Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. She is author and coeditor of several books, including Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia and Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism.

Flexible Citizenship

The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

Duke University Press

Contents

The Geopolitics of Cultural Knowledge

Anthropological Authority and the New World Disorder

When I was a child growing up in Malaysia, it seemed as though we were always trying to catch up with the West, which was represented first by Great Britain and later by the United States. Although Malaya gained independence from the British in 1957 (and became Malaysia in 1962), British-type education and the mass media continued to construct our world as a failed replica of the modern West. This colonial effect of trying to learn from and imitate the global center has been a preoccupation of postcolonial elites seeking to articulate a destiny that is a mixed set of Western and Asian interests. Now a resident of the United States, my annual visits to Southeast Asia reveal that a different vision of the future is being articulated, an alternative definition of modernity that is morally and politically differentiated from that of the West.

The first half of this century saw the collapse of Western colonial empires; in the second half, we are witnessing the emergence of a multipolar world. What do these circumstances mean for anthropology as a Western theory of knowledge about culture? In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said notes that a Western "structure of attitude and referencing" used the third world (cultures, places, peoples) as sources of materials to produce knowledge and as "cases" to explicate Western theory without recognizing non-Western actors as equal partners in cultural production. In today's world, such a structure of attitude actually reflects a defensive Western cultural nationalism more than it reflects the supreme cultural confidence at the height of Western imperialism, the era dealt with by Said in his book. This chapter calls on anthropology to weave our empirical knowledge of the non-Western world into new geopolitical configurations. I argue that anthropologists and other scholars should shift from their vantage point of viewing the rest of the world as peripheries or sites for testing models crafted in the West. They can then make a unique contribution to an understanding of how the economic structures of development are integrated with the production of cultural identities.

The Moral Politics of Comparison

Anthropology as a discipline is mainly concerned with studying the non-West, especially the effects on it of colonialism, capitalism, and the cultural destruction visited by Euroamerican powers. Indeed, this rich and critical contribution to Western liberal tradition is a valuable corrective to ethnocentric assumptions that plague all disciplines, together with their representations of non-Western cultures and societies.

Our concerns about the effects of global structures of power and wealth have made us concentrate on the poor, the downtrodden, the marginalized, and the exploited in the third world. This is a rich tradition that in many ways represents what is best and distinctive in American anthropology. Yet in a maturing field, we may want to broaden the scope of the anthropological understanding of power and deploy our disciplinary insights to investigate how the privileged half lives, exercises, and reproduces its domination—all increasingly on a transnational scale. Of course, Marxist anthropologists have always been concerned with the broad issues of political economy, but their focus has been on systems of trade, structures of production, and flows of commodities. Rather less attention has been given to human agency and the cultural practices of the powerful, as well as how they have been shaped and given meaning by translocal relationships. Nevertheless, the issue of human agency needs to be foregrounded much more in relation to different structures of global domination and hegemonies, looking not only at the powers of the weak but also of the strong.

However, in a recent trend, the anthropology of modernity seems to be turning away from engaging with the changing global scene and seeking instead to focus on changes within the West, as if they can be understood independently of the West's entanglements and dialogue with the Rest. For instance, in response to the "crisis of representation," George Marcus and Michael Fischer call for "repatriating anthropology." In proposing this reorientation in anthropology, Marcus and Fischer convey the impression that the chief value of "cultural others" is in providing a foil to American modernity. The study of other cultures becomes "a strategy of defamiliarization" that anthropologists can use to engage in a cultural critique of their own Western society. Furthermore, if cultural others are to be used for this contrastive function, "they must be portrayed realistically, and in the round, sharing modern conditions that we experience also." Here, Marcus and Fischer are cautioning against a largely obsolete tendency in anthropology to portray other cultures as existing in a noncoeval space with the West. But they also seem to assume that Western modernity is a universal formation and that the modernities of non-Western others can be understood only in relation to the idealized Western Model. Thus, although the comparative method is at the heart of anthropological knowledge, it has been a comparison that employs the West as the single measure of modernity against which other societies must be measured.

The moral politics of the entire field of discussion about modernity and transnationalism needs to be interrogated in a world where capitalism is no longer centered in the West but distributed across a number of global arenas. The hegemonic Euroamerican notion of modernity—as spelled out in modernization theory and theories of development—locates the non-West at the far end of an escalator rising toward the West, which is at the pinnacle of modernity in terms of capitalist development, secularization of culture, and democratic state formation. But even in the particular ways political-economic and cultural dimensions are combined, it is not possible to talk about a single modernity within the West. The contemporary impassioned conflicts and negotiations over immigrants, multiculturalism, women's rights, and the environmental effects of capitalism in the United States and in Europe speak to the composition and goals of development, culture, and the nation in different countries. In anthropology, we need to attend to how places in the non-West differently plan and envision the particular combinations of culture, capital, and the nation-state, rather than assume that they are immature versions of some master Western prototype.

Indeed, the crisis in American social sciences concerns how to represent (other) modernities when linear models of modernization, development, and the spread of democracy are no longer adequate to capture the range of political formations and self-positioning in different parts of the world. For instance, both modernization theory, represented by William W. Rostow, and Marxist-influenced narratives of development, represented by Immanuel Wallerstein, ignore the ways in which Asian experiences cannot fit neatly into Western historicism (with its sequential history) and the core-periphery model. Even when world-systems theorists talk about regional core-periphery formations, they fail to capture the complex interweaving relations of domination and subordination by transnational capital that blur the division between "core" and "peripheral" countries. Actual historical events, such as the collapse of communist systems, the revival of ethnic nationalisms, the relative decline of some Western powers, and the rise of Asian capitalism, have rearranged transnational relations of trade, development, and power. A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times criticizes the view that the United States is bound to lead the New World Order. Christopher Layne notes that "while Washington may believe its aspirations for world order reflect universal values, they reflect American preferences that may not comport with others' interests.... We [can't] indefinitely prevent new powers ... from rising, or old ones ... from staging comebacks." In what ways can anthropology as a form of Western knowledge enact a decentering by attending to other narratives of modernity that are neither wholly derivative of the West nor based entirely on the interests of Western democracies?

Postcoloniality or Alternative Modernities?

In recent years, the study of postcoloniality has emerged as a new theory of relations between the West and the Rest. Emerging out of the writings of Indian "subaltern" theorists, postcolonial approaches have tended to use the particular experiences of colonialism in India as the model for understanding contemporary relations of domination, subjugation, and subjectivization. This metropolitan theory of third-world subalternity tends to collapse all non-Western countries (except Japan, of course) into the same model of analysis, in which primacy is given to racial, class, and national dominations stemming from the European colonial era.

In British cultural studies, "the postcolonial" refers specifically to nonwhite populations from former colonial territories that have relocated in the West; it recognizes that their historical experiences and contemporary productions arean irreducible and critical part of European modernity. Homi Bhabha identifies a "postcolonial contramodernity" in the works of black subjects in diaspora, and Paul Gilroy talks about the "double consciousness" of transatlantic black cultures as an irreducible part and critique of Western modernity. For Stuart Hall, the postcolonial refers mainly to the effects of decolonization (through the influx of peoples from former colonies) on metropolitan countries such as England. For these cultural theorists then, postcolonialism refers primarily to the ways colonialism has shaped contemporary minorityidentity politics and the critique of Western societies.

More broadly, postcolonial theorists focus on recovering the voices of subjects silenced by patriarchy and colonial rule (The Empire Writes Back is the title of one popular collection); they assume that all contemporary racial, ethnic, and cultural oppressions can all be attributed to Western colonialisms. American appropriations of postcolonial theory have created a unitary discourse of the postcolonial that refers to highly variable situations and conditions throughout the world; thus, Gayatri Spivak is able to talk about "the paradigmatic subaltern woman," as well as "New World Asians (the old migrants) and New Immigrant Asians (often 'model minorities') being disciplinarized together." Other postcolonial feminists also have been eager to seek structural similarities, continuities, conjunctures, and alliances between the postcolonial oppressions experienced by peoples on the bases of race, ethnicity, and gender both in formerly colonized populations in the third world and among immigrant populations in the United States, Australia, and England. Seldom is there any attempt to link these assertions of unitary postcolonial situations among diasporan subjects in the West to the historical structures of colonization, decolonization, and contemporary developments in particular non-Western countries. Indeed, the term postcolonial has been used to indiscriminately describe different regimes of economic, political, and cultural domination in the Americas, India, Africa, and other third-world countries where the actual historical experiences of colonialism have been very varied in terms of local culture, conquest, settlement, racial exploitation, administrative regime, political resistance, and articulation with global capitalism. In careless hands, postcolonial theory can represent a kind of theoretical imperialism whereby scholars based in the West, without seriously engaging the scholarship of faraway places, can project or "speak for" postcolonial situations elsewhere. Stuart Hall has warned against approaches that universalize racial, ethnic, and gender oppressions without locating the "actual integument of power ... in concrete institutions."

A more fruitful strand of postcolonial studies is represented by subaltern scholars such as Partha Chatterjee, who has criticized the Indian national projects, which are based on Western models of modernity and bypass "many possibilities of authentic, creative, and plural development of social identities," including the marginalized communities in Indian society. He suggests that an alternative imagination that draws on "narratives of community" would be a formidable challenge to narratives of capital. This brilliant work, however, is based on the assumption that both modernity and capitalism are universal forms, against which non-Western societies such as India can only mobilize "pre-existing cultural solidarities such as locality, caste, tribe, religious community, or ethnic identity." This analytical opposition between a universal modernity and non-Western culture is rather old-fashioned; it is as if Chatterjee believes the West is not present in Indian elites who champion narratives of the indigenous community. Furthermore, the concept of a universal modernity must be rethought when, as Arif Dirlik observes, "the narrative of capitalism is no longer the narrative of the history of Europe; non-European capitalist societies now make their own claims on the history of capitalism."

The loose use of the term "the postcolonial," then, has had the bizarre effect of contributing to a Western tradition of othering the Rest; it suggests a postwar scheme whereby "the third world" was followed by "the developing countries," which are now being succeeded by "the postcolonial." This continuum seems to suggest that the further we move in time, the more beholden non-Western countries are to the forms and practices of their colonial past. By and large, anthropologists have been careful to discuss how formerly colonized societies have developed differently in relation to global economic and political dominations and have repositioned themselves differently vis-à-vis capitalism and late modernity. By specifying differences in history, politics, and culture, anthropologists are able to say how the postcolonial formation of Indonesia is quite different from that of India, Nicaragua, or Zaire. There are, of course, places for the use of the term postcolonial—for instance, in ethnographies about people who may see themselves as still haunted by the "ghosts" of colonialism or who live in agrarian situations where the forces of colonially instituted relations continue to play a significant role. But in many areas of the world, we must move beyond an analysis based on colonial nostalgia or colonial legacies to appreciate how economic and ideological modes of domination have been transformed in excolonial countries, as well as how those countries' positioning in relation to the global political economy has also been transformed.

It appears that unitary models of the postcolonial and of modernity are ascendant at a time when many Asian countries are not interested in colonialism or in postcolonialism—having in their leaders' views successfully negotiated formal decolonization—and are in the process of constructing alternative modernities based on new relations with their populations, with capital, and with the West. In other words, the "alternative" in alternative modernities does not necessarily suggest a critique of, or opposition to, capital. Rather, it suggests the kinds of modernity that are (1) constituted by different sets of relations between the developmental or postdevelopmental state, its population, and global capital; and (2) constructed by political and social elites who appropriate "Western" knowledges and re-present them as truth claims about their own countries. First, Asian tiger countries consider themselves as belonging to a post postcolonial era—one characterized by state developmental strategies, rising standards of living, and the regulation of populations in a post-cold war order of flexible capitalism. They would not consider their own current engagements with global capitalism or metropolitan powers as postcolonial but seek rather to emphasize and claim emergent power, equality, and mutual respect on the global stage. Many formerly colonized countries in Southeast Asia are themselves emergent capitalist powerhouses that are "colonizing" territories and peoples in their own backyards or further afield: Indonesia has invaded and colonized East Timor, while Malaysian, Singaporean, and Hong Kong entrepreneurs are factory managers in China, timber barons in New Guinea and Guyana, and hotel operators in England and the United States. These strategies of economic colonization by countries formerly colonized by the West represent new forms of engaging dissension at home and capital abroad—new arrangements that cannot be accommodated by a universalizing theory of the postcolonial. More fruitful are attempts to understand new modes of biopolitical regimes that now discipline, regulate, and "civilize" peoples in varied contexts of the late twentieth century.