The Illusion of Cultural Identity

Author: Jean-François Bayart.

Translated by Steven Rendall, Janet Roitman, Cynthia

Schoch and Jonathan Derrick.

University of Chicago Press (Co-published with

C. Hurst & Co.), 2005, 296 pp.

$US 29.00 paper (0-226-03962-5), $US 75.00

hardcover (0-226-03961-7)

The Illusion of Cultural Identity is a sophisticated

and provocative text with the potential to make

meaningful contributions to the sociological

examinations of culture, politics, globalization and 

postcolonialism, specifically, and to sociological

theory and historical sociology, more generally.

In this text, Jean-François Bayart offers a complex

account of the social world, attending primarily to

the relationships between“cultural representations 

and political practices, popular modes of political

action, and the political imaginaire” in a global

context (ix). Describing his aims as both modest

and Nietzschean, the author advances in the

preface that intellectual inquiry ought to help us

“free ourselves from ourselves”by leading us

astray from what we (think we) know. Throughout,

Bayart develops a caustic critique of“culturalism”

and specifically, of the belief in the existence of

“primordial identities…imperturbably travers(ing)

the centuries”(85) with incandescent cultural

“cores”His over-arching concern is with the

commonplace reduction of political action to an

expression of an underlying and/or immanently

unfolding cultural identity. The alternative to

culturalism that is creatively developed and

identified under the rubric of the“imaginaire”

brings the historically contingent, negotiated,

differentiated, recycled, and invented nature of

social formations into the foreground of an

understanding of theintersections of cultural and

political life.

This book was first published in French in 1996; in its

2005 foreword it is proposed that “there are few

contemporary matters that do not involve the problem of

the illusion of cultural identity” (x). This “illusion,” Bayart

argues, is reiterated in various ways, including through

expressions of Western Islamophobia, Hindu

nationalism in India, references to a “Confucian legacy”

to account for economic “miracles” in East Asia,

“political correctness” and multi-culturalism in the

United States, and French government policy’s tacit support of the Rwandan genocide through the

invocation of an uncontestable “Francophone cultural

community.” The author’s passion to discredit all forms

of culturalist reasoning is fuelled in large part by the

shadows cast by recent wars and insurgencies which,

as he puts it, drew “lethal power from the assumption

that a so-called ‘cultural identity’… corresponds to a

‘political identity’”  (ix). Thus while Bayart’s field of

inquiry is impressively broad and includes examples as

diverse as “hillbilly” music competitions in the United

States, the chewing of khat in Yemen, and the invention

of “authentic Turkmen” carpets for the global market, it

is the troubling backdrop of violence, war, “ethnic

cleansing,” and genocide that gives this polemical text

its particular force.

While the culturalist position that is being railed against

is not new, Bayart suggests that in the contemporary

period, there is a haunting spectre of the vanishing of

difference (and dilution of particularity) that

accompanies the general “opening up” of societies

(globalisation); this engenders an exacerbation of

particular identities (e.g. religious, national, ethnic,

popular cultural), whereby heritage is overstated and

innovation is concealed. Further, while cultural values

may generally be understood as “relative” in the

contemporary world, Bayart argues that a troubling

assumption that tends to accompany this (now)

commonplace recognition is that “we belong to

different species or sub-species” and that

“communication between cultures is impossible in

principle” (xii).

The narrative is organized into two major sections. In

part one (chapters 1 and 2), Bayart develops his

unrelenting -- and at times comical -- critique of

culturalism. Through a prolific and strongly Canadian

Journal of Sociology Online July-August 2007 Bayart,

Illusion of Cultural Identity - 2 theoretical engagement

with diverse examples drawn from across the globe,

and taken primarily from his extensive research on the

societies of sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey and Iran,

Bayart works to puncture the “hallucinatory

discourses” of culturalism by uncovering the

heterogeneous, contradictory, conflictual, derivative,

and endlessly transformed “core” of any group configuration. The very concept of culture, it is argued,

has an ossifying tendency which leads the author to

suggest — in one of this text’s more hyperbolic

moments — that if language were biodegradable, we

would be best to do away with the notion altogether!

In part II (chapters 3 and 4), the notion of the

imaginaire (the imaginary) is used to explore how

different political repertoires are creatively constituted

out of ambivalent, ambiguous and and imagined

components of culture. The imaginaire is, in essence,

a social imagination, a set of interwoven meanings

(and representations) whose enunciation is

constitutive and open-ended. Considered less reifying

than the concept of culture, the imaginaire is formulated

along the lines of an absorbent “blotter” which “soaks

up the ink” of political action, in an implicit and perpetual

dialogue interweaving past, present and imagined

futures of a society. While Bayart strongly rejects the

Weberian conception of modern society as

disenchanted, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of

Capitalism is held up as an exemplary text for how it

highlights the place of contingency, overlapping

influences, and “sequences of circumstances” in the

ironies and paradoxes of human history. With respect

to culture’s relation to politics specifically, a significant

thematic running through the text is that “there are only

strategies based on identity, rationally conducted by

identifiable actors” (x). Alluding to his recommendation

that the social analyst attend to how different

repertoires are enunciated by identifiable actors, who

are embedded in particular sets of social relations,

Bayart remarks that “Christians have sometimes

interpreted the grammatical sentence, 'Thou shalt not

kill' in strange ways, with the Church’s blessing” (121).

The importance of the relationship between interpretive

acts and “a certain materiality” is developed

persuasively. It is noted, for example, that the

time-space compression which is characteristic of “the

imaginaire of globalization” (182) is tied inextricably to

particular transformations in communication and

transportation technologies. Along analytically similar,

but historically different lines, Bayart elaborates upon

how the imaginaire of Terror during the French

Revolution emerged in part out of “the countless

technical difficulties raised by the guillotine” (182).

Political imaginaires are also materialized (and

contested) through subjectively meaningful everyday

practices and bodily rituals. On this theme, Bayart

presents an insightful discussion of how particular

hair-styles, clothing styles and culinary customs

come to crystallize distinctive political subjectivities

and modes of existence, albeit in contradictory and

conflictual ways. A timely illustration of the

polysemousness of such materializations appears in 

a lengthy discussion of the “Muslim” veil (the hijab).

A major thrust in Bayart’s theoretic approach, which

is explicated in the conclusion, is that every society

is marked indissolubly by radical heterogeneity and

thus, by a radical incompleteness. While he

acknowledges that various social theorists (e.g.

Tocqueville, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Elias, Bakhtin,

Foucault) noted the absence of coherent social

totalities “long ago,” Bayart remarks that, curiously, western societies generally “find it difficult to

acknowledge and incorporate this fundamental lesson”

(234). While the text does not really take this up as an

interesting (and/or analyzable) phenomenon in its own

right, one of its notable strengths is how it encourages

a reflexive reading of the relations between (so-called)

identity, culture, and politics. The text concludes with

the statement that more than anything today, the

“illusion of cultural identity” threatens the very stability

of social order. This ending is somewhat unsatisfactory

in its abruptness; it would have been helpful if Bayart

had developed the implications of his argument further

by Canadian Journal of Sociology Online July --

August 2007 Bayart, Illusion of Cultural Identity - 3

elaborating upon what a social world might look like, or

how our current global and political configurations could

be different, if the theoretical schema that he has

elaborated were to be widely taken up and deployed.

One of the exceptional strengths of this text is Bayart’s

ability to move artfully between theoretical discussion

and empirical example, while avoiding the excesses of

either abstract theoreticism or concrete empiricism.

This is not incidental; the alternative to culturalism that

Bayart expounds (and embodies) in this text requires

nuanced interpretive analysis of the variations and

“leaps” between “identity-registers” (94) that occur

within (and between) particular social formations

across space and time. The text borders on

repetitiousness and Bayart sometimes meanders in his

discussion of examples; that said, the diverse

repertoire of material that is so richly woven into the

argument has the advantage of enabling the reader to

clarify the complex theoretical moves that are being

made through their vivid illustrations.

While this text offers a stimulating contribution to many 

existing sociological conversations, it was clearly

written with an eye towards influencing the very

categories that we use more generally to speak and make

judgments about the social world(s) in which we are

embedded. In this spirit, if one drawback is that it is not

always clear to whom Bayart is referring when he invokes

the maligned figure of the culturalist (professional

academic, policy maker, political analyst, journalist, or

everyday member?), a corresponding strength is,arguably,

the belief in the possibility that thoughtful inquiry can

transcend any border.

Tara H. Milbrandt, Trent University, taramilbrandt@trentu.ca

Tara Milbrandt is an assistant professor in the

Sociology department at Trent University, where she

teaches classical theory and introductory sociology.

Her current research explores the negotiated order of

the city through interpretive inquiry into the contested terrain of public spaces, with a focus upon

contemporary Toronto.

http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/illusionidentity.html

July 2007, © Canadian Journal of Sociology Online

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