The Culture Cult Revisited

Society - What is the gravest threat to “open” democratic societies today? In Karl Popper’s view it was tribalism. By contrasting closed autarkic Sparta and free-trading Athens,...     

'Intemperate and Unchaste': Jean Rhys and Caribbean Creole Identity

In this article, Carr examines Jean Rhys's ambivalent feelings about her West Indian origins. She looks at the problems both she and others have had in deciding whether her work can be truly considered to belong to the category of Caribbean literature. The difficulty lies not just in her expatriate existence or European themes, but goes back to her position as a white Caribbean Creole woman, the descendant of slave-owners. Carr looks at the traditional representations of the Creole woman, and suggest that the characteristics assigned to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre , 'intemperate and unchaste', persisted to Jean Rhys's day, and that all her fiction, even when not explicitly Caribbean, can be seen to write back to such representations. When Rhys arrived in England, she was immediately identified as Other because of her Caribbean accent, something that marked her out as disturbingly associated with non-white West Indians; in England, she was no longer really white, although back in the Caribbean her whiteness made her unacceptable to so many of her fellow Dominicans. Much of the power of her fiction comes from her knowledge of the violent scars left in the Caribbean by the colonial past, and her own experience of the prejudices and oppressions of a hierarchical metropolitan society. In particular, if it had not been for her stigmatization as the always racially dubious West Indian when she reached England, her insight into the injustices of metropolitan and colonial society might never have been so acute.     

Culture and Relativism

The meanings and implications of cultural relativism have been debated for decades. Reprising this debate, Roger Sandall offers a pointed critique of the anthropological concept of culture and identifies relativism as the internal and corrosive enemy of the open society. I challenge his reading of our predicament. Considering the work of Franz Boas and his debts to the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, I distance the social science concept of culture from positions—the rejection of standards of truth, beauty, and morality; the belief that cultural value systems and practices are all equally true (or untrue); the valorization of primitivism—that are not intrinsic to it. Next, I consider the use of culture in the “philosophy of primitivism” and its meanings in multiculturalism and identity politics. I argue that many ostensibly relativist claims are used to serve non-relativist agendas, or hide universalistic claims in unstated but essential premises and background assumptions. Rather than a world dominated by relativism, where cultural differences are held to be inviolable and cross-cultural judgments have been rendered impossible, I see something like the reverse. Our problem is not that we overvalue cultural differences but that we underestimate them. Even in our multiculturalism, we imagine a sameness of outlook and aspiration, an unwitting projection of ourselves in the end.