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Diaspora 1:3 1991 "Like a Song Gone Silent": The Political Ecology of Barbarism and Civilization in Waiting for the Barbarians and The Legend of the Thousand Bulls Arif Dirlik Duke University Everything we ever knew about the movement of the sea was preserved in the verses ofa song. For thousands ofyears we went where we wanted and came home safe, because ofthe song. . . . There was a songforgoin' to China and a songforgoin' to Japan, a songfor the big island and a song for the smaller one. All she had to know was the song and she knew where she was. To get back, shejust sang the song in reverse. . . . Ann Cameron, Daughters of Copper Woman, as quoted in Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines Of all the ideas that have gone into shaping our conception of history, those that are products of the juxtaposition of the civilized against the barbarian are among the most fundamental, universal, and persistent. History as we know it is the account of civilization which, in this conception, is another way of saying a break with and subsequent conquest of nature and the creation of a physical and social space within which men (and to a lesser extent, women) can overcome the animality of their natures to become human beings. Outside that space is the realm of the barbarian: a realm without history, a realm represented as that which civilization seeks not to be and in which humanity is once again subject to nature and animality . While the boundaries ofthe two realms may shift and, with them, our ideas of what it means to be civilized (and therefore human), there is little disputing that the conflict between civilization and barbarism is a grand metahistorical theme around which we have thought and written history. Our very conception of civilization also predetermines what the outcome of such conflict must be. The power of the concept is such that it is difficult even to imagine a world other than the world of civilization, which must conquer and convert the barbarian or else. But there is another story within this story of conflict: that of the barbarians who experience the march ofcivilization, if not as literal extinction, then as an extinction of a way of life, and history as a suppression of their voices in time. The barbarian's story is bound 321 Diaspora 1:3 1991 up with the history ofcivilization: the barbarian as so defined is very much a product of civilization, without which the very notion of barbarianism becomes meaningless. Yet in their alterity, barbarians are from the moment of conception negations, castaways from history , evolutionary dead ends doomed to extinction. The barbarian is the ultimate exile (and perhaps every exile carries a taint ofthe potential barbarian). The paradigmatic exile is the stranger—stranger at once to the society of origin and the society of arrival—who exists in the niches of the society of refuge. The barbarian is without even that niche, an outcast from society, the total outsider, for whom there is no refuge or acceptance, except in the total abandonment of the identity that was the cause of estrangement in the first place; in other words, by cultural extinction. There can be no partially assimilated, hyphenated barbarian. The paradigmatic barbarian is the wandering nomad. George Simmel wrote that the stranger (read the exile: "the man who comes today and stays tomorrow") of circumstantial necessity commands an objectivity that helps unlock the hidden relations of society. The stranger as barbarian ("the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow") may also have much to tell us about the hidden relations of society, for in this case the estrangement is a radical estrangement from civilization itself. Ifwe concede to the barbarian a historical presence, civilization's denial of humanity to the barbarian appears not as a confirmation of an inherent barbarity that history has demonstrated already by banishing the barbarian from its domain but as a perversion that condemns civilization itself to an alienated historical consciousness. Civilized historical consciousness is alienated in a double sense: from its own origins and from its own humanity, for the dehumanization of the barbarian dehumanizes the civilized as well. In his Savagism...

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