Building Sustainable Imagined Communities

Bruce White
Organization for Intra-Cultural Development

Bruce White

Anthropological contributions to the analysis, prevention and resolution of conflict have spanned an impressive range of activities and approaches. Anthropologists’ intimacy with the worldviews and cultural sensibilities of local people have facilitated, amongst other things, enhanced mediation processes, culturally specific negotiation styles, actor management, greater understanding of socio-political root causes, and the consideration and use of indigenous discourses, interpretations and approaches in the resolution process.

Importance of Symbolic Discourse
Anthropologists’ ability to understand, and, on occasion, to use, the language of cultural symbolism, has already contributed a great deal to the way in which countless millions understand themselves as cultural beings. In many ways the Boas/Sapir/Benedict/Mead efforts to promote cultural relativism through their ”personality writ large” frame were attempts to build an understanding of cultural relativism into a globally-shared symbolic discourse of the human being. In so doing, their ideas helped to prop individuals up in new ways, to give them interesting representations for their own personalities by linking them to “in our culture” traits and characteristics.

In the early-mid 20th century, this was a vastly underdeveloped arena of representation where cultural and racial persecution, superiority and stereotyping were commonplace. The Boas/Sapir/Benedict/Mead cultural relativism was not merely destined to become an example of classical anthropological theory. In providing a sustainable imaginative environment for individuals to seek out and find self representation in their everyday lives, their efforts were also a splendid example of Intra-Cultural Development.

Intra-Cultural Development
Contemporary writings blending psychological understandings of personality with anthropological perspectives on identity and culture illustrate a greater complexity and volatility in the individual’s search for representations of themselves as cultural beings. Contemporary theories see our personalities as multi-sited entities, selecting certain cultural symbols at certain times to suit certain social configurations and states of mind. The way we are at the same time traditional and modern, or morally-anchored yet open to change—these ongoing internal oscillations constantly demand appropriate symbolic expression. And so we search intensively within available symbolic discourse for a representation that legitimizes, and gives meaning to, our current, and also explains our overall, state of existence.

So multi-sited, so volatile is the system of identity and representation that building total sustainability into it—preventing periodic collapse—is perhaps impossible. When the system is working the individual is involved in a kind of unending symbolic roulette of reinvention and “play,” going about pairing social and emotional states with “appropriate” symbolic representation. But when the symbolic language becomes unsustainable—the individual cannot find appropriate representation for the upkeep of a legitimized self—as Gary Gregg points out in Culture, Personality and Identity, “it is a “short step… from creative play with social dualities to hostile freezing of stereotypes.”

Need for Sustainable Architectures
This, of course, is the moment of potential descent into conflict, and its reverse—re-engaging in creative play—a moment of potential conflict resolution. Sustainable imagined communities ideally equip individuals to be able to respond to any given political, economic or inter-group situation or event through the provision of a large diverse range of representations for any given configuration of personality-culture that an individual will bring to it. By contrast, unsustainable communities’ underdeveloped and static symbolic discourses will channel, rather than represent, individuals’ actions and states of mind into predetermined (prefabricated) architectures which restrict “creative play” and propagate hostility.

The development of the imaginative landscape of self representation can be paralleled to the development of physical infrastructure and community development in the traditional sense of the term. In both endeavors, the importance of good management, planning and construction are vital. As with its concrete counterparts, intra-cultural development must identify problem areas where little or no infrastructure exists and work to design and build sustainable architectures and environments. These environments will work to diversify and enrich the symbolism available for self-representation, seeing that such symbolism is broadly and equally accessible and representative across the diverse sectors of societies and personalities.

Interdisciplinary Activity
Intra-Cultural Development is in motion across vast areas of interdisciplinary activity. The range of projects that have the potential to improve and develop the quality of our imaginative landscapes is limitless. Hosts of media projects, role-play and dramatic workshops, and educational and experiential programs attempt to directly redress unbalances within the individual-cultural identity representation system. However, anthropologists well versed in symbolic language of individuals and cultures—the bricks and mortar of this intra-cultural development—share a special responsibility to return to a once influential, even leading, role.

Innovative anthropological research into the workings of identity needs to continue to be consolidated and further innovated in order to continue to provide for people rich representations of human diversity. This research must be marketed, popularized and distributed in accessible forms so that individuals can digest and utilize these enriched representations of diverse symbolism and meaning. A long-term project here is to distribute the contemporary ideas of the universality of contextual, improvised selves—to make it “acceptable,” even “natural,” to be culturally multi-sited, or contradictory, in one’s affiliations and choices of symbolic representation.

Applying Theory in Practice
Areas where Intra-Cultural Development has been deliberately halted, restricted or seized through media campaigns, misinformation and/or propaganda need immediate pluralization. As a means to achieve this, anti-propaganda campaigns and other applied approaches to restoring diversity in symbolic representation need consolidation, innovation and deployment. Formal training programs and curricula aiming to equip students, a variety of actors and diplomats with the interpretative skills necessary to make their own professional contributions need to continue to be designed and put into action.

These aims cannot be achieved by anthropologists alone, but our trade and its tradition dictates action on our behalf. We need to build interdisciplinary networks and terminologies, resources and forums in order for intra-cultural development to be fully realized as an organized cooperative endeavor. Our anthropological tradition of building sustainability into the concepts of humanity and community which we produce is unquestioned. What needs now to be considered are “concrete,” systematic approaches to the development of imaginative infrastructures and architectures—the development of environments that simply must succeed our current unequally resourced and underdeveloped landscapes of identity.

Since founding the Organization for Intra-Cultural Development in 2003, (http://oicd.net/), Bruce White has worked on building interdisciplinary projects centered on resolving conflict through monitoring/modifying cultural symbolism. Bruce received his PhD from Oxford Brookes University, and is an honorary research fellow at the Europe-Japan Research Centre. He lives in Kyoto, where he teaches anthropology in the department of social studies at Doshisha University.