Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference

Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference

1. Problems raised by the implicit mapping of cultures onto places

   • What is "the culture" of border inhabitants?
     • Disjunction of place and culture
   • Cultural differences within a locality
     • Plurality of cultures within the framework of a national identity
     • Link between identity and place
   • Question of postcolonialty
     • Where do the hybrid cultures belong?
   • Cultural and social change
     • Rethinking difference through connection
     • Space achieves identity as a place
   • Fredrich Jameson "Postmodern hyperspace"

2. Transnational public

   • New forms of cultural difference and imagining community
   • Reterritorialization of space

3. Deterritorialization of Identity

   • Edward Said "a generalized condition of homelessness"
   • Lines between "here" and "there" become blurred
   • Breaking of the connection btw. place and culture
   • Imagined communities (Anderson 1983)

4. The experience of space is socially constructed

   • Challenging two naturalisms (Malkki)
   • Analyses of nationalism

5. Cultural critique

   • Identity of the "We" = "The West"
   • Processes of production of difference
     • Power relations
     • Task of denaturalizing cultural and spacial devisions
     • Spaces and places are made (sociopolitical construction)
   • Critique of the anthrop. cult of the "Bushman" (Wilmsen 1989)
     • Kalahari was not isolated
   • Requestioning of the spatial assumptions in concepts such as "culture", "society", "community" and "nation"

6. Reconceptualization of space

   • "Cultural dominant" (Jameson 1984)
   • "Cultural style" (Ferguson 1997)
   • "The uncanny of cultural difference" (Bhabha 1989)

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