THE DISTRACTED LOOK: ETHNOCENTRISM, XENOPHOBIA OR RACISM?

THE DISTRACTED LOOK: ETHNOCENTRISM, XENOPHOBIA OR RACISM?Author(s): Michel GiraudSource: Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1987), pp. 413-419Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29790251 .

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THE DISTRACTED LOOK: ETHNOCENTRISM, XENOPHOBIA OR RACISM?

Michel Giraud

At a conference held over a decade ago,

particularly in the preface to the volume in the text in which this conference was re-published [1], Claude L6vi-Strauss attacked the abuse of

language involved in using the term "racism" to

talk about what is actually ethnocentrism, or for

that matter, even xenophobia. The need for

conceptual accuracy is academically, but not

only academically, clear enough. However, such a clarification avoids the question of whether

xenophobia is socially or morally more accept? able than racism "defined in the strict sense of the term." L6vi-Strauss' text turns on this

question, but never confronts it directly.

Recently, the extreme Right in France, with

reference to the issue of immigrant presence in

the country, took up some of these arguments, -

and this seems to me to be much more serious -

and adopted most of the basic premises of the

position developed by the internationally celebrated French anthropologist. It is in these terms that the spokesmen of the militant Right have attempted to justify the positions they adopt. They claim that they have been victims of

misrepresentation by the Left, and that far from

being racist, they are merely seeking to preserve the cultural inheritance shared by all the French. Such an extraordinary alliance between an

anthropological analysis and "nationalist"

demagoguery is a problem. The problem is

intensified because it hardly need be stated that

L6vi-Strauss has not adopted the political

position of the National Front.

But this debate which I am now entering must confront issues that go beyond The Distant Look and its author. It is important to emphasize and

re-emphasize the responsibility of intellectuals

for the possible social uses to which their analyses can be subordinated [2].

The particular problem with Ldvi-Strauss'

analysis is his banal use of the term "ethnocentrism." By reiterating one of the

"primary truths" of Race and History [3],

namely, that ethnocentrism is universal, he is led to conclude, curiously enough, that such

attitudes are inevitable and legitimate. He

reaches this conclusion, despite the fact that he is quick to define ethnocentrism as an "aberration," deriving from the "crude reac?

tions" of barbarianism [4]. Today, L6vi-Strauss sees such ethnocentric attitudes as "normal ...

legitimate ... in any event, inevitable." "It would

be fancifiil," he continues, "to imagine that

humanity could one day be liberated [from these views], or even that one would wish such a thing ... they are ... inevitable ... and at the same time

pregnant with dangers when ... exacerbated

[5]."

Obviously, L6vi-Strauss' perspective would seem to be the logical outcome of the position that he has already adopted

- "the need to

preserve the diversity of cultures in a world threatened by monotony and uniformity [6]." From this point onward he views ethnocentrism as a bulwark against the development of cultural

exchanges which produce this uniformity, and as

a guarantee of the maintenance of the diversity he sees so desirable [7]:

This profound indifference to other cultures ... is a

guarantee for them to continue to exist in their way and

manner [8].

Michel Giraud is an anthropologist at the Centre Nationale

de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.

Translated by Felicity Edholm, London.

Dialectical Anthropology, 12:413-419 (1988) ? Kluwer Academic Publishers. -



414

[The relative mcommunicability of cultures] can itself

represent the price that has to be paid for the preserva? tion and internal capacity for renewal of the value

system of each spiritual family or each community [9].

This [cultural] diversity stems in large part from the desire of each culture to oppose itself to those around it, to differentiate itself to those around it, to differentiate

itself, in a word, to be itself... in order not to perish, it is necessary that [human societies] maintain a certain

impermeability between themselves [10].

All real creation implies a certain deafness to the appeal of other values which can lead to their being refused or even negated [11].

Thus a little ethnocentrism and xenophobia -

maintained within "reasonable" bounds - a

certain closing of our frontiers (at the very least our mental frontiers) cannot be bad; in fact quite the opposite, they are necessary for the preserva? tion of our precious inheritance (and that of others elsewhere). This argument does not seem to be that remote from the discourse of Le Pen and of all those who justify their rejection of others through claiming that they are not racists but that they have the right, at home, not to like the smell of mutton or not to want their daughter to marry a foreigner. I am not the first to notice that one of the possible lessons to be drawn from the famous "right of difference" reinforces the logic of apartheid or, as Pierre Andre Taguieff has commented, that "the racism of identity

through taking over the new commonplace which is the 'hymn to difference' has gained its most recent claims to cultural legitimacy [12]."

The whole area just outlined, in particular the way in which it appears in L6vi-Strauss' text, is flawed in two respects: in terms of its argument (in which there are logical errors), and in terms of the data it employs (in which there are

anthropological misreadings). To take the last point first: it would seem that

the argument rests on a series of inadmissable inferences: These, as has been noted, lead from

normality to inevitability and, finally, to

legitimacy. To state that ethnocentrism is the one thing in the world that is most equally shared does not oblige one to conclude, as does

L6vi-Strauss, that it is therefore inevitable and that it cannot and never will be stopped. Such an argument would require evidence that eth? nocentrism is rooted in human nature, belongs to the inner mechanism of the human species, for only natural givens are inevitable, necessary and eternal. This is indeed what L6vi-Strauss attempts to argue when he locates ethncentric attitudes as derivng from a "solid psychological basis since it tends to reappear in each of us when we are put in an unexpected situation [13]," or that it is the product "of inclinations ... consubstantial to our species [14]." But his argument as stated is not proof, merely a simple postulate

- a postulate that, like any recourse to a naturalist argument in sociological analysis (which ignores the sacrosanct Durkheimian rule that the social has to be explained by the social and only the social) constitutes a statement of powerlessness insofar as it provides as an

explanation that which has itself to be explained [15].

I - along with many others - do not think that ethnocentrism (any more than xenophobia or racism) is the expression of "natural inclina? tion." Given that it is advisable to "challenge all attempts to define the truth of a cultural phenomenon independent of the system of historic and social relations in which it is inserted ... to eternalise into nature the product of history [16]," I view ethnocentrism as the (poisonous) fruit of particular systems of sociocultural relations based on relations of force and hostility, of domination and exploita? tion (of which European colonialism represents the limiting case), and that it itself helps to reproduce these relations. In other words it is a

socially determined and historically-defined phenomenon and consequently has no intrinsic necessity and no inevitable characteristics.

The fact that all social systems known today have functioned and still function to a greater or lesser extent [17] with notions of ethnocentrism in no way undermines this proposition. In fact it indicates that such an attitude cannot be overcome by developing a pedagogy of the intercultural, but only through transforming the



415

social structures that give rise to it. I am on this latter point in agreement with L6vi-Strauss when he writes: "It is not enough to produce admirable

speeches year after year to change mankind," or, "we should be wary of thinking that the diffu? sion of knowledge and the communication between men will succeed in making us live in

harmony with each other, able to accept and

respect each other's diversity ... We can only

put our hope in a change in the course of history, which is far more difficult to achieve than a

progress in the course of ideas [19]." But even here he contradicts himself: if a

"change in the course of history" can destroy or reduce ethnocentrism, it follows that the latter cannot be seen as "the product of instincts that are fundamental to the human species."

It should be added it is not necessary to enter into subtle philosophical considerations to affirm that the legitimacy of a phenomenon cannot be deduced from its necessity. The first derives from the order of Value, the second is a

property of Being. There is something deeply shocking in seeing the spread of an argument which states that an attitude or a kind of be? havior becomes legitimate when it is inevitable. A fine excuse! To claim that ethnocentrism is unavoidable - an argument which I for my part cannot accept

- does not imply that it is there? fore legitimate.

In short, L6vi-Strauss does not take account of the practical, actual reality of ethnocentrism, and this leads him to his fundamental misun?

derstanding. The roots of this misreading and the resulting errors lie in the very definition of ethnocentrism that the author of The Distant Look implicitly retains in the Preface to this work. He considers, mistakenly, that the attach?

ment of an individual to his/her culture (which is not itself ethnocentric) and the belief in the superiority of this culture (which is essential for prejudiced ethnocentrism) is one and the same attitude. He is therefore led to transfer, quite improperly, the legitimacy of the first to the second: "It is not unpardonable to place a way of thinking and living above all others and to feel

little attraction towards others whose way of life, respectable in itself, is too far from that to which one is traditionally attached [20]." Descartes however already demonstrated in his time that the legitimacy of the precept, "to live in conform?

ity with the habits and customs of one's

country" does not stem from a putative super?

iority of these customs over those of other people but - since there is cultural relativism -

in the simple convenience of finding oneself in agreement with the norms and values of the country in which one lives.

Once having confused the attachment that a person feels for his or her own culture with the belief in the superiority of this culture, the danger of this belief becomes L6vi-Strauss' blind point. Such an analysis ignores (or rather underestimates) the fact that with the exploita? tion of man by man and in countries of immigra? tion, to believe that one is superior to others implies not only pride in one's own values and insensitivity to those of others [21], but also, equally, leads to the militant rejection of those others. It is here that ethnocentrism is always accompanied by xenophobia; and it is here that

perhaps the major distinction between the ethnocentrism of so-called primitive peoples becomes evident, that simple "indifference to the culture of others" which L6vi-Strauss refers to so often [22]. Ethnocentrism is not in our societies a simple passive attitude, a benign option that can be cultivated for oneself. It comes out of a negative activity, repressive practices, discrimination, and segregation. Ethnocentrism is an opinion but, as burning realities reveal, it is one that kills and maims.

Furthermore, when it is dressed up in a powerful

proselytism, it produces contempt and hatred for those of "us" who dare meet "the others." The

counsel of moderation by L6vi-Strauss when he writes that the relative incommunicability of cultures "does not of course allow the oppres? sion or destruction of the values that one rejects nor their representatives, but, if it is kept within these limits, there is nothing shocking about it [23]," seem, in this context, like the naivetes of



416

the sorcerer's apprentice. One cannot bless the embers and at the same time cry fire before the

conflagration. The statements made by Ldvi-Strauss that we

have criticized seem to us even more sad since

they are inspired, quite sincerely, by what seems to us to be an unjustified fear. We can briefly recall the terms in which the

author of Race and History formulates this fear: the process of all cultural progress is contradic?

tory to the extent that it is the result of the communalization [voluntary or involuntary] of

aspects of different cultures which, by the

simple fact of their merging (homogenization) tend to lose their initial diversity

- which was

precisely what made their being put together so fruitful.

Such an argument seems to us to sin through oversimplification. We too feel that it is highly desirable that the diversity of cultures should be

preserved, but we do not see why the develop? ment of cultural exchanges has to be fatal, why it forces this diversity to disappear, nor why it

necessarily leads to its reduction. The anthropology of cultural contacts has

clearly established that all traits borrowed from a "donor" culture are inevitably reinvented

(Herskovits) by the recipient culture according to its proper genius

- in its own way, on its own

terms. All borrowing is at the same time, as

Andrew Leroi-Gourhan has shown for technol?

ogy, an invention. In cultural exchange it is not

the Same which is diffused and repeated but the New, the Other, which is produced through using the traditional resources of the different

exchanging cultures. Such an exchange certainly puts different contributions together and puts them into a new configuration, but in this

process none of the things that have been

brought stay exactly as they are; they are transformed through mixing with the others. The end result cannot be identified with anything similar in its origins (nor to all the disparate parts put end to end). For example Jazz - which is essentially synchretic music - cannot be reduced to either European or African music,

nor to the juxtaposition of those two; again the

"Franco-Algerian Mix" of France, cannot be

reduced to its constituent elements. The same movement of cultural contact which destroys ancient diversities also produces new ones. L6vi

Strauss only seems able to retain the negative aspect of this movement [26].

He seems to argue as though he wanted to freeze the cultural diversity that exists now and preserve it at all costs. It is as if cultural con? tacts, which for millenia have been rich and

productive, had suddenly mysteriously ceased

being the source of all the advances of

humanity:

The chaos caused by the expansion of industrial civilisation, the rapidity of the means of transport and communication have broken down the barriers . . .

which enabled cultural experiences to be elaborated and

put to the test, have disappeared [27].

L6vi-Strauss experiences a similar uncertainty when faced by the growth of cultural mixes -

this is also a feature, in the form of an uncondi? tional rejection, of the arguments of the New

Right - and this leads him to see discrimination

as useful (even if he does not admit its

legitimacy).

Now we cannot hide the fact that, despite the urgent

practical necessity and the high moral ends that the fight against all discrimination assigns to itself, it is still part of the same movement that is leading humanity towards

a world civilization; one which would destroy all the old

particularisms around which the honor of having created the aesthetic and spiritual values which give value to

life and that we store meticulously in libraries and in museums because we feel less and less capable of

producing them [28].

It is important however not to veer from one excess straight into another. Cultural contacts are not all, at any time and place, whatever their methods, necessarily and absolutely good. They can also, and often do, produce deculturation, and cultural impoverishment.

But it is not the development, increasing frequency, greater speed and greater ease, in and of themselves -

as, in a rather mechanical



417

fashion, L6vi-Strauss seems to think [29] - that are the important elements in the negative effects of these contacts. Rather it is the

unequal, oppressive nature of the social relations in the context of which these exchanges take

place that is the problem. The groups that borrow have always

- including situations in

which cultural imposition has been brutal, such as slavery or modern migratory labor - had a certain capacity to reinterpret and reinvent the borrowed thing or things; all forms of contact are not however inevitably equal. In the same

way the dangers of deculturation are not the same for all groups. What are the risks of the "Islamisation" of the "real" French compared to

those of the Maghrebian children in France of

becoming little French children (even if they are

entirely separate)? One cannot, in an abstract fashion, pose the problem of "cultural unifor?

mity" at the planetary level - if this is a problem - without stating that there are certain groups that are more threatened by it than others.

So, since it is vitally important for each culture to open itself to others (as L6vi-Strauss affirmed in Race and History), to what must it, so imperatively, be opened? The problem is to maintain the number and or the intensity of cultural contacts (in any case how could we do this?), so as not to reestablish a certain im?

penetrability of cultures and their relative

incommunicability (which allows the anthropologist to maintain his/her position as

interpreter!). The purpose is to restore, through structural changes, the sovereignty of those

groups which are the borrowers in the cultural

exchange, and the equality of all the partners of this exchange. Xenophobia

- which furthermore does not favor the relative but the total incom?

municability of culture - is certainly not produc? tive; acculturation can be if it occurs between groups which both recognize their equal dignity and mutually respect each others' freedom. So

why cannot the dream, which L6vi-Strauss seems not to believe in any more, be realized?: "The dream that equality and fraternity will

reign one day among men without their diversity

being compromised [30]." Why could not the demands of "faithfulness to oneself and opening towards others" the "creative affirmation of each

identity" and the rapprochement between all cultures be reconciled? These hopes today seem to be rejected by the author of The Distant Look [31]. The real alternative is not in the caricature that L6vi-Strauss gives us when he writes; "one can at the same time fuse with the joy of another, identify with him and keep oneself separate [32]."

Are assumed ethnocentrism or asserted

xenophobia, in the last analysis, so very different from racism, as L6vi-Strauss so rigorously insists? To give importance to such a distinction

means giving a certain respect to racism by taking its pseudo-scientific jargon seriously. In fact it is not a scientific theory of race (could there be such a thing? Claude L6vi-Strauss, like

many others, quite rightly doubts there could be) which the discourse of racism refers to. Racism, which is par excellence ideological, always addresses us in terms other than those of race. It is the language of domination: "race constitutes in racist ideology a biological form used as a

sign. Race has to be seen as a signifler which is manipulable in the symbolic order... A category which carries the mark of biology but which is essentially sociological, one whose object is to mask its relations with power in society [33]." In this it is no different basically from other forms of intolerance such as xenophobia or eth? nocentrism (at least in modem societies), as L6vi-Strauss sees when he writes

Are we so sure that the racial form taken by intolerance

results initially from false ideas that a given population holds on the dependence of cultural evolution on

organic evolution? Do not these ideas rather provide simply an ideological cover for more real oppositions that are based on the desire to enslave and the relations of force? ...

Minority cultures ... are not distinguished from the mass of the population by race but only through their ways of life, their morality, their hairstyles and clothes; how substantially different are the feelings of repulsion and of hostility that many of them inspire from racial hatred, will we therefore really help people if all we do is dissipate the specific prejudices on which



418

these hatreds alone, understood in the strict sense of the

term, can be said to rest? [34]

But why make it a point of honor to distinguish between realities that are so similar?

The extreme Right is in no position to

complain that it is attacked for its racism, since it is only concerned about defending "Western culture." Is it not the only group to confuse Race and Culture by making the Indoeuropean cultural inheritance a genetic quasi-inheritance? When the young "beur" or the young second

generation Antillais, in the process of "specific francoisation," is beaten up by police is it his/her culture or his/her appearance that is stigmatized?

What are these "unassimilable cultures" if not "races?".

To incorporate ethnocentrism and xenophobia into racism undoubtedly, from an academic

point of view, leaves unresolved the terminologi? cal confusion, but it nonetheless constitutes an undeniable practical truth.

NOTES

1. C. Levi-Strauss, Preface and "Race et Culture/* in Le

Regard tloigni (Paris: Pl?n, 1983), pp. 11-17,21-48

("Race et Culture" first published in Revue Inter? nationale de Sciences Sociales, 1971, XXVII, 4, pp.

647-666. (All references are to works by Claude

Levi-Strauss, unless otherwise cited).

2. "It is a fact that it (philosophical discourse) can have

political implications that must, insofar as it is

possible, be anticipated before circumstances reveal

them ... In fact what I am protesting about is the

simultaneous lack of subtlety in the determination and the anticipation of these consequences and the totally irresponsible way of dissociating oneself from them once it has happened through stating that one did not

understand that it was possible. Philosophers must

realise that their texts cannot be read exclusively by

specialists ...," (J. Bouveresse in Le Monde

Aujourd'hui, 19 Feb. 1984, p. xv.) 3. C. Levi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris:Gonthier

-

Bibliotheque Mediations, 1961) (first published in La

Question Raciale Devant la Science Moderne (Paris, UNESCO: Gallimard, 1952); see in particular pp. 19-23.

4. "The Barbarian is above all the man who believes in

barbarism,"/tai., p. 22.

5. Preface to Le Regard tXoigni, op. cit., pp. 15-16 (my emphasis). This change of opinion merits particular attention since it is deliberate and presented by its author as a correction of what might have been excessive over defensive in Race and History (see Ibid., pp. 13-16).

6. Race and History, op. cit. (1961), p. 84. 7. It should be remembered that according to Levi

Strauss, cultural diversity is desirable more because

particular cultures enrich "world civilization," than because of their diversity: "The real contribution of cultures consists not in the list of their individual inventions, but in the differential variations between them ..." because "to the extent that it is on its own a

culture like an isolated player ... it succeeds only in little series of some elements and the probability that a

long series could arise in its history (although it cannot theoretically be excluded) is so remote that we would need more time than it has taken for the whole

development of mankind for it to take off [Ibid, pp. 76, 70])." This latter argument is found almost word for word in "Race et Culture," op. cit. (1983), pp. 39-40.

8. "Race et Culture," op. cit. (1983), p. 26. 9. Preface to "Le Regard ?loign6," op. cit., (1983), p.

15.

10. Ibid. 11. "Race et Culture," op. cit., (1983), p. 47. 12. "Alain de Benoist, Philosophe," Les Temps Modernes

451 (1984), p. 1463. 13. Race etHistoire, op. cit. (1961), p. 19. 14. Preface to "Le Regard fsloigne," op. cit., p. 16. 15. This assertion is for us all the more surprising and

bitter since we know how much anthropology

(particularly the anthropology of kinship) owes, in terms of the refutation of naturalist theses, to Levi

Strauss' remarkable analysis, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, of the incest taboo, and at a broader level, to his "sociological" theory of marriage.

16. P. Bourdieu, J.C. Chamboredon and J.C. Passeron, Le

Metier de Sociologue, (Paris: Mouton/Bordas, 1968), p. 42.

17. With reference to ethnocentrism or racism, these

processes are not experienced to the same extent in all

societies: the fact that, for example, European democracies in 1984 are not without anti-semitism still does not allow one to state that the position the Jews occupy within these democracies is the same as that which they occupied in Nazi Germany. In the same way, all the individuals of the same society are not afflicted to the same extent with ethnocentric

prejudices; some do not even possess them. Those

who are most involved - the victims of prejudice and

the discrimination that frequently accompanies it - are

only too well aware of the difference!



419

18. Preface to Le Regard tloigni, op. cit (1983), p. 16. 19. "Race et Culture," op. cit. (1983), pp. 46,48. 20. Preface to Le Regard tloigni, op. cit. (1983), p. 15

(my emphasis). Here again Levi-Strauss is far from the positions adopted in Race and History: "We touch here on the absurdity of declaring that one culture can be superior to another," op. cit. (1961), p. 70.

21. Preface to Le Regard tloigni, op. cit. (1983), p. 15. 22. See Race and History, op. cit. (1961), pp. 20-22 and

"Race et Culture," op. cit. (1983), p. 26. It should be noted here that at rare points in his text, Levi-Strauss sees the importance of this distinction. Thus he writes

Insofar as cultures keep themselves different

they can either voluntarily ignore each other or see themselves as partners in a desired dialogue. In either case they sometimes threaten and attack each other, but without really putting their

respective existences at risk. The situation is

entirely different when one of them replaces the notion of difference that each recognizes in the other by a sense of superiority based on relations of force and when the positive or negative recognition of the diversity of cultures is replaced by the assertion of their inequality ("Race et

Culture," op. cU. (1983), p. 27). But then how can this statement be reconciled with his

previous statement of the illegitimacy of ranking cultures from inferior to superior (see above)?

23. Preface to Le Regard tloigni, op. cit (1983), p. 15.

24. My colleague Jean-Luc Jamard has commented that in

good structuralist logic one would expect this intercultural entropy to have as a correlate an

intracultural non-entropy (see in this context G.

Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Claude Levi-Strauss

(Paris: Plon-Juilliard, 1961). 25. See "L'Immigration Maghrebine en France, les Faites

et les Mythes," Les Temps Modernes, nos. 452, 453, 454 (1984), pp. 1707-1725.

26. This should be seen in relation to the "anthropological pessimism" which is a profound theme nirming through Levi-Strauss* work in general; e.g., anthropol?

ogy defined as "entropology." 27. "Race et Culture," op. cit. (1983), p. 47. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., pp. 47-48. 30. Ibid., p. 47. 31. Preface to Le Regard tloigni" op. cit. (1983), p. 16. 32. "Race et Culture," op. cit. (1983), p. 47. 33. M. Labelle, "Ideologie de couleur et classes sociales

en Haiti (Montreal: Universite de Montreal, 1978), p. 18. See on this point the important work of Colette

Guillaumin, L'Ideologie raciste, Genese et langage actuel (Paris: Mouton, 1972), and for a particular case, M. Giraud, Races et Classes a la Martinique (Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1979) and J-L. Jamard, "Reflexions sur la Racialisation des Rapports Sociaux en Martinique," Archipelago 3-4 (1983), pp. 47-78.

34. "Race et Culture," op. cit. (1983), pp. 43-44.



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THE DISTRACTED LOOK: ETHNOCENTRISM, XENOPHOBIA OR RACISM?