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What Do We Share? From the Local to the Global, and Back Again Mineke Schipper Us and them Throughout the centuries, human beings have created binaries, devising images of themselves as against those of others. They have embedded each other’s images in their thoughts, their stories, songs, and other forms of artistic expression. The nature of these images has varied according to the interests of those involved and the contexts in which they lived. Over the past years I have been doing research about those human imaginings in proverbs and myths, two genres which exist globally. In this chapter I want to argue that there are not only differences between people, cultures, ethnic groups, nations, the sexes, and so forth, but also quite striking similarities, even in the ways in which people tend to emphasize their differences. All over the world, peoples and cultures have their own oral traditions in the form of proverbs, poetry, myths, epics, and all kinds of narratives. One of the main tasks of my field, comparative literature, is to study the how and the why of similarities and differences in both historically related and historically unrelated cultural tradi-tions, literary themes, genres and so forth. If myths are mainly concerned with establishing a human order of hierarchy in various ways, proverbs are mainly struggling with a precarious balance of power in society. Studying people’s proverbs in different cultures, I found amazingly similar messages. Many reminded men to behave responsibly, using the same formula “a wife is not” or “a woman is not like”, followed by all sorts of metaphors: food such as cassava or maize, musical instruments such as a guitar or a violin, garments such as a shawl or a shirt, and so forth, thus producing comparable messages that not only resemble each other in content but also in form, in spite of their widely different areas and cultures of origin. Here are a few examples: Awoman is not cassava to be valued by roasting and tasting. (Baule, Ivory Coast) A woman is not a boot; you cannot kick her off. (Russian) what do we share? 19 20 ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN EASTERN AFRICA A woman is not a fiddle you can hang on the wall after playing. (German/Finnish) Awife is not a shirt you can change according to your needs. (Ladino, Morocco) A wife is not a bedcover. [One cannot simply change her after a while.] (Creole, Haiti) This is just a simple example, but it illustrates that across cultural diversities other commonalities exist. Moreover, such similarities in ideas about each other exist everywhere and certainly not only thanks to globalization, but also without any cultural contact at all. How is this possible? Our common patterns as human beings have to do with the shape and functions of the human body and its basic needs, such as food, shelter, safety and procreation. And with emotions such as fear, longing, joy and sorrow that we all experience as human beings living on planet earth. I always tell my students: if you look for differences, you’ll only find differences, and if you look for similarities, they are right there. However, instead of looking for what we share as human beings, we seem to be more inclined to blow up the differences—differences of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and so forth. Looking into the worldwide harvest of cultural legacies in all their differences and similarities may help us put our own local differences into a more global perspective, whereas limiting the world to locally fixed Selfand -Other images gets in the way of the awareness of a wider picture. Awareness is always a first crucial step towards questioning our established views of each other. Crocodiles and tree trunks “However long the tree trunk lies in water, it never becomes a crocodile,” goes the West African Mandinka proverb, referring to the others, those who are different from us, the outsiders, those who will never really belong here, even though they try their utmost. Indeed, the world seems to “naturally” consist of us and them, of crocodiles and tree trunks, and “them” are not allowed to become part of “our” community. From the insiders’crocodile perspective, they will stay tree trunks, however much they twist and turn. Us and them, Self and Other, the drawing of demarcation lines of culture and ethnicity have separated us as human beings in an ongoing history of inclusion and exclusion, often with devastating consequences. [3.133.144.197] Project...

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