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8. Anti-Americanism as Schemas and Diacritics in France and Indonesia
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8 Anti-Americanism as Schemas and Diacritics in France and Indonesia J O H N R . B O W E N 227 The phrase “anti-Americanism” suggests a set of individual, irrational attitudes toward Americans, U.S. society, or the U.S. government. We can view the matter in a slightly different way, however: in terms of the ideas, images, and theories (or “schemas,” a concept I develop below) held concerning the United States. These ideas might be negative, positive, or relatively neutral. People often hold a number of such ideas. They may be in tension with, or even contradict, one another. Some of these ideas will be more salient at some times rather than others, possibly because of current events. People also may deploy them in strategic fashion to justify their own policies, to formulate a sense of their national identity vis-à-vis features of the United States, or to criticize more general features of today’s world, such as globalization or neoliberalism. In some parts of the world, people may hold a set of ideas about the United States that have long historical depth and that they consider to have been confirmed by past events. In these cases they may not look for much new information before interpreting an event in terms of their preexisting understandings. In other countries (and the units need not be countries) people may not have such a set of well-formed ideas about the United States, or they may be less accustomed to drawing on such ideas. In these cases they may be more likely to radically revise their ideas in the face of new events. In this chapter, I explore two cases that differ in the way just described: the long-term images and ideas found in France and the shallower and intermittent I thank the continuing direction and friendly criticisms offered by the skillful organizers of this project, Bob Keohane and Peter Katzenstein, as well as the comments provided by other readers of earlier drafts of this chapter, and in particular David Laitin, Charles Hirschkind, and Sophie Meunier. anti-Americanism found in Indonesia. These two cases are perhaps extreme versions of a broader contrast between Europe, where greater time and more contact have fashioned specific and deeply rooted schemas about the United States, and Asia, where contact has been intermittent, knowledge more often indirect, and schemas therefore less well-developed and more subject to sharp shifts. I pay special attention to the ideas and attitudes of Muslims in France and Indonesia. Because France has been given special attention both in this book (Sophie Meunier, chapter ) and in books that she cites, I devote more of this chapter to Indonesia. As an anthropologist I look for the particular ways in which people combine and change their ideas about the world in specific settings or events. This general orientation leads me to look to the ways in which actors develop schemas and theories about the United States and to the forms that these schemas take, particularly narrative forms that explain how the world works. This approach leads me to talk less about attitudes and more about positions, concepts, and strategic uses of both. It is largely a rationalist position but one that emphasizes the particular and the shifting natures of these ideas. Concepts and Evidence The very topic of “anti-Americanism” challenges my emphasis on the rational and the particular. Looking for common dimensions of statements by people throughout the world inevitably tends to depict anti-Americanism as a coherent and globally distributed phenomenon, as something that is “out there” and that can be measured across countries and followed over time. Adding credibility to this assumption are the strong resemblances across countries in ideas held about the United States. In all world regions one hears similar criticisms of the United States as imperialistic , hedonistic, and insufficiently concerned with the welfare of its own citizens. (One might argue, in accord with pragmatic theories of truth, that these convergences indicate the criticisms’ plausibility.) The typology proposed by Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane in chapter elegantly captures those resemblances. Yet precisely because anti-Americanism consists of negative images and ideas, it often also serves as an alter image of one’s own country or tradition, and thus retains a diacritic particularism. Actions, values, or institutions imagined as characteristic of the United States can become a convenient or psychologically satisfying object against which public leaders or intellectuals can fashion ideas of how their...