INTRODUCTION: THE DIALECTICS OF CULTURAL HYBRIDITY

PNINA WERBNER

THE POWER OF CULTURAL HYBRIDITY

The current fascination with cultural hybridity masks an elusive paradox. Hybridity is celebrated as powerfully interruptive and yet theorized as commonplace and pervasive. Born out of the paradigmatic shift in theory from the modernist to the postmodernist, the paradox is energised by anti-essentialist, anti-integrationist zeal.

The power of cultural hybridity – one side of the paradox – makes sense for modernist theories that ground sociality in ordered and systematic categories; theories that analyse society as if it were bounded and 'structured' by ethical, normative dos and don'ts and by self-evident cultural truths and official discourses. In such theories, it makes sense to talk of the transgressive power of symbolic hybrids to subvert categorical oppositions and hence to create the conditions for cultural reflexivity and change; it makes sense that hybrids are perceived to be endowed with unique powers, good or evil, and that hybrid moments, spaces or objects are hedged in with elaborate rituals, and carefully guarded and separated from mundane reality. Hybridity is here a theoretical metaconstruction of social order.

But what if cultural mixings and crossovers become routine in the context of globalising trends? Does that obviate the hybrid's transgressive power? And if not, how is postmodernist theory to make sense, at once, of both sides, both routine hybridity and transgressive power? Even more, what do we mean by cultural hybridity when identity is built in the face of postmodern uncertainties that render even the notion of strangerhood meaningless? When culture itself, all cultural categories, are – as Hans-Rudolf Wicker and Alberto Melucci argue – reflexively in doubt, unstable and lacking cognitive faith or conviction? How do the subjects of (post)modern nation-states respond to such ambivalences and the sheer efflorescence of cultural products, ethnicities and identities? This is a central question in postmodernist theory, and one that the contributors to this volume directly address.

The paradox leads us to ask about the limits of cultural hybridity, demarcated not only by hegemonic social formations but by ordinary people. What are the forces, Jonathan Friedman asks, that generate antihybrid, essentialising discourses stressing cultural boundededness, ethnicity, racism or xenophobia? And how are we to theorise the ambivalences and multiplicities contained in these forces? Why do strangers continue to pose a threat, despite the fact that the very meaning of strangerhood might seem to be elusive and meaningless in what Zygmunt Bauman defines as an age of 'heterophilia'?

Modernist hybridity theory made its heuristic gains on very different frontiers. Starting from an assumption about cosmic and social ordering, Claude Lévi-Strauss analysed tricksters as ambiguous and equivocal mediators of contradiction (1963); Victor Turner explored the anti-structural properties of liminality and hybrid sacra (1967); while Mary Douglas recognised the dangerous or beneficial powers of exchange inherent in anomalous conflations of otherwise distinct categories (1966; 1975). Starting from a perspectival position within society, these outstanding contributions to modernist anthropology stressed the capacity of hybrid symbolic monstrosities to challenge the taken-for-granteds of a local cultural order, and thus to recover a critical cultural self-reflexivity. Their theoretical stance allowed them to explain why dangerous mixings were culturally marked and hedged with taboos.

Along with that, modernist hybridity theory looked to sites of resistance and exclusion, as in Foucault's analysis of heterotopic spaces (Foucault 1986). Similarly, Barthes (1972), Bourdieu (1984) and Bakhtin (1984) analysed popular mass culture and carnival as subversive and revitalising inversions of official discourses, high-cultural aesthetic forms or the exclusive lifestyles of dominant elites. Such popular mixings and inversions, like the subversive bricolages of youth cultures analysed by Hebdige (1979), are 'hybrid' in the sense that they juxtapose and fuse objects, languages and signifying practices from different and normally separated domains and, by glorifying natural carnality or 'matter out of place', challenge an official, puritanical public order. Indeed, the ordering tendencies of modernity are, Bauman argues, the key to understanding intolerance towards 'strangers' in the modern nation-state, leading either to their expulsion/elimination or to their assimilation (Bauman 1989; see also this volume, Chapter 3). This also explains why the defence of hierarchy and elite privilege in colonial settler societies was buttressed, Papastergiadis shows, by a pervasive fear of 'racial' hybridity.

From a postmodern perspective, it might seem self-evident that essentialising ideological movements need to be countered by building cross-cultural and multiethnic alliances. But cross-cultural or gendered politics, the politics of anti-racism or of transversal alliances, turn out to be fraught with the very same sorts of difficulties that generate the contemporary dual forces of hybridity and essentialism in the first place. Rather than being open and subject to fusion, identities seem to resist hybridisation. The result, Nira Yuval-Davis argues, is that the creation of new oppositional alliances aiming to transcend differences must contend with the resistance of activists to a fusing of their identities and subject positions. What makes for that resistance, and why is it so difficult, Alastair Bonnett and...