selling out their country to the West ‘for a handful of cigarettes, alcohol and perfume’.

Such conspiracy theories of a few strong men making nefarious deals with globaleconomic powers were frequently repeated in the independently published brochuresand pulp literature piled up on the tables. Several book covers and political cartoonsshowed Gorbachev and Yeltsin – who are unquestionably Russians – festooned withJewish emblems. The skullcap on their heads and the Star of David around their necksmarked their actions as decidedly not Russian, anti-Russian, part of a dastardly globalscheme to rob Russia of her resources, heritage and pride.8

When I returned to Moscow for full-time fieldwork in September 1995, this particu-lar display of literature was gone. The landscape had again been transformed with bill-boards urging one and all to take a break with Nescafé, jump high in Air Jordans, go toMarlboro Country and invest in Most-Bank. Russia was knee-deep in the global age ofmoney, media and markets. Proving to be more profitable for businessmen on the rise


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to import ready-made products than to coax Russia’s sluggish industries to produce, whathad begun as a delightful encounter with interesting foreign goods had already becomeexperienced as oppressive. A resistive urban folklore accompanied the practices of manywho searched their cities to buy local produce instead of what they deemed to be chem-ically-infused, unhealthy and expensive foreign goods (Humphrey, 1995, 2002; Ries,1997).

By the end of the 20th century, Russian scholars, most of whose standard of livingand social status fell as their country (and they themselves) plunged into the global age,also had much to say about the causes and consequences of globalization. Holdingcultural global flows theory up to scrutiny under their well-honed Marxist lenses, manyreached the conclusion that, traveling around the world from the West with rap musicand Coca-Cola, this theory works as an ideological distortion of reality masking objec-tionable political and economic outcomes. For them, the tantalizing imagination-basedalternatives constituting cultural global flows disguise the ‘Americanization of thecultures of this planet, foisting on them western-oriented culture (Zinov’ev, 1995: 414).Globalization in economics and politics is portrayed as a means of subordinating Russia(and the East) to the interests of the West, and above all, the United States’ (Pilkingtonand Bliudina, 2002: 4). Revealing that political-economic structures are the primemovers of globalization, Russian academics assert that cultural global flows theory isnothing more than a glossy cover-up of the peripheralization of Russia by imperialistic,capitalistic western powers.

Along with proclaiming the liberatory messages of globalization a hoax, many Russianintellectuals also seek ways to understand and overcome their country’s collapsedeconomy and deflated political position. In this search they are wont to stress the unique-ness of Russia’s culture and character and ask their constituents for patience with, alert-ness to or resistance against the challenges posed by the post-Soviet global age (seeKozlov, 1995; Likhachev, 1990; Zinov’ev, 1995). Russia’s academics and people on thestreets, like the man who approached me on the Square of the Revolution, often see eyeto eye in their desire to perpetuate these cherished Russian narratives of singularity, spir-ituality and soul while rejecting the conclusion that they are at the peripheralized bottomof the global scene. Academics and regular folk also agree that because of their country’seconomic position (but through no lack of cultural discernment) Russians are unable toembrace the global consumer and information supermarket as discriminating shoppers.Instead they feel as if they are at the receiving end of a flotsam-filled global tide that isoverpowering what is left of Russia’s natural and cultural resources.

It is not only those of the older generations who feel that way (cf. Humphrey, 1995:44). In 1996, 16-year-old Kristina lamented,

For me our culture existed during the time of the Soviet Union. There were all thoseRussian songs, which for me was totally all right. My parents are already in shockthat there is no more Russian culture – that’s already done and gone. Everything isWestern, and there is nothing left of our own. 9

For Kristina, who five years earlier returned with her family to Moscow after a lifetimein the capital of what had been the Turkmeni Soviet Socialist Republic, Russia not onlyceded political centrality as the mighty Soviet superpower collapsed but also proved


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vulnerable to the impact of cultural global flows. Their final result has been the end ofRussia as an enviable cultural center.

Other teenagers, however, are neither as certain nor pessimistic as Kristina that ‘thereis nothing left of our own’. In fact, they frequently invoke a seamless literary and musicaltradition (the ballets of Tchaikovsky, the literature of Tolstoy), point to exquisite folkarts and refer to the broad Russian soul as eternal characteristics of the Russian people(Markowitz, 2000: Ch. 8; cf. Pesman, 2000). As opposed to the temporariness of theSoviet era and its embarrassing legacy of obsolescent scientific projects and a frustrating,unpredictable economy, Russian culture is indexed as a positive and timeless differencebetween Russia and the rest. Sixteen-year-old Yulia Z. muses:

I’ve always thought that the most important thing in Russia, the most importantthing she has is culture. Our national culture. Nothing else that we do is quite asgreat, not in the field of economics, not in the field of politics. Our culture, our litera-ture, has always been the face of the nation.

Unlike Kristina who mourned its passing, Yulia Z. is assured of Russia’s singular culturaltradition. So too is Yulia K.: ‘Russia is Russia. It’s unique and it’s its own, special. It hasits own mentality. It is completely unlike any other.’ This perspective is supported aswell by Hilary Pilkington, who, in concluding a recent study of cultural globalizationand Russian youth, notes that, ‘Young people were happy to consume western culture,while remaining confident that which was Russian would remain untarnished by globalintrusion’ (2002: 225).

Yet both extremes – young people completely assured of Russia’s uniqueness and thosewho believe that Russian culture has drowned in the torrents of globalization – pale inlight of those who note that there are no assurances that Russia’s thousand-year-oldcultural tradition can persist through the next millennium. Russia’s unique culture, theybelieve, is vulnerable to external influences, cruder, stronger western pressures: theunstoppable flow of Hollywood movies, world music, mass literature and youthfulfashions. To persist, Russian culture requires self-conscious Russians who will value andprotect it. Tanya K. takes heed:

Well, it seems to me that for Russian people the most important thing is to preserveRussian culture. Its churches, its language. It would be good to hold onto thosepeople who can make village crafts, like those little toys of birchwood, those things.That, it seems to me, is real Russian culture.

So too does Nikolai as he rails against the incorporation of English words like ‘market,supermarket and mini-market’ into Russian because they are displacing ‘our’ perfectlygood words like magazin and univermag.10 For him, Tanya and thousands of others, theRussian language and Russian culture are valuable and irreplaceable contributions tohumanity, and it is through these contributions that the Russian people are granted animportant place in the world. Their loss, however, can push Russia and Russians intooblivion.

Once, not long ago, Russia, the center of the USSR, was a global military, economicand cultural superpower to be reckoned with. Now, as they experience the musical


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sounds, media images, modes of consumption and inflationary economics that pervadetheir daily lives, Russians feel that their country has been pushed to the periphery.Instead of accepting these conditions and accompanying feelings of vulnerability anddenigration as the natural outcome of global flows, they rally time-tested Russian cultureas the saving grace. Perhaps western technology can produce better and more efficientconsumer goods, but, as Yulia Z. contends, it cannot produce a Dostoevsky, Prokofievor Tolstoy. Their unique cultural contributions earn Russians a valued place in humanhistory, enable them to counter-balance economic weakness and political vulnerabilityand claim a starring role in the Family of Nations on the world stage. Therefore, Russianteenagers’ essentializing culture talk, along with that of their elders, should be viewedmore as a bid for full citizenship in the global community than the desire to block aspir-ations of others or to deny them a share of the global pie.11 Globalization and humanrights discourses combine to send the distinct message that a solid, eternal culture canultimately divert and overcome destructive global tides; people who lack such a cultureare at their mercy.

BLACK FOLK IN A WHITE WORLDUnlike Russians’ history of (often mandatory) rootedness coupled with the certainty ofcultural distinctiveness and political might, the Black Diaspora began with the violenceof uprooting. Torn from their homes, ripped from their families, millions of men andwomen were shackled and shipped across the ocean where, if lucky enough to survive,they were forced into slavery. Denied what the signers of the USA’s Declaration of Inde-pendence called the inalienable rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’,Africans-in-America were deprived of their land, language and people while condemnedto toil for others.12

After the bloody American civil war and a presidential decree ending slavery, Congresspassed the 14th amendment to the Constitution granting citizenship to ‘All persons bornor naturalized in the United States’. Differing from the documents drawn up by thefounding fathers in which citizenship was assumed for them and their descendants, theinclusion of racially marked Negroes and Amerindians into the polity required a legalstatement. This statement can be read, on one hand, as a remedy to past injustices. Onthe other, since it was white men, and not the Creator, who were now bestowing rightson former slaves and indigenes, the 14th amendment can also be read as an affirmationthat racialized populations fall beyond the self-evident truth that ‘all men are createdequal’.13 This interpretation is borne out by the fact that bestowal of citizenship notwith-standing, former slaves and their descendants continued to be deprived of economicresources, voting rights and state-provided social services. And although black people inAmerica struggled on for civil rights and forced a change in their group label, misrecog-nition, mistreatment and misnaming intensified over the years (Fulop, 1997; West,1990).

In response to the ‘modern Black diaspora problematic of invisibility and nameless-ness’ (West, 1990: 26), the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC), better knownas the Black Hebrews, emerged in Chicago during the 1960s.14 Unlike many of theircontemporaries who based claims for civil rights – full inclusion in the American dreamof ‘liberty and justice for all’ – on Euro-American enlightenment philosophy and theUS constitution, the Black Hebrews concluded that the political programs and religious


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tenets of the white man exclude black people from kinship in the human family and arenot about to change (Ben Ammi, 1990). Yadiel, the African Hebrew IsraeliteCommunity’s Minister of Agriculture, recounts,

We can go through and see these different movements among Black people inAmerica, their transformation from Africans to slaves, to Negroes to Blacks, toAfrican Americans. Every people in America has an identity: Polish Americans, ItalianAmericans: they have a land, a language, and a culture. What are Negroes? Blacks?African Americans? Africa itself is composed of fifty nations, and within each of these,hundreds of ethnic groups with their land, language and culture. African Americansare the only group of Americans without an identity.

If Russians fear the effects of globalization and are struggling to solidify andstrengthen their culture to maintain a central position in the world, the Black Hebrewspoint to their historical experiences of slavery, followed by racialization and second-classcitizenship in a country committed to democracy and human rights as proof that cultureloss is disastrous. The AHIC’s leader, Ben Ammi, noting that misfortune awaits thosenot ‘tied to a nationalistic whole: the whole being a land, language and culture’ (1990:139), set before himself – and all who would join with him – the task of resurrectingthe wisdom of his people, revitalizing its culture and clarifying its vision.15 Rejectingauthoritative Euro-American texts, the Black Hebrews turned instead to alternative,often discredited sources of knowledge as they gathered into study groups and excavatedtheir history. Piecing together sayings handed down from generation to generation, like,‘A small Black nation will rise out of the East’ with biblical verses, they discovered thehidden truth of ‘who we are as a people’.16 Prince Gavriel ha-Gadol writes with elationthat after reading in Genesis of God’s revelation to Abraham that his descendants wouldundergo 400 years of captivity, the entire story of Exodus, and the warnings of Deuteron-omy 28 that should they stray from the Law, the Israelites would be scattered to the fourcorners of the earth, embrace idols of wood and stone and endure ‘a second captivity inwhich the[y] would be carried into another Egypt . . . involving “ships” ’ , he finallyunderstood who he and all American Negroes really were (Prince Gavriel ha-Godal,1993: 80–2).

Realizing now that black people in America are the Children of Israel, Ben Ammi andhis followers declared themselves the Original African Hebrew Israelite Nation, re-adjusted the map of the world by setting Israel in Africa, and returned to the land oftheir forefathers (Markowitz, 1996).17 Yafah, the AHIC’s Director of Public Relations,recalls that,

Once I was shown that in Deuteronomy it is explained if you sin and turn away fromGod you will be punished, I could understand why Black Americans were in this[terrible] position. I didn’t want to be a nothing Black American, Afro-American,Negro American, and the Community answered my questions by providing an order,a solution, a righteous path to life.

By the early 1970s, several Black Hebrew families left the USA and resettled in Israel.Today, in its American branches as well as at its communal center in the Negev town of


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Dimona, the AHIC teaches that over the centuries of diaspora their ancestors abandonedtheir original culture and adopted the ways of others. ‘In 70 CE’, they explain, ‘theremnants of the African Hebrew Israelites were driven from Jerusalem by the Romansinto different parts of the world, including Africa. Many Hebrew Israelites migrated toWest Africa where they, once again, were carried away captive – this time by Europeanson slave ships – to the Americas’.18 Knowledge of their origins eluded them because whenthey lost their traditions, they also lost their identity as a people.19 That identity loss wasaccompanied by a loss of wisdom and rights. In slavery they were denied humanity andlost their very selves. Yet particular sayings and disjointed practices persisted as remindersto African Americans that they once had a noble culture and that, despite the difficultiesinvolved, they could, indeed must, piece it back together again. ‘Reinvigorate an old law,’Prince Rockameem told me in 1995, ‘and live it this time, not break it’.

Invoking the ‘power to define who we are as a people’ (Ben Ammi, 1990: 55–80), theAHIC has established a social program to jolt African Americans out of their memoryloss, re-establish ties with the God of Israel, and retrace the routes of their ancestors’dispersion from Israel-in-Africa.20 Most important of all, whether at their Americanmissions or in Israel itself, the brothers and sisters of the Community ‘wear their culture’;they comport themselves, take their meals and regulate the lifecycle according to thedemands of their ‘holistic lifestyle’.21 Yadah Baht Israel explains:

Instructions were given to the Israelites for the management of their lives, includingeverything from the monitoring of dietary habits to setting the criteria for clothingas well as standards governing social behavior. Economic and environmental concernswere originally viewed and treated as a part of the whole social fabric. (1998: 10)

Citing biblical chapter and verse, the men and women of the AHIC talk about and liveout Hebrew Israelite customs as God-given, eternal and true.22

Intrepid anthropologists might conclude that the Black Hebrews’ culture and beliefsderive from a creative melding of Euro-American lifestyles with Africana and Hebraiccultural strands (Markowitz, 1996).23 But the men and women of the AHIC are certainthat they have revivified their original culture, which has enabled them to lead authen-tic, fulfilling and valuable lives (Ben Ammi, 1990, 1991). They describe their past selvesas black folk in the white world of Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Washington DC wherethey embodied the ravages of African and African American history. Their experiencesin that world – and not just the teachings of Ben Ammi – demonstrate that, ‘natural’human rights notwithstanding, if a group becomes hybridized, racialized and decultur-ated it will disappear from the annals of history, except, perhaps, as a footnote aboutoppression and slavery. With the discovery of the ‘truth about our people’ and theirembrace of the Hebrew Israelite lifestyle they shed feelings of dread, anger, self-hate andpurposelessness. As Stuart Hall has noted, ‘there are powerful reasons why people persistin trying to retreat defensively from the fact of cultural hybridity and difference intoclosed definitions of “culture” ’ (1995: 186).

The men and women who thrust off their Anglo-American names, rejected the Chris-tian religion, and left behind the permissive lifestyle, dress, dietary habits and untenablesecond-class citizenship of the USA to come home to a Bible-based holistic culture inIsrael offer themselves as living proof of diaspora’s disasters and the rectitude of return.


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Having been ‘the only group of Americans without an identity’, the Black Hebrewsknow that people without a culture, that is, a unique package of traditions rooted in aspecific place and transmitted through a particular language and set of practices, areviewed and treated as a not-quite-human anomaly. Positive recognition – from Christ-ian clergy, ministers in the Nation of Islam, members of the US Congress and Israeligovernment officials – has only come their way once they resurrected their culture,proclaimed themselves a cultural group, and embodied its holistic lifestyle.

The Black Hebrews knowingly blend African fabrics with the modesty code of theOld Testament, North American musical genres with words of praise to God, andHebrew with English in their daily language. As they tell it, however, they are certainthat their garments, music, language and lifestyle respond to and manifest their people’stimeless and authentic traditions. Outsiders – blacks or whites, Israelis or Americans,Christians or Jews, and certainly anthropologists – might jump at the chance to label allof these practices hybrids, borrowings or invented traditions. And from one angle, theAHIC does indeed appear to be part of the ever-throbbing kaleidoscope of globalcultural productions. Yet that perspective ignores the fact that peoples perceived to lackthe holy trinity of a land, a language, and a culture have suffered throughout history –and still do. The AHIC has learned that lesson well. Having a culture and living it outhas proven to be just about the only route for gaining rights and recognition in a farfrom fluid and just world.

CONCLUSIONS: HYBRIDITY, LIQUIDITY AND THE DISCONTENTSOF CULTURE

The demand for recognition is a claim to humanity and the right to participate inshaping it and enjoying it. (Bauman, 2001: 147)

Through contextualizing Russians and Black Hebrews talking about their cultureswithin the broader discursive fields of globalization and human rights, this essay hasargued that insistence on culture in its reified form provides a proactive political platformfor global recognition and a social plea for valorization. Culture talk is not simply a mani-festation of inherent ethnocentrism, a way of distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’, a maskingof racism or a misplaced ‘defensive reaction from the fact of cultural hybridity’ (Hall,1995: 186). Instead, because essentialized culture lies at the heart of human in humanrights and demands consideration in global decision-making, its articulation has becomeone of very few legitimate avenues for demanding attention to the cruel contradictionsbetween, on the one hand, discourses of global fluidity and human equality and, on theother, the seemingly solid barriers to economic opportunities, self-determination andsocial esteem that people confront all the time.

The same discourse of global flows and the processes of globalization that have spurredanthropologists among other global elites to rethink, revise and even throw out theculture concept have given rise to a renewed allegiance toward specific, seeminglytimeless expressions of being human – what many people point to, display and invokeas ‘our culture’ (see Friedman, 2002; Sahlins, 1999). But culture is not a naturalphenomenon that is automatically recognized and appreciated. As this essay has shown,it is precisely because of its centrality in the discursive convergence between globalization


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and human rights that ‘culture’ offers itself to everyone, including ‘embattled peoplesstruggling to secure or maintain a way of life, a polity, a territory, or merely resist[ing]oppression at the hands of a powerful state’ (Handler, 1997: 80), as a narrative forpressing claims, asserting value and insisting on a place in the world. That culture narra-tive must be rooted in solid traditions and documented as having persisted through thelongue durée, despite parallel discursive celebrations of mobility, migration and multi-culturalism in the globalized world.

Nederveen Pieterse (2001: 220) has pointed out that the hybrids are missing in allexercises in social mapping because ‘We are all mixing cultural elements across places andidentities . . . this has become an ordinary experience’ (2001: 237, emphasis in theoriginal). It is this very ubiquity, perhaps, that renders all different kinds of mergers,creolizations and blendings into one hybridity category without distinctive meaning,24

and, consequently, very little discursive or political space has opened up to acknowledgethat hybridities are authentic and culturally creative ways to be human.

If ‘culture’ conjures up humanity, hybridity, especially as narrated in myths of nationbuilding and accounts of colonialism, implies an impure result of mixing categories –unique human cultures, if not racial stocks – that are better left alone (Werbner, 1997;Young, 1995). In anthropology, while the culture concept was quite successful in swayingscientific and political opinion away from the idea of racially-based abilities to that of aspecies-wide unity based on the fact that all human groups have their own equally effec-tive languages, belief systems and ways of being in the world, dispersed, colonized orcreole cultures have often been designated as partial. In the 1950s, American anthro-pologists’ shift away from the seemingly timeless ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherers and smallscale tribal societies to consider the contradictions inherent in peasantry offered a theor-etical and empirical challenge to the notion of culture as bounded, coherent and homo-geneous. Robert Redfield’s (1956) declaration that peasant communities are ‘partsocieties/part cultures’ was indeed a breakthrough, revealing the mutual and dynamic yetcertainly asymmetrical dependencies between subsistence agriculturalists and the broadernation-state in which they are situated. But it, along with Ruth Benedict’s (1959 [1934])‘broken cup’ metaphor of American Indian cultures struggling for survival after centuriesof conquest and change, implies a lack, even depravity. Some contemporary anthropolo-gists may declare that no culture is complete, that culture is always ‘a contested processof meaning-making’ (Wright, 1998: 8). But the wider discursive and juridical apparatusesof globalization and human rights ignore the ‘facts’ of blurred cultural boundaries andslippery identities and grant no place of honor to hybridity.

Optimistic post-modern analysts view in hybridity the potential to deconstructboundaries, transcend exclusionary racial and ethnic categories and bust oppressivepolitical practices (Bhabha, 1990; Gilroy, 2000). Viewed from the standpoint of criticalsocial science, the reification and essentialization of culture in times of intense fluidityand remorseless change may seem like a vicious trick of ideology, a retrogressive retreatfrom the obvious mergers and blendings that collide with fixed categories. Yet as thisessay has shown, when claiming territory, asserting rights, or resisting the impact ofcorporate consumerism, hybridized or partial cultures will not do. Russians fearing thedilution of their distinctiveness and the Black Hebrews who experienced the cruel effectsof deculturation and racialization know that in a discursively united world in whichculture is the ultimate common denominator of humankind, having or bearing a broken


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one makes the people concerned less than human. They therefore assert, solidify anddefend their cultural uniqueness in the quest for social justice, economic opportunitiesand value in the world. ‘Facts’ of hybridity notwithstanding, culture as bound andtimeless emerges within contemporary discourse not as a luxury that can be debated,deconstructed and even bade adieu (Trouillot, 2000), but often as a matter of life anddeath.

After having demonstrated how on-the-streets desires for culture emerge from andrespond to the discourses of globalization and human rights, I now ask that we anthro-pologists take a clue from our hosts in the field and put culture back in anthropologicaltheory by taking into account the impact that it exerts on their symbolic and practicallives. Just as it was important in the 1980s to crack the discipline’s self-satisfied accept-ance of an ethnographic genre and a culture concept that did not quite work, it maynow be equally crucial to rethink anthropology’s rejection of culture in the contemporarycontext of globalization, nation-states and human rights and understand why, despite asurfeit of proof as to its partiality and constructedness, ‘having a culture’ matters sogreatly to so many people. As the examples I have presented were designed to show,nothing less than (their) humanity is at stake. Of course, this makes all culture(s)ideology. But is that the point? If it were possible in less than a century to dislodge the‘truth’ that people’s abilities come with their race and consider instead ‘the impact of theconcept of culture on the concept of man’ (Geertz, 1973: 33), then perhaps the 21stcentury offers hope that we can ‘improve upon the idea that culture exists exclusively inlocalized national and ethnic units – separate but equal in aesthetic value and humanworth’ (Gilroy, 2000: 247–8). A starting point for this endeavor is to reinsert cultureinto anthropological theory (Brumann, 1999; Yengoyan, 1986), understand its geneal-ogy and its use as a saliently politicized cultural symbol embroiled in the increasinglyuniversal globalization and human rights discourses, and then perhaps find a way tomove beyond it.

AcknowledgementsAn earlier version of this essay was first presented as ‘Talking About Culture: DisciplinaryDemise and On-the-Streets Revival’ at the November 2000 Annual Meeting of theAmerican Anthropological Association in San Francisco, California at the session,‘Locating Theory: Papers in Honor of Aram A. Yengoyan’. For better or for worse, AramA. Yengoyan introduced me to the ‘culture concept in anthropology’ and taught me tolove, appreciate, push at and flail against it. The usual disclaimers go for the content ofthis article – anything resembling brilliance or insight should be attributed to mymentors; specious theorizing or unsupportable conclusions are my own fault. Thatnoted, thanks go to Tania Forte for asking the hard questions that I have mulled overand begun to tackle, to Sara Helman and André Levy for challenging my arguments,and to Dave Edwards for unrelentingly reminding me to do something with my ‘Arampaper’. At Anthropological Theory, Jonathan Friedman, editor, and an anonymousreviewer offered encouraging remarks and helpful suggestions that I much appreciate.

Notes1 Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. Soviet nationalities policy, as formulated

by Stalin in 1913 and implemented during the 70 years of the USSR and for 40


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years among the Warsaw Pact members of Eastern Europe, rested on the definitionof nation as ‘a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on thebasis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-upmanifested in a common culture’ (Stalin, 1975 [1913]: 22). The Treaties of Versaillesand Trianon that redrew the map of central and eastern Europe after the First WorldWar were based on the supposedly emancipatory doctrine of the self-determinationof nations. The western powers, however, defined ‘nation’ in much the same way asdid the leaders of the Soviet East. Many peoples in Europe and the Middle East –most notably, perhaps, the Jews, the Kurds, and the Roma (Gypsies) – fell short ofthat definition and were not given political recognition as a state or as an ‘auton-omous republic’ within one.

2 Jonathan Friedman (2002) argues that the discourse of global interconnectednessand its linked celebration of hybridity is a positioned discourse of global elites thatmasks structures of global power while focusing on aesthetics and commodities. Thiscontention should certainly inspire further deconstruction of ‘the global’ rather thanaccepting it as the current condition (Tsing, 2000).

3 See Graeber, 2002a for an anarchistic alternative. Labeled by the mainstream pressas ‘anti-globalization’, Graeber describes this alternative as an internationalist‘movement about reinventing democracy’ (2002a: 70), demanding global justice,global citizenship, a universally guaranteed basic income and free access to new tech-nology. It is not against globalization but decidedly against corporate globalization.Terence Turner’s appeal for an ‘emancipatory cultural politics’ depends on theemerging ‘global civil society’ (1997: 282) – and not anarchy – to achieve these verygoals.

4 Of course, the ‘natural’ nature of human rights represents an ideological stance; it iscertainly not a naïve construction. Thanks to André Levy for pushing me to state,rather than assume, the obvious.

5 Unmoored individuals face tremendous difficulties in pressing rights-based claims.Preis (1996) has shown brilliantly how seepage of human rights discourse into hier-archical local cultures can spur social action based on reformulated racial, ethnic orgender identities and challenge the oppressive status quo. The ‘need’ for a collectiveidentity to support demands for dignity and valorization (and not just for claimsadjudication) is explored in the case studies of the next sections.

6 A note on methods: After years of studying Soviet Jewish immigrants in the US andIsrael, I began fieldwork in Russia with three two-week trips in 1993 and 1994.Then, from September 1995 through February 1996 I resided in Moscow andcollected ethnographic data for Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia (2000). My visitsto the Black Hebrew Community in Dimona began shortly after I arrived in Israelin September 1992, and during the 1998–1999 academic year, I took a sabbaticalin Chicago where I was able to participate in several aspects of the stateside Hebrewcommunity. The insider/outsider dilemmas of my Israel–US fieldwork among theBlack Hebrews are discussed in Markowitz, 2002.

7 Glasnost translates as ‘publicity’, or ‘openness’. Perestroika means reconstruction.8 The Jew in Eastern Europe symbolizes all that is foreign, threatening and extrane-

ous; as the sometimes ineluctable or slimy, yet always in-the-midst Other (seeBauman, 1989; Verdery, 1993).


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9 Quotations from Russian teenagers derive from Markowitz, 2000. See note 6 above.10 Of course, the Russian word magazin entered that language just a few centuries ago

from French. Univermag, department store or supermarket, is a shortened versionof universal’niy [from Latin to French to Russian] magazin. Yet to Nikolai andmillions of other Russians, these are perfectly good Russian words, used throughouthistory with no interference from abroad. Which brings us back to Friedman’scritical statement, ‘It may be hybrid-for-us but in the street or the village, things arevery different’ (2002: 28).

11 Appadurai (1996: 32) astutely notes that ‘the simplification of these many forces(and fears) of homogenization can also be exploited by nation-states in relation totheir own minorities, by posing global commoditization (or capitalism, or someother such external enemy) as more real than the threat of its own hegemonicstrategies’.

12 This is not to say that African American slaves held no agency over their thoughts,expressions and actions, or that they imagined no alternatives to their position.Quite the contrary. What is crucial here is that the slave by definition possesses nohuman rights, not even the right to his or her own labor, destiny, offspring or body.The un-freedom of slavery delineates slaves as not quite human beings; having norights in the self, slaves are solely at the mercy of their masters.

13 I must credit a conversation with AHIC Deputy Minister Haraymiel in January1999 for pushing me to see and accept this second alternative. Indeed, it has helpedme to formulate and articulate the broader argument of this article.

14 Black Hebraic congregations have dotted the American urban landscape from at leastthe beginning of the 20th century. See Landes, 1967 and Chireau, 2000.

15 Ben Ammi means ‘son of my people’ in Hebrew.16 Weekly classes continue to be offered at AHIC Institutes of Divine Understanding in

Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, DC, and on a less frequent basis in other US cities.17 ‘Israel was formerly composed of a Black race, just as the nations of Egypt, Libya

and Ethiopia are comprised of Blacks’ (Ben Ammi, 1990: 116).18 See the AHIC’s website, http://www.kingdomofyah.com/ourstory.htm.19 As to how it is that of all the dispersed people of Israel only those who arrived in

America from Africa’s west coast had ‘lost’ the holy texts and the Hebrew language,the AHIC explains that they are a special remnant that has fulfilled in its entiretythe prophecies of Deuteronomy. The established Jewish community, the Orthodoxrabbinate, and the State of Israel, however, do not accept the Black Hebrews as Jewsand view their claims to be the descendants of biblical Israelites with skepticism, tosay the least. See Markowitz, 2004 for an analysis of the AHIC’s identity assertions,and Markowitz, Helman and Shir-Vertesh, 2003 for the Black Hebrews’ struggle forcitizenship in Israel.

20 The African Hebrew Israelites are certainly not the first African Americans toidentify with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, but they are the first and thus farthe only group to have made an exodus out of America, resettled in Israel, and estab-lished a community there (see Prince Gavriel ha-Gadol and Israel, 1993; Markowitz,2004).

21 See Lambek and Boddy, 1997 for a compelling analysis of culture as something thatall peoples ‘have’ and ‘are’. This notion of culture-as-skins pervaded American


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cultural anthropology, especially its culture and personality school of the1930s–1950s, and remains salient for many, including the Black Hebrews, who areseeking recognition as a people.

22 These are enumerated as: ‘the maintenance of a vegan diet void of all animal by-products (Genesis 1: 29), the wearing of only natural fabrics – cotton, wool, linenand silk (Based on Leviticus 12: 12), the circumcision of our male children eightdays after birth (Leviticus 12: 3) and, the maintenance of the laws of purificationfor women relative to their monthly cycle and childbirth (Leviticus 12: 2–5)’. TheBlack Hebrews keep the Sabbath, celebrate the cycle of Holy Days listed in the Torahand, ‘In accordance with the prophetic return of the children of Israel (Jeremiah 23:7–8) annually . . . commemorate the historic exodus of the vanguard group whichleft the shores of America in May 1967.’

23 Stephen Howe (1998) artfully demonstrates that 20th-century Afro-centrism is asyncretic blend of Euro-American cultural motifs with (yearnings for) a prior, moreauthentic Africa.

24 Thanks to Jonathan Friedman for this phrase.

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FRAN MARKOWITZ teaches anthropology in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben-Gurion

University in Beersheva, Israel. Her current projects include an analysis of the Black Hebrews’ homecoming

to Israel and an ethnographic inquiry into Sarajevo’s cultural legacies. Address: Department of Behavioral

Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheva, Israel. [email: [email protected]]


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