Race / Religion

 race/religion

The first article of our weekly series Instant Karma is a treatise about the different depth of meaning cultural symbols can take, once they are taken out of their cultural context, and used as fashion and style symbols instead. In this example the author S. Sandhu selected some of the Indian symbols like saree, bhindi, mehndi to demonstrate how Asian Indian culture was commercialized in 2004 in high fashion magazines, and in the following gained broader acceptance as fashion accessories in the general fashion trends. His interest was also to explore the effects of this apparent interest in Asian Indian culture on the social acceptance and perception of Asian Indians inside the USA.
Once fashion icons in the American pop and cinema culture started endorsing typical Indian symbols with their wardrobe and looks, a broader audience was ready to copy these idols of theirs, and to dress in outfits that resembled the Indian saree, with accessories like mehndi (temporary henna tattoos) and bhindis on their foreheads for the sake of an instant exotic Indian feeling; the streaming of fashion soon started to be accompanied by activities like yoga, to dive even deeper in the experience. Erroneously, as the author soon discovers. The ‘Instant Karma’, is not much more than a temporary borrowing of decorative items, the yoga classes are yet another way to pursue the own physically appearance based culture that in return offers yet another possibility to a dress up in the what is deemed appropriate attire - all for the sake of being hip and fashionable.
Does it, on the other hand, impact the perception or acceptance of the Indian population? The author's answer is no. When he examined, if members of this ethnic group were now faster recognized by their environment, his study group could not perceive any improvement; when it came to a deeper knowledge of the Indian culture, neither his Indian study group, nor the yoga teachers could confirm, that there was a deeper interest or understanding for Indian culture present in the American society accompanying this fashion trend.  On the contrary, as one participant of the study group put it, when a native of the culture actually wears these symbols, they are perceived by the American public as something to 'whisper' about and to consider weird and deviant. When the same symbol is worn by a pop icon it becomes fashionable and chic.
For the Indians, these cultural symbols have obviously a much larger meaning and impact. What the author did not give much consideration in his short essay is the fact that, when an Indian chooses to wear these symbols, she is not only considered through a special lens by the general American public, she also generally experiences different views and reactions by her own people, who are not a homogenous society neither, and who have a diversity of different views concerning these symbols and their today's use, especially in a foreign country like the US.

I found this article especially interesting, as it is easy for me to experience this kind of reactions in the public; I just have to exchange my jeans and button down shirt for a day and decide to wear a jalabiyya (traditional gown or long tunic worn with pants in my home country Egypt) with all the accessories that go with it: cap, scarf and sandals. I am not up on the fashion hit list, but I get the stares. My wife however told me that over the last two years kaftans were big sellers and that American woman wanted to experience the feeling of thousand and one night through the richly decorated Moroccan, Egyptian and Arab gowns that have been traditional wear in our countries for centuries.
Mainly, these adoptions of cultural symbols is not more than a short-lived flare of appropriation for the purpose of living through  preconceived ideas and prejudices about the other culture. It is accompanied by a feeling of acting out a fantasy, or putting herself temporarily into the shoes of some invented character of an old story or movie or just re-living the event as a pop or film idol. These adoption of cultural symbols have very little to do with a real interest in the relevant culture.
A very good example came up in a discussion I had recently: we were pondering on the quite weird (in our regard) representations of female characters on tableaus and paintings from the area of the Orientalist period. Europe, at the time was hungry for exotic beauties, their fantastic stories of imprisonment in haramliks and lives in unimaginable luxuries.  Rich European family homes soon became decorated with these kinds of interpretations of Middle Eastern culture. However, if looked closely, these paintings were pure products of Western fantasies and had little to do with the realities: Not ever would a princess (and those were the ones living in luxury and sometimes haramliks) consider posing half naked for  foreign painter, whom she would consider classes beyond even to talk to, and who would never have access to female royalty, left alone royal family live. A regular woman would also never consider to expose herself for portraits, and what those painters found as willing models must have been the poor and miserable (needy of the money they could offer them) that they then painted according to their fantasies in settings that only happened in their imaginations - the way they chose to perceive life in the Middle East; not the way it actually happened and most certainly, did they not have interest in how life really was and what values and principles society followed, as they were catering to a market that had made its requirements and demands already clear. The art had to be exotic and filled with Greek-like representations of half-dressed women, for a change in Arab clothing and settings, to serve the new need of the fashion, entirly created and filled with content in the West. The ‘other’ culture was nothing but means to an end, and had no deeper meaning for those, who chose to buy and expose these paintings in their homes. The 'other' is only taken in, as long as it does not threaten the own identity, and does not cause the individual to question his values or points of view. Therefore, the encounter has to be as superficial as can be, anxiously preserving the own prejudices and ideas - basically the foreign culture has to be imported into the own, leaving anything that could cause friction behind, not to scare or agitate the identity of the beholder. On the other hand, the industry, who feeds these demands is eager to please and to cater to the prejudices and perspectives of its customers (after all, it’s about money), creating the loop of re-enforcement and confirmation needed to put the client at ease with his transformation and new acquirements.

At A Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die - things like racial separation in this case. Coming to America about more than a decade ago, I soon discovered that there seemed to be a lot more to racial tensions than just the commonly known black and white pattern projected in the movie industry to the rest of the world. It seems that every ethnicity is categorized and allocated a rank in general society. It also staggered me, how much people are willing to conform to this ranking, and how much they chose to stay within their own ethnic groups – which is ‘o so contrary’ to the widely propagated “melting pot” concept, we hear so much about.
The management of the slaughterhouse in question is most certainly using the racial component of this society in its favor. By splitting people consciously and purposely into groups that, because of the labor division, will consequently and eventually get into conflicts over the appropriate coordination of the work process, the management avoids to busy itself with many issues related to the work flow. This work flow has become almost self regulating, as none of the groups wants to risk causing a major annoyance to the other, as the tensions between them make sure that every group complies willingly with their part of the job. On the other hand, having these groups opposing and disliking each other has the additional advantage that they will not realize easily that they are all in the same boat of exploitation by the slaughterhouse. Because of the ongoing tensions, it is unlikely that they will consider organizing themselves, and thereby gaining an impact and strong voice to oppose the management: Building a union that would ultimately be a mean to improve the working conditions for all, already failed, because of the conflict potential between the different groups. The management, through its policies of competition and distribution of pay, skillfully keeps the focus of the workers on the differences instead of letting them discover their similarities.
The segregation of the slaughterhouse does not stop at its doorsteps, but extends itself into the living space outside, causing all kinds of additional social problems, like heightened criminality and poverty. This was not really surprising to me to read this, as I can witness dynamics like that in the neighborhood of my restaurant, an area that has lived through massive waves of gentrification and that is equally separated in the classes of whites, blacks and Hispanics. Society, as well as the workers of the slaughterhouse, seems to be easier to govern and rule when fractioned than when united - as Julius Cesar discovered thousands of years ago, it's 'divide and conquer' or in this context 'divide and rule' that works best for the governing class.

The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism by the German economist Max Weber examines the forces that enabled capitalism to grow in Europe. He argues that the Calvinist and Protestant work ethic caused a large number of people to engage in work in the secular world, allowing them to accumulate wealth and re-invest it, in order to gain further wealth. He explains how this view of life  and religion decisively impacted societies  and enabled them to develop into capitalistic nations competing for further wealth and riches under an ideology coined by submission to God's will and ascetic life style.
Max Weber's text is insofar interesting, as it exposes capitalism almost as a result of an extreme life code: temperance, asceticism, focus on work over pleasure, accumulation of wealth regulated by minimum spending and maximum investment in further profit…Through a life style like this, the definition of a human being almost automatically becomes one based on his economical function, a being, oriented in life on the possibilities to enhance economical power and means: a ‘homo economicus’ - stripped off his other properties as a spiritual, compassionate, creative, cognitive and scholastic being.
Opposed to the Protestant life style at the time, was the overly spiritual, withdrawn and oriented on individual sustainability only, Catholicism, where life mainly took place in the seclusion of monasteries, and where material gains were to be passed on to the Mother Church in Rome and its local offshoots. It could not deliver a long-term alternative to the materialistic oriented Protestantism, and the way it systematically fed into the needs and desires of humans to accumulate riches and live a plentiful life.
It is interesting, how capitalism developed out of these contradictions in Western religious convictions and views. It is also amazing how much this historic development proper to one kind of culture is often unreflectively applied to cultures, who have never been through these kind of religious and moral tensions or developments; however, they are pressured to join the wagon, and adopt the system - because it has been proven to be the best, forgetting that this was the case because of certain conditions and circumstances that created an environment in which it was seemingly the best (as in most profitable) road of development at the time. Equipped with this insight, but neglecting the particularities of the Western history and its results, scholars and politicians are eager to do the thinking for other cultures, disregarding that these cultures and nations often have alternative models that work 'best' for them - mostly in other areas, and often not restricted to economical considerations. Instead of respecting these differences, the nations that hold up the capitalistic system have made it their mission to spread it and make it the measurement of ultimate success, unbeholden, and unaware of the destructive forces that are at work inside their own societies eroding the purely capitalistic structure and causing multiple failings of the system, while the worst is still to come.