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Diaspora 1:3 1991 Culture, Ethnicity, and the Politics/Poetics of Representation Gillian Bottomley Macquarie University, Australia 1. The Study of Culture and Ethnicity I will trace several interconnected themes in this essay, which can be stated separately at this stage. They are: (1)to relate ideas, beliefs, and practices to formulations of ethnicity , that is, to separate the concepts ofculture and ethnicity while recognizing their close kinship; (2)to discuss relations of power in cultural processes, especially in forms of representation, of which ethnicity is one; (3)to suggest a more anthropological approach to cultural studies , which tend to be mostly concerned with cultural products— literature, films, television programs—frequently read as texts without adequate contexts; (4)to review some recent discussions about the cultural construction of identities and subjectivities in relation to discourses of gender , ethnicity, race, class, and culture; and (5)to draw these threads together in a brief discussion of black music (through the work of Paul Gilroy) and of Greek music and dance, with particular reference to the politics and poetics of representation . The conceptual framework linking these themes is a version of Bourdieu's constructivist structuralism, in which habitus, that is, "the embodiment of history," traces a dialectical relationship between structured circumstances and people's actions and perceptions . A close examination of the interaction between habitus and specific social fields, or terrains of struggle, can reveal positions of power that appear as natural, that support and sustain the attempt to delineate identities as natural and homogeneous. Bourdieu's concepts can also help to overcome the opposition of subjectivism/objectivism and to direct attention toward the interaction between these two. His emphasis on symbolic and cultural capital and on the struggle for symbolic power provides a dynamic alternative to overly materialist interpretations of cultural practices as epiphenomenal, as well as to reifications oftradition, ethnicity, community, and related boundary markers. Culture, therefore, can be seen not only as ex303 Diaspora 1:3 1991 pressive, but also as constitutive, of social relations; its role in the definition of what is deemed necessary or even thinkable and in the reproduction ofcommunality through practices and dispositions become visible within Bourdieu's formulation. Such visibility, in turn, illustrates the shortcomings of regarding culture as only the sum of articulated rules, traditions, and ideologies. This essay will discuss the cultural construction of several forms of power relations and communality, while attempting to cut across some of the essentialisms and assumptions of homogeneity implicit in discussions of culture , ethnicity, race, community, and the politics of identity. In Keywords and Culture, Raymond Williams describes the concept ofculture as one ofthe most difficult in the language. He traces a brief history of the concept from its early use as a noun of process —still found in words such as horticulture and agriculture—to a noun ofconfiguration or generalization, a kind ofinforming spirit of a whole way of life, manifest in all social activities but especially in language, styles ofart, and intellectual work. This is the sense taken up by anthropologists, who have examined the interconnectedness of social activities. However, this holistic approach tends to support a rather static view of cultures as integrated and enduring wholes that could clash on contact. Despite extensive debates and refinements within anthropology, this notion ofculture as a whole way of life demarcated by tenaciously guarded traditions continues to be regarded by nonspecialists as the anthropological view ofculture. In fact, anthropology, more than any other discipline, provides abundant evidence of the historical specificity and fluidity of cultural practices and beliefs, even as it retains the centrality of culture and the stress on interconnectedness. Yet as James Clifford, discussing the links between art, culture, and nineteenth century humanism, concludes, "[a] powerful structure offeeling continues to see culture, wherever it is found, as a coherent body that lives and dies. Culture is [seen as] enduring, traditional, structural (rather than contingent , syncretic, historical)" (235). The persistence ofthis stubborn misconception ofculture is complicated by the fact that anthropology has also been intermeshed with the development of nationalisms and the coupling of culture with ethnicity (Herzfeld, Anthropology). The idea that cultures exist as separate and integral entities clearly supported the project of defining the...

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