Futures 31 (1999) 475485

Essay

Cultural identities and practices of community

Ian J. Grand*
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California, USA

Abstract How can people from different cultures collaborate effectively? How can we imagine joint futures when we come from radically different background? Is cultural diversity an asset or a hindrance to effective collaboration? Is celebrating cultural diversity enough? This essay explores these questions by discussing the problems of convergence and diversity in communities as they relate to possible futures. It examines some examples of successful collaborative ventures, raises numerous problems and questions, and suggests that cultures always reinvent traditions. We can learn to practice community if we learn to practice difference. 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

This is an extraordinary time of conuence. During October 1998 in San Francisco, for example, the new Integrative Center for Culture and Healing had its Grand Opening. The Center, which aims to to integrate the best of complementary and traditional (indigenous) medicine with conventional western medicine, brings together acupuncturists, herbalists, curanderos, body workers of various kinds, alternative healing practitioners and Western medicine physicians at St. Lukes Hospital in the citys Mission district. In the opening event, people from vastly different backgrounds celebrated this cooperative enterprise with ceremonies derived from various traditions. The Episcopal Bishop of San Francisco, dressed in red and white robes, mixed waters from San Francisco, Lourdes and Jacobs well in Israel in a chalice and then sprinkled these mixed healing waters over the crowd. Thomas One Wolf, a Native American healer from Taos, New Mexico, invoked the powers of

* Address correspondence to: 1139 Green Street, San Francisco, CA 94909, USA. Tel.: 1-415-6745500; fax: 1-415-561-0307; e-mail: IanGrand@aol.com and iang@ciis.edu
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the directions as he drummed and chanted and burned sage. He buried a packet of medicine in the Hospital ground and said that it was a good day when we all came together to do this good. Concha Saucedo, Executive Director of Instituto Familiar de la Raza, burned sacred copal and also called to the directions and chanted, evoking the powers of the Raza. There was a dancing procession down the street from the hospital to the Center ofces in which Loco Blanco, a group of Afro-Brazilian drummers played, women walked on stilts and a group of community artists and puppeteers led the parade. We all followed, dancing in celebration. This was a joyous event in which people from a variety of medicines, healing practices and spiritual understandings came together to celebrate and announce their programme to heal both the community and the individuals in it. Indeed, one of the things that has been impressive about this initiative has been the ability of the project to attract and sustain interest from a wide range of community activists and practitioners who themselves come from a wide range of cultural and theoretical backgrounds. The founders and movers of the project see it as a community of healers embedded in a particular community in which they will participate. What has happened at St. Lukes can be seen as part of a larger socio-cultural set of changes that have contributed to the initial success of the enterprise. Not the least of these is that currently people are able to conceive change, development and healing in a way that is different from how these have been conceived in the past. There are institutional changes and changes in the general social representation of wellness and healing that are creating new opportunities for individuals to explore. There is a proliferation of newly available approaches to health and healing that draw from a wide range of cultural practices and varying underlying understandings of the meaning of health, disease and well being. Individual patients are contributing to these changes by the way they use and interact with the diversity of healing opportunities, understanding, and practices more easily available to them. Although there is great controversy, fear and elation about these changes, none of us yet knows what kinds of new understandings and practices will begin to develop as we come together in this polylogue concerning health, bringing these diverse voices and understandings together.

1. Images of the body But the question of collaboration in diversity is in reality not simple or easily won. Recently, in another milieu, I was engaged in a series of conversations around the question of what constitutes health. A friend, Ross Laird, had asked for some help in designing a course in health psychology, and we had decided to talk in terms of rst principles. What is health, we asked, and how would we think toward it? To dene this meant to look at what we considered to be life and what we considered to be meaningful and important. Is it healthy, for example, to sacrice ones life, to be willing to be maimed and disgured for the sake of the state or a particular religious ideal? Or is it healthy to have access to expensive life saving care, while the people around one die for lack of funds for even a decent diet? Whose version

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of the good life or health are we speaking of? Ross and I have both been involved in a variety of alternative, complementary, traditional and Western health practices. And we included in our conversation other people who were similarly experienced in a wide variety of health approaches. We actually started with a particular problem. Since we were studying Taoist approaches to health at the time, we posed the question like this: what is the relationship between the Tao, which claims to encompass all, and, for example, Lorcas description of the Duende. In his essay Play and Theory of the Duende [1], Lorca describes a relationship to the Duende, a chthonic force which, he claims, is different from either the artistic muse or the angel. The Duende is an unsettling, ripping force, a shattering becoming, the blood and pain of birth and life, the inelegance and twists of death. The dancers, singer or painters who dance or sing or paints with Duende have this spirit rip through and take them. This is quite different from the images in the Tao Teh Ching which promote a way of being that speaks less to the passionate and the pain of creation. So in our questioning we asked: In which of these images would we say there is the image of health? Which way of life is healthier? Another of our friends described health as ease. But, we objected, what of the pain and difculties of practice, development, and becoming. I cited the Sun Dance ritual of the Oglala Sioux in which stakes are implanted in the chest of the dancer and ripped out through the ecstasy of the dance. One woman who was present said that that was sick. The conversation became quite heated. It is here that we have the problem that concerns me in this essay. What are we to make of the differences that people hold culturally and personally about the basic terms by which we live? Throughout history, to greater or lesser degree, these differences in understanding have been the root of bloodshed and war. People coming from different communities and different cultures are often suspicious of each other, not without reason. In his classic study on The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James [2] wrote about the bloody politics between whites, mulattos and blacks in the revolution in Haiti. Similar racial discord continues to be epidemic around the world. There are, for example, the ethnic and tribal wars of Kosovo and Rwanda. The Shariah law, which involves cutting off hands of thieves, of the Taliban are seen as abhorrent in some quarters of the West and as a just following of a just Quranic law in some other parts of the world. There is torture and disgurement of ethnic others in prisons everywhere, and state sponsored terror by both East and West that seeks the annihilation of some imagined dislikable other. At root there are deep differences that divide and separate us. We identify deeply with our culturally-derived senses of health and disease, good behavior and bad, insult and accolade. We identify deeply with senses of propriety, with ways of making emotional display or withholding it, with ways of acting, learning, loving, and doing work. And these deep seated identications with culturallyderived roles and understandings lead us to devalue, dismiss and denigrate the lives and life understandings of others. In one way of looking, we do not only identify, we are expressions of the social and cultural milieus in which we have developed. Recently I have been dealing with gout. I had my rst attack a year ago, when I awoke unable to walk without great pain. After walking in ways that misaligned my

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posture and gait as a result of compensating for the extreme pain in my feet, I began to develop sciatica. I went to a chiropractor who brought noticeable relief; and then, in Mexico, I visited a curandera who did a limpia and then prescribed a particular herb. This treatment ended the sequence. This last Summer, I again was aficted with gout and this time went to a Chinese practitioner who did acupuncture and prescribed herbs and diet. My uric acid levels went down, as well as my cholesterol. Each of these medicines had a different sense of the body and the source of disease. For the Western doctor, I had gout, an inammatory arthritic condition caused by an overabundance of uric acid which crystallizes and is then deposited in the joints. The chiropractor looked at the misalignment of my back and my muscular usage as causal. The curandera saw that there were attacks from without that came at me and that I had to become aware of both benecent and malevolent spiritual and social forces. For the Chinese practitioners the problem was revealed in my pulses, the way my chi was owing or being blocked and in the balances of Yin and Yang, and hot and cold. There were different bodies being looked at and different senses of unbalance. What we seem to be discovering at this time in our medicines is that there are fundamentally different cultural constructions of body, different senses of pain, its expression and management, different senses of strength and power, different senses of perceived aliveness. We identify our bodies and their function according to the cultural and social terms in which we have been steeped. The problem of cultural identities and how we live with each other in them is central to the futures we contemplate. There are basic differences among us and the question becomes how do we in fact live with them and still live, together. What is clear is that old liberal preaching about tolerance is at best patch work, a marching in place in which there is no forging of something new and deeper that both respects diversity and honors unity. How do we get to the place where the passing of an egg over the body of the person as a healing tool used by a curanderas in Mexico can be seen as potentially equally efcacious as the dose of penicillin given by the Western doc, and vice versa? How do we get to cultural difference not simply as a celebration of avors promoted by economic interests so that markets are increased and are un-hampered by unsightly disruptions of local warfare?

2. Conicts from perceptions I have used images of the felt and treated body as one example of basic cultural differences that lead to different and often conicting senses of self and other. There are, as well, different implied cultural senses of the conduct of the social life and its implications in the well being of the person. It is this latter point that I turn to next. From a multicultural perspective, there are profound questions about what enactments of strength, power, emotional expression, feelings, social gestures, and interactions lead to what kinds of senses of health and well being. There are basic underlying assumptions about self, other, group and individual that guides our behavior and forms the basis for our sense of self. These assumptions come to us

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from the social and cultural surround. We identify on unconscious levels with ways of being, ways of conducting our expression of feeling, our gesture, our closeness and distance while talking, which we incorporate from the cultures and subcultures of which were a part [3]. There are large variations in images of right and wrong ways of behavingdifferent images of modesty in dress and demeanor, for example, or different ways of showing respect, deference, or self-assertion. When we interact cross-culturally we run into the underlying social principles with which we identify. There is not only the conscious content of difference in political or religious or cultural difference that are problematic, but there are also different underlying identications with ways of talking, ways of behaving, and ways of reasoning. Cultures encourage and shape particular kinds of social bodies, with specic ranges of both personal and interpersonal feeling, expression and action. I once watched a segment of the Ron Reagan show that was illustrative. Reagan (the presidents son) had a television program with a debate format in which people discussed issues of the day. In this particular segment there were two African Americans and two Jewish Americans talking about the riots in Brooklyn in which both Blacks and Jews had been killed. The audience was mixed, with a large African American contingent. As the Black speakers spoke, there was a style of interaction rooted in the Black Church. There was call and response. The speakers faced the audience and spoke toward and to them. The audience responded by vocalizing back with exclamations and shouts. There was a great deal of movement and gesture and emotional expression in the speech of both speakers and audience. One of the Jewish speakers was appalled. He wanted a rational discourse and was getting instead an emotional one. He couldnt understand the style of interaction that was occurring, and he critically appealed to the audience for civility and rationality of discourse. He was roundly booed. The other Jewish speaker began to speak about his own pain at the situation of the death of a young Yeshiva student. At this point the discourse changed. One of the African American speakers began to say that it was in the sharing of the pain, the speaking it together that something could happen. For me, this incident illustrates something profound and problematic. The question is what kinds of skills do we need as we move into the future to deal with fundamentally different ways of being and different ways of construing self, other, community, and discourse. The problems here are, again, quite beyond good will and tolerance. There are, as I have noted, fundamental images we have of what constitutes good or acceptable behavior that we have derived from our cultures and that we identify with. In trying to bring people together in communities we immediately have the problem of these underlying cultural enactments and identications. For some people expressive aggression is simply bullying and should be dismissed, while for others it may be a show of personhood and strength. Modesty and deference in social manner are considered virtuous in some cultures and weak and repugnant in others. There are confusions about public and private expressions and demeanors and meanings. In prisons and high schools in California there are strict cultural rules and injunctions among gang members that, when violated by difference, can result in physical harm and death. The same kinds of problems exist worldwide. In The

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Sword of Truth, for example, Mervyn Hiskett [4,5] traces the history of conict between the Hausa people of Nigeria and the African Muslims which revolve around basic conceptions about proper living. Hausa women tended, for example, to socialize in the market, while the Moslem ethic preferred women to not be part of the market activities. This theme of fundamental cultural differences in the sense of proper conduct and behavior, purpose of being, and way of life underlies a good deal of conict and strife both locally and internationally. One example of a basic cultural difference is the way various groups manage individual and communal senses of self. In the West there has been a long development and valorizing of a particular model of the individual. In this model, the individual is considered to be separate, free to move about and express anything, not connected in binding ways either to other persons, the community or to the natural or spiritual surround. Historically, there have been two trends in this individual emphasis and development. On the one hand, there is the scientic, rational, allegedly objective, secular and technical. On the other, there is the Romantic image of the creative individual, separate from other people and the surround, discovering truth through an effort of individual emotional experience. Both of these images of an individual self contrast with other characterizations of self which are more embedded in the cultural and natural surround. One Native American man I know, for example, always identies himself in groups by his clan, his ancestors and his tribal connections on both sides of his family, as well as the particular animal and landscape features with which his people have traditionally been identied. Each of these characterizations of self has particular ways of feeling, moving and interacting, and many of the basic conicts in our time can be traced to these basic assumptions and to the interpretations of the other that accompany them. Said and others have noted the role that the Arab has played in the mythology of the West; the stereotypical representation of the Arabs has a long cyclic history going back to the Crusades and beyond [69]. In a chilling example, the pygmy Ota Benga became the object of Western mythologies about Africans when he was put on display in the Bronx Zoo after having been displayed at the New York Worlds Fair [10]. It is a commonplace in Western European intellectual circles to assume that there is no sense of self in traditional cultures and that it is only in the West that a sense of self has evolved. Upon a moments reection this can be seen as patently false. In the music, spiritual developments, initiations, and histories of traditional peoples, there is always and everywhere the sense of individual self. But this sense of self is quite different for its being embedded in either the cultural, natural or spirit worlds. One Native American woman told me how strange it was for her to go to University in a state school in California because of the emphasis on individual learning that was so separate from how learning occurred in the tribal world. At the same time, it is also important to note that the so-called individualism of the West is actually surrounded by and embedded in cultural imagery and dictum. It is itself a cultural invention, as Roy Wagner [11] has noted. In the West there are also ideas of teamwork and group spirit that contrast with the valorizing of the individual. There is a history of blind adherence to the group or blind adherence to

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the image of the rebel; and, for the most part, a great difculty in seeing how these two senses of self might be considered together. This too is a source of great difculty as we try to bring people together in community. There are profound differences in the conduct and implications of the conduct of the sense of self that feels itself either as primarily connected or primarily separate. Here again the problem in attempting collaboration becomes how to actually get at these underlying identications and senses of truth. What senses of future do we imagine, for example, from the view of the Western development of the individual or from the deep sense of community and social connection which is more highlighted in some other cultures? Which senses of community obligation or individual freedom do we valorize? How do we get at working the primary ways that people show emotion, connection, relationship so that we can come together without insult. And nally, what do we do with the question of fundamental belief and belief in fundamental truths that vary from culture to culture?

3. Learning difference and collaboration All difference is learned and all of it must be taken into account as we try to work toward the problem of diversity and unity. Several writers have recently talked toward this kind of learning. Donal Carbaugh has suggested that we all have varying culturally learned identities we employ in different situations. We learn how to be a fan at a game, or a worker, or an advocate for environmental cause. These identities are pieces of social discourse that can be looked at in what he calls a cultural pragmatic theory of positioning. In looking at interactions, Carbaugh asks us to look at What identities are getting discoursed here? What are their social locations, qualities, processes of ratication (or refusal)? What social relations are being constructed in these activities? [12]. He nally goes on to look at a communal functioning that he calls a dialectic of identication in which we learn to speak together about the cultural identities and conicts that are emerging among us. Rogoff [13] has noted that collaboration needs to be learned. She cites research showing, for example, how in comparisons of 35 year olds, US children played alone in 35% of observations and with just one partner in 35% of observations. In contrast, Marquesan (Polynesian) children almost never played alone, only 7% played with just one other child; they played in groups of 36 children in 75% and groups of 710 in another 18% of the observations. The implication here is that in each group children learn in different ways how to be with themselves and each other. Colman [14] has noted that we take experiences of different groupings learned when we are young into our adult experience in groups, being more comfortable, for example, with functioning in dyads rather than groups of three or four. Rogoff also points to evidence that suggests that different children have different abilities for collaboration that come from their cultural and social environments. Some European American children, for example, apparently have some difculty in learning collaboration as late as in elementary and secondary school. She cites other work that showed that children can learn to collaborate in learning situations that focus on the problem

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of cooperation. Rogoff also looks to the work of Crook [15], who notes that there is way of learning to collaborate works toward constructing joint understanding. Colman suggests ways to enable groups to learn about the construction of group life that moves beyond their early cultural training. What seems to me crucial to understand is that collaboration must be modeled and learned. This includes learning how to work with the antagonisms, fragmentation and polarization that are a part of collaboration. There is a complex interpersonal learning required here that is essential to incorporate on various levels of community activity.

4. Coming together I look back to the courts of Abdullah Rahman in Cordoba and Alfonso the Tenth in Toledo as images. In each of these places people from different ethnic backgrounds came together to produce translations of classic Greek, Roman and Islamic texts from the Arabic to Latin and to create magnicent poetry, music and philosophy. There are many things we can learn about identity, its enlargement and its plasticity, I believe, when we come together in certain ways. They include nding identity in looking at and working with the difculties that emerge in living with difference as we sit together. A deep and powerful set of images keeps returning to me as I sit and write this essay. I think of Paul Stoller, who writes about Songhay spirit possession rites in Niger and sees possession as a cultural mimetic that employs specic bodily states in recreating cultural memory and performing cultural creation. Stoller [16] describes how the historical conquests and migrations of people in Songhay territory have resulted in the evolution of inner deities that manifest in spirit possessions. There are a number of different kinds of spirits that become present in these rites, each family of spirits having a specic history of manifestation. There is an ongoing incorporation of powers and possibilities into the Songhay unconscious that occurs in their contact with other peoples. And so, for example, there is a family of spirits call the Hauka who enact the roles, attitudes and demeanors of the colonialists who had control of Songhay. There seems to be a deep syncretism at work here in the cultural psyche of the Songhay. Expressions of power and powers of various orders are learned from contact and the subsequent incorporation which creatively occurs. The spirit world itself expands or is seen differently. The denition of self and other, the identity of the people is altered. There is some process of psychic and cultural change. There is possible a kind of evolving syncretism, not easily won but worked at, that even includes this extreme example of bringing into the psyche aspects of the oppressor or the abhorred other. This kind of working can be seen in other cultural arenas. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and other African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance, for example, saw possibilities for incorporating into formal written poetry the everyday speech of American Blacks [17]. White poets of the 1950s applied this possibility to their own work. They were additionally inuenced by other forms; Japanese

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Haikus, for example, and Native American prayers and chants. Forms of popular Black American music were taken by Rastafarians in Jamaica, transmuted, and then incorporated again into African American forms. The implication here is that we can usefully come together and expand and create our sense of spirit and our sense of self, our sense of meaning and our sense of humanity, even when this involves radical difference and severe problematics. The dangers here are always loss of cultural identity in some permanent way, again a hegemony of belief and meaning. And in these times a loss of all connection with the spirit and natural worlds. Of course there is, for all these reasons, the problem of refusal. Some people will simply not come together to work in this way. Here is the conundrum I cannot overcome. I can see the power of our coming together. The Grand Opening celebration of the Integrative Center for Culture and Healing with which I began the essay is exemplary. But I do not have a clue how yet to bring together with those of us who want to create these complementary possibilities with those who preach and practice racism of whatever ilk, cultural domination or who are simply unskilled and unpracticed at singing and valorizing the songs of others and therefore wary of our attempts. There are primary differences between those who would subjugate others and those who would ght for justice and equality. There are primary differences in those who would bear witness to our connection with the earth, trees and water and protect them and those who would cheerfully exploit both them and other persons for prot. It is still difcult for me to see how these differences are overcome. It seems to me on the one hand that Baudrillard [18] is right when he says there are no longer any traditional cultures and no longer anything that can be called wildernesses. In protecting wildernesses we change their basic character, and in the current era of electronic communications there are no longer isolated traditional cultures with no reference to and impact from the surrounding world. The revolution in Iran and the uprisings in Tianneman Square both extensively employed fax machines. We recreate, always, our traditions, extend them, reinvent them. There is an ongoing alteration and meander in practice and belief as Buddhism moves from country to country, for example, or as cultures have come together in the great sea ports and trade centers of the world. The implication here is that all traditions that are living change. However long or short the period of change and whatever its mechanisms, the shape of practice and belief alters with time. And that we have the opportunity to see in this deep process a possibility for our creative dialogue over even the most problematic and basic matters. Still it must be said that there are particular global forces at work that aim at ending difference, or appropriating it in a riot of consumerism and trade hegemony. The hegemony in this case is a hegemony of use rather than one of belief. Thus, peasant women in southern Mexico were allegedly drawn into clinics that were touted as better than the traditional midwife practices and systematically sterilized. The IMF wanted a lowering of birth rates. Traditional herbal remedies are being sold across the counter without reference to the diagnostic and healing traditions from which they came. And ceremonies such as pipe and sweat lodges are appropri-

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ated and practised by people outside the cultures in which they are embedded. There is a separation from the earth, the waters, the spirit worlds that is alarming. It is in this context that fundamental and orthodox faiths raise loud cries against the syncretism of belief and practice that I am speaking of. There are histories and traditions and cultural identities and bodies that must not, it is felt, be lost. In recent debates in Trinidad and Tobago, for example, there are questions of the role of cultural identities in a place where separate cultures have come together under various mottoes such as All o we is one and One love, one people, one heart. There has been criticism of the attempt to deny difference with its concomitant loss of cultural identities. At root it seems to me that all this is background, for example, of the Rushdie fatwa, a clash of understandings that is fueled by the worldwide attempt at denial of spirit and denigration of tradition. In these places emergence and syncretic intertwine are seen, as they always have been, as the end of traditions and, as such, anathema and heresy. So in this time of ongoing racial and ethnic and cultural strife, bitterness, fear, and hatred, what can we hope for? What can we imagine? What can we do? It all seems, at best, daunting. I see hope in our coming together. From my point of view, there never was a golden age, a pristine beginning, in which peace and happiness reigned. Neither do I hold for the conquest of all pain and difculty amongst peoples as a goal for the future. There are no easy, and no universal, solutions. But, still, there are ways of proceeding that may be generative and life giving. I return to the image of learning. We must, I have suggested above, come to processes of learning how to collaborate, how to be together, both in our difference and in our unity. There is a work to be done in which we hold the cultural differences in community and communication as both basic problematics to be worked and opportunities for enrichment. Groups and communities coming together can be seen as places of emergence, creation and transformation. In this work we are concerned with the creative emergence and enlargement of the human spirit. The social and cultural psyches of persons are both held and worked with. Difference is celebrated and overarching commonalties participated in. In doing this work, we would not assume an a priori ability of individuals to be able to function well in groups or communities, nor an easy and smooth development in the life of groups and communities themselves. Rather there would be an ongoing learning and becoming, a practice of dening ourselves as communities. And it is on this note that I nd possibility and hope. Quite simply stated, we do not yet know how to do this learning, how to see ourselves in the process of creating, together and separately, the traditions of the future. But we do have glimmers of practices of collaboration, practices of coming together, practices of community participation that we can do, practices of holding and working with different fundamental senses of ourselves, practices of celebrating together what seem to be disparate ways of knowing, being and becoming. We can learn how to practice community and how to practice difference. We can learn how to see the work of communal imagination as a common work with all the difculties and promise of all creative enterprise. This, for me, is our work for the future.

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