MULTICULTURED COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE RHYTHMS OF ETERNAL MYSTERY

MULTICULTURED COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE RHYTHMS OF ETERNAL MYSTERY.

by Nikos Gousgounis Social Anthropologist Ph.D. Sociologist M.A.
Senior Researcher of European Union Multicultural Education Programmes
Greek Ministry of Education
Athens
Greece



What is the meaning of cultural identity under actual post-modern conditions? How this notion once favourite in classical anthropological and ethnographic inquiry, could be defined under recent globalizing circumstances and media explosion? We chose the Egyptian example in order to study this subject for multiple reasons: First, to explore the powerful myth of North/South under cultural terms and how does this myth still operate as related to western as well as to eastern eyes. Egypt figured as the corner in the southern edge of the classic Mediterranean Greco-Latin and then European world.
In the same time, Egypt remains an oriental place par- excellence in the popular imagery of Europeans. This double locality permits Egypt to figure as a LIMIT of the "civilised expansion". It is a land that produced the first important civilisation and that actually serves as the south-eastern margin of actual civilisation. The consequence of this double geographical identity has also its cultural analogues : Glorious Antiquity and Islamic religious mentality. Second, as a tourist site of mass tourist interest, Egypt demonstrates a double quality of traditionally sacred and modern country where past and present coexist. The illusory tourist advertisement for this country, focus on the pyramidal shape of its classical monuments and ignore actual Islamic reality. The fragmentality of our media habits, combines Pyramids with luxurious hotels and to the popular imagery of mass tourists, Egypt is a land created to host visitors as a representation of its past enveloped with climatization and clean food. But the reality of the Egyptian double culture waits in the crowded streets and in the terrorist tourist killings that made the president of USA to announce his famous guidelines of unsafe countries for American tourists aiming to visit the country. Actual tourists, need to feel free with their credit cards in the pocket free from obligations and ready to know new things as prepared by the group guides. Respecting theoretically the rights of the inhabitants to be "different" the post-modern tourists remain completely indifferent to these inhabitants' habits while visiting themselves huge museums and pyramids. We shall try to demonstrate in our analysis that a journey to the quasi-mythological, quasi-actual Egyptian Otherness cannot but be elliptic, plural and infinite, briefly a journey to a non hierarchical Difference. However, there are much more interesting aspects of Otherness encounters during an Egyptian adventure. Is it accidental that the most successful and powerful spirit of cosmopolitanism blossomed once in this land under the name of Alexandrism ? This spirit that reproduced itself till recently, permitted the amalgamation of many different cultures under the same sun while encouraging the importation of foreign cultural models without loosing the older ones. This model of a tolerant cosmopolitanism is radically opposite to usual models of domination of one cultural model on another so common in analogous cases in Europe or America. The Alexandrian -or the par excellence cosmopolitan-served as the ideal model of the person who could feel easily "at home" while in his place and receiving foreign imported models, as well as while abroad where he could easily export his own cultural model without willing to dominate the local people. This quality of internationalism includes various risks. One has to pay the "tax" of his personal freedom of choices and decisions or his ethical qualities or abilities to enter and "live" in the position of the "OTHER". Living in the liminality of borders or even reducing physical and cultural borders, a real cosmopolitan risks to be always misinterpreted himself by intolerant fanatics ( as Hypatia, the eminent Greek Philosopher who was killed by Christian crowds in Alexandria in the late Hellenistic era.). The only risk that this type of person never faces, is the risk to be alienated by being absorbed by his own and unique cultural model. He can be "aliated" or differentiated, but never alienated. What does this lesson of "in located" cosmopolitanism can teach us, post-modern massive or not visitors to a land of Eternity ? What is the difference of the classical Alexandrian with the today's visiting cosmopolitan (if exists) ? Maybe the criterium for classifying a visitor in this category, in his potential capability to distinguish, the original cultural forms from the pre-fabricated ones for tourist use. Certainly, this visitor's interpretation of the originality will be partially influenced from all "representative mechanics" that have stored stereotype material in his mind since his early school days with all the illusions hat this knowledge may concern. After his return from his visit, this sensitive visitor will realise that the "real Egypt" is still far from his vision but, this vision has been greatly ameliorated due to his visit and personal encounters to the Egyptian otherness.
There is also, a last important point concerning the Egyptian "riddle" : The interconnection of it's landscape with the temporal dimension as expressed by the eternal cyclic rhythms. Time is perceived as a most different quality and the way that people are moving in this land has many common points with the Freudian notion of fort-da, or in other words the childish game of appearance /disappearance. If the temporal dimension as complementary to the spacial one, is responsible for the coexistence of two cultural identity of tolerant cosmopolitanism-if not alienated by religious fanaticism-then, we must admit that this dimension is very important. It was known from the Antiquity that the whole country -that means the cultivated Nile valley-was appearing and disappearing annually after the river's floods. Imported (Soviet) technology succeeded in early sixties to tame the monster by constructing the huge dam of Asswan. Human arrogance and political interests neglected that in long term Nature is always winning. The deadline for this kind of constructions that not surpass 50 years of life, is approaching and Egypt will experience after some years, its eternal cyclic rhythms. There is not much place for organised and hierarchical discipline in this land and tourists have noticed long ago, the paradoxe and impossible to be explained -under western eyes-phenomenon of circulatory chaos in Cairo, where nobody respects signalization, but all try to get priority in cross-roads or circuses by corning. And yet there are not accidents reported in this chaotic way of circulation as if the gods of Egypt favour this irrational spacio-temporal system. This interesting quality of Egyptian people, perfectly adapted to their land's spacio-temporal particularities reflects to their cultural multipolarity resulting from their geographical-historical context. This aspect of life that a real cosmopolitan realises at once because it is a prerequisite of his very cosmopolitanism, has been kept in shadow and neglected by tourist advertisement that keep reproducing the illusory stereotype model of an immobile glorious past periodized after Pharaonic dynasties and demonstrated by static mommies in the modern cemeteries of culture that are the well climatised museums.

Knowledge and Geography in the postmodern era

Egypt has been through centuries the legendary land of first civilisation. However this birthplace of old cultures and human skills sealed by monumental constructions, has never ceased to produce new cultural forms. Under Arab occupation, the miracle of Islamic culture started from Egypt toexpand to all directions. Egyptian cosmopolitanism is interior that meaning that one has to live in this land to feel as a citizen of the World. Multiple cultures had all the times the quality to coexist and blossom not to speak about religions. Today the old tradition and the practical cult of Islam coexist in the most harmonious way permitting to speak about a "double culture" of Egyptians who live in both past and present historical levels following the eternal rhythms of the Nile river. It seems that every foreign influence is impotent to change this slow rhythm of evolving and that the occidental values' crisis has no place in Egypt. The famous declaration of an occidentalised Japanese(1) about the " end of History" in 1989 soon after the fall of the Soviet Empire and the end of superpowers' competition, has small effect in a land of eternal rhythms where History follows its own path. The question raised in this book related to the otherness aspect during journeys, is in its depth a problem of knowledge of what the newcomer must acquire if he really intends to approach the "different other", That makes a problem of Geography since visiting new landscapes , one needs to adapt himself to new conditions related to climatological and geographical issues. However, physical Geography is subordinated to the cultural and social reality of a living population in lands such as Egypt, where every corner of landscape " has its own past and present history to narrate" and the human seal is heavy everywhere. Some claims about the decline of the importance of physical borders under post-modern technological information (such as the creation of new virtual spaces) cannot but seem naive in countries as Egypt. Visitors think that before coming they know everything about the infinite past but they soon discover that they know nothing about the present. This is not an illusion of time but also of space. Human encounters are proved to be more important than impersonal
information flow among terminals. Time gains new value and one week's time is more crucial than a year on the computer. The space is re-discovered through cultural ways since space inhabited by humans is not impersonal as information about this same space might be. The "experimental space " as said by Mannheim to define the knowledge as produced by specific groups or communities, proves itself to be more powerful than our actual virtual realities propagated through the chaotic boardless and limitless Cyberspace. We have been accustomed to live in a phantasmagoric space that we suppose to govern ( cyber from Greek cybernetes ,the governor) but in the reality we cannot manage even our human rhythms much influenced by the artificial and mechanical information flow through the Net. But the space is reanimated the same as our sense of time while meeting real -and different- human beings who are accustomed through centuries to take life rather as a game of bargain and offer using the same fort/da mechanism of the children game as described by FreudIn this place , people walk all together in big crowds carrying their kids with them never daring to leave them afar from them because simply they need to be all together. When accounting or meeting somebody known or unknown, they walk directly on him trying to touch him, looking directly tothe eyes and proposing offers. Even merchants at the central bazaar propose three times higher prices just to have the pleasure to diminish it afterwards during the customary Arab bargain and to run after the customer proposing new offers. All these movements and interactions , hold a much different aura than our common occidental ways and their paradoxical logic give new dimensions to our experience. But who are " we" if not the tired citizens of the suburban metropolis of the "western rationale", who adore the speed and the fragmentary representation of reality through illusive and simulating Media and who carry our boredom and alienation of our meaningless aims even while visiting the much proposed "Otherness"? We tend to believe all the simulative constructions of false myths as created by tricky tourist agents the same as we follow the everyday idiocy of our pluralist and "democratic" Media and yet we accept to act like that even if we know the reasons and the results of our acts ! Our alienation is mainly an alienation of knowledge, since we cannot seize its real meaning and wecontinue to confuse it with the falsificatory information. Our educational systems never attempted to teach us methods of transforming this information to useful knowledge and even how to make our selections. We are not educated even into selecting our interests. But interest has lost also its strict sense that was " to look to the different and to appropriate it" in Greek. Since we have no interests for knowledge how could we approach the otherness and all the difference it might include ? Knowledge means also the acquaintance with the other person and the mutual understanding during the very act of the interaction that will follow the meeting. Interpretation comes after. Instead of that in our occidental utilitarian and individualistic rationale, we criticise and judge the acts of the others from a distance of personal security and our interpretations presented as critical and objective is the most subjective are arbitrary at their most.Egyptian double culture and double Myth through ages.The Egyptian paradox of cosmopolitanism is combined with the parallel construction of a double myth
That of the classical Antiquity and that of the Islamic cornerstone. Egyptians learned to accept foreigners among them while developing the notion of what Ibn Chaldoun named UMRAN (e.g. thefundamental all-embracing culture) resulting to creative forms of intercultural exchange and influence Ibn Chaldoun a Tunisian born intellectual himself, who spent the most fruitful part of his intellectuallife in Cairo, during the 14th century, calls Egypt "the mother of the World, the Palace of Islam and the source of all arts and sciences". Today, claims for return to the " purity" of the original or native cultural trends has been recently established by both Western scholars and Egyptian intellectuals. However, unless one understands the very essence of cosmopolitan amalgamation process through various historical periods, one cannot interpret successfully neither Egyptian Antiquity nor Islamic Orientalism. The cultural classification of the Other as exercised by cultural Anthropologists of local cultures, attempting to the betterunderstanding of the Other , and thus of doing less injustice to the indigenous people, brought about but a false framework of local culture and religion which neglected a long tradition of productive intercultural exchanges and influences. By the act of isolation of a local indigenous culture and its reduction to its supposed original historical "source" the external observers misinterpreted the spherical way of creation of this culture as result of a cosmopolitan cultural interaction among differentpeoples during the past Outsiders as observers of the " local" provided or invested very simply their own imageries on what was supposed to be the" essence" and the " real" of the culture of the Other. In fact they projected their own cultural traditions creating a pseudo-image of" Orientalism in reverseBy these means it is not paradoxical how a crossroad of cultural exchanges such as Egypt, served as the ideal locus for the construction of falsificatory myths that preserved all their DOUBLE character : The remote past and the actual reality. Both were falsified for the same reason : That the constructors of these myths did never realised that a culture is never the creation of an isolated people but it is rather the fruit of multicultural exchanges. What was attempted to be demonstrated as pure and original cultural trend, was in reality the indirect product of a multicultural interaction encouraged by the traditional tolerance and openness to every new that composed the true essence of cosmopolitanism.
Starting from nineteenth century German classificatory Ethnology and Orientalism (2) aiming to understand more deeply the "soul" of the oriental Other , and preserving all along the twentieth century the trend of classificatory externalization of alien cultures, western scholars and explorers of the "exotic Orient" contributed to the creation of the double Egyptian puzzle presented as paradoxical reality long ago before the coming of the tourist era. Some of the indigenous intellectuals trappedthemselves too in the same logic while trying to penetrate to the Orientalism riddle using hermeneutic methodology inspired from western rationale. The so called " going native" approaches, much inspired from Weberian arm-chair comparative interpretation of Religion (3 ) ignored in their claim for purity and authenticity by " indigenisation" the very simple fact that the local knowledge presented as original had undergone a long process of amalgamation with global structures in the remote past. Thus thequest for the " essentialization" of local truth is a falsificatory game of representation of western truths and their transposition to less studied settings such as Orient. For example actual trends in western cultural ( or better inter-cultural studies ) search to prove that the only alternative to explain the failure of malfunctions within social structures of oriental countries cannot be but the religious one. Local cultures under this point of view ,failing to be compatible with the modern (or post-modern) structuresof the nation-state, owe this failure to their peoples' apparently much different conception of power/knowledge. Thus the study for the discovery of their Otherness needs to be directed towards, the quasi mystical quasi spiritual/ritual exercise of their religious cults. Neglecting the long evolution of secular thought developed through the long course of Islamic civilisation , ( manifested by reason in science, philosophy and political theory under the very influence of Aristotelism) these
"one -dimensional " interpretations , ignore also that in Islam, fundamentalist movements have a long tradition of alternatives for the social development of the regions under consideration.(4)
Under these terms, one can see fundamentalist movements as modernising attempts to evolve Islamic Orthodoxy, the same as Protestantism evolved Catholicism towards a more secular way of practical life- style promoting the rise of the capitalistic spirit after the famous Weberian interpretation. In other words religion that is usually seen as source of spiritual; and traditional life, has in fact promoted in Islam modes of cosmic approach in social structures and everyday life.The simulating world of accelerating images and the eternal Orient The western triumphing model of commercialised life owes its success mainly on the principle of visual representation by the means of images starting from religious icons and terminating to video-clips and advertising pictures. However, the cultural trend of visual; representation has not ananalogue in traditional cultures. In Islamic tradition images had been banned from the very beginning for obvious religious reasons and recent technological media of massive emissions such as television have never been successful. Impressions were never transmitted through popular arts or anymeans of theatrical presentations.. Innocent games of imitation turning to simulative technics through western mass media are the real causes of alienation of meanings and aims for millions of paralysed tele-spectators under their falsificatory aesthetics. The abundant fragmented informationpropagated by the means of short advertisement shots do not permit to the already passive audiences to concentrate to a specific meaning and penetrate to its depth. This general atmosphere of accelerated cult of the fragmented information under their simulative imitation of reality has greatlyinfluenced the style of tourist promotion in the West. Using the same method as for mass-mediated advertisement, tourist promotion, develops the aesthetics of carte-postale and turns the promised Otherness of the desired destination into consumption good. Under the logic of super-marketpromotion, the eventual tourists behave as ideal consumers of images and preserve the same mentality during their real transfer in the place of their touring destination. Consuming images, but not participating in the REAL LIFE of the visited places, western tourists of the Otherness manifest oncemore the insecurity syndrome of western individuality much more while expressed under collective means( necessary adaptation to the group regulation that never terminates to true development of social relations with the other members of the group )For the host population the influence of such an attitude from the part of visitors could be dramatic if the image cult had the same power in their local cultures. In Islam this is not the case as said before and native population accept perplexed the extravagant attitude of the newcomers fascinated to photograph every possible aspect of their reality transporting it to the realm of simulation and copy. There are many cases of traditionally dressed natives who pose professionally for photos asking standardised sums of money for their " services" yet this fact not proving their comprehension to what exactly the Others (visitors) are doing or are intending to do.Summarizing, the aesthetic vision of the western cultural model does not enable to the average tourist to penetrate to the "difference' of the local Otherness while visiting it. The reason is obvious : the difference stands between his stereotyped aesthetic vision and the opposing aesthetics of the host country. This crucial difference cannot be bridged by the artifice of globalization as proposed by West after 1989 due mainly to the collapse of Sovietism and the end of the cold war competition But we need to examine now the reasons of the creation of our "different vision" as related with foreign or exotic (exterior) local cultures opposed and resisting to the functionning of an Universal Globalization model.Old U-topias and post-modern Globalization.There is an old Greek example of what illusion can be. The spatial analogy with the privation or loss of a certain locus this non site ( ou-topos) giving to the fantastical land of Utopia is used to describe theimpossibility of the proof of a certain truth as is expressed by a theoretical idea. Topos means a personal idea before taking the shape of a public idea ( koinos topos) and its demonstratory impossibility marks the realm of Utopia.Western cultural building consider time and space as linear entities of one and three dimensions respectively, resulting to a certain (fruitful ) progress However, in the " primitive" collective conscience of traditional peoples, neither time nor space have the same linear plus progressivemeaning. The (eternal) myth of the eternal return as a derivative of circular time, has its analogue in the indefinite mythological space that popular lore describe as the site of living for gods and heroes. Thisunlimited space, serves also as the site for the after-death life ( "au dela" or far from here in French). In places such as Egypt where traditional life style succumbed to the rhythms of a natural powerfulelement such as the Big River, space and time acquired their sense through the periodical movements of this natural force. Topographical sites defined as fields were periodically appearing and disappearing from and under the river's waters and this latency of existence marked the creation of local legends and religion. What we call culture today is nothing more than the marriage of rhythms to the “Koinoi Topoi“ or public ( common) ideas shared by all communities' members as propagated by popular religion and its corresponding rituals.The problem posed during all ages was the result of the multiple possible encounters of peoples carrying different conceptions of time and space. The important question is : In what loci these encounters had been "taking place". We suggest that the host country gives to the outsiders thesentiment of being different and "other" before the meeting with its representative habitants and their culture. Strangers who managed in the past ages to " adapt" their conceptions and ideas to these of their host country, CREATED or discovered new differences or interests and advanced arts and science to a considerable degree. In the contrary , strangers who came as passengers, to destroy, steal and use the local resources, did not influence the host land by their passage and they were not influenced byits culture themselves too. They looked to the host country's rhythms and sites "under their eyes " and they nothing understood from their visit. Globalised tourism, of nowadays can serve as an analogue while being served by all the technological and financial facilities to penetrate to the hostOthernesses , currying its tourists with the minimum of risk and the maximum of profit, maintaining and securing the standard models of aesthetics for its agents -now called as customers"-and taking from them the optimal supervalue needed as a price for its services. But globalization is rather a contextualartefact serving more as an alibi for post-modern intellectuals who intend to assure all potential tourists that the whole Globe is securated under the capitalist monopolisation of values ( financial esthetical and moral). Its claims for global expand of the SAME against all possible local particularities consist rather the most modern aspect of U-topian beliefs or ideas. Intellectual illusions propose security while propagated as quality of life models by the media aiming to the increase of travel business aroundthe planet.Once , foreigners were considered by the natives as divine because of their scarcity. Today the things have been reversed. Natives are considered as rare especially in highly crowded tourist areas where more tourists gather to visit the much advertised locations where real natives no more exist butthey pretend to be there as representatives of a supposed to be tradition while they serve in reality the tourist industry.
However, there are some other aspects of actual lifestyles in the Western cultural system of values as moderated by technology and late mass-media and cybespace communications, that highlight new points of conceptions characterised as post-modern ideas of a post -industrialised affluenturbanised World tired of being "progressively( linearly) developed "and nostalgizing the "innocent" past of its insecure rural (feudal) origins. These lifestyles much influenced by the new ecological conception of alternative development and ecosystems' protection create a new current ofeco-tourism in which participants in small groups, concentrate their efforts in the respectful pilgrimage of menaced locationsNotes
1/ Francis Fukuyama The end of History
2/ We refer to the Diffusionist School of Social Anthropology as developed in the beginnings of the
20th century in Germany by Fritz Graebner and Wilhelm Schmidt.
3/ Max Weber: The Religion of China, The Religion of India, Ancient Judaism.
4/ Edward Said : Orientalism