Distant Futures and Alternative Presents for South Asia

By Sohail Inayatullah

In Search of Truths

A saffron robed monk trudges up the mountains of Nepal in search of a great guru.[i] He finally reaches the enlightened One only to find the room full of other seekers.  He patiently waits his turn until he is invited up to the rostrum. There the guru tells him about the future.  India’s future is bright but there will be a period of great difficulty.  First, Pakistan will attack India, possibly with nuclear weapons. China, seeing its opportunity, will follow suit.  To the rescue will be first, Russia, and then, the United States.

The lesson is not that we have been given privileged information–the future is far more mysterious than what mystics or technocrats can imagine–but how the dominant model of international relations, neo-realism, can shape our understanding of current and future events.  Not only are we handcuffed to the past, but we are also chained to the future. Breaking free of these temporal boundaries is not an easy task.  Our language, our theories of the real, our understanding of daily events constantly force us into a fabricated present.  To begin to undo this tapestry of reality, we first develop a working model of the South Asian theory of knowledge and then by moving into the future –through preferred and probable scenarios of South Asia-— we make the present remarkable, that is, we allow it to be seen as a functioning discourse instead of an essentialized reality.[ii] We develop visions and scenarios, not with the concern of predicting the future but with creating the possibility of another space, and thus to open up the present.

The future then becomes a tool to rethink the present.  The future also allows discussion since our identification with a possible future is less intense; we are less likely to hold onto positions and will be more concerned with negotiating possible realities. Finally, in this quest to distance ourselves from the present –that is, to see ourselves from an epistemological site outside of the immediate– we analyze South Asia using the exemplar of present day Yugoslavia, particularly focusing on the problematique of Kashmir.  By moving into the future and moving comparatively in international space, our intention is to undo the chains that create our configurations of South Asia today; chains that, we argue, are complicit in creating war, poverty, and stultifying bureaucracy: state and military.

The Epistemological Boundaries

To begin with, we need to deconstruct the eyes from which we see South Asia, the knowledge frame of reference, the modern episteme from which South Asia makes sense to us today.

As shown by the above allegedly divinely-inspired intuitive forecast, our arena of reference creates the categories from which we know reality.  Thus, even as the mystic is far above reality, his upbringing represents conventional views of international relations in India with Pakistan and China as enemies, Russia as a lifetime friend, and the US –now that India is potentially moving into semi-periphery status– as the new friend to be.  Moreover, the future is not given to us through spiritual categories of reality (categories focused on service, justice, consciousness and compassion), but from a vision which reinforces States and the territories they occupy.  What is important then is what States do (security and economic development) and not how humans act or how ideas can transform history.

Within this State-oriented framework, the essential category is power, framed as a zero-sum game, that is essentially coercive.  Reality is the battle between States, and it exists in the relationships between States.  Strategy is defined in technical rationalist terms with the future seen as a useful arena of study if it can help predict the behavior of other States, and if it can lead to instrumental advantage for a particular State. The future as a site for transformation, for reconceptualizing who we are, how we live, and what we can be is rarely investigated.

The dominance of neo-realism and the loss of mutual trust can be explained by external variables as well. The most important of them is the event of partition –the alleged break from colonialism– that has dominated intellectual efforts. With more than a generation of mistrust, hate and fear, creating alternative futures, new utopias and eutopias not dominated by the partition discourse has been nearly impossible[iii].  The trauma of partition is both used as justification for the strength of this particular accounting of reality but also used as revisionist history; for example, to argue that Pakistan, Kashmir, Bangladesh or even India have existed eternally as nation-states.  States then occupy real territory not imagined social spaces. This territory is metaphorically related to the body. Thus for Pakistanis, losing Kashmir is like death, and for Indians, it is only amputation.

Central to discussions of partition are colonial categories of thought (again, largely nation-state, bureaucracy oriented, with power as essentially administrative and military). Conceptual travel outside of British influence is difficult and cultural, economic, military and psychological colonialism and categories of thought remain in South Asian internal structures and representations of the self.  Knowledge from this perspective is then expert knowledge; it is not critical, rather it is based on the famous five year plan.  Knowledge practices that are more critical of historical categories appear by and large as unnatural acts as they remove the control of knowledge from experts and make problematic the official “one nation, one leader, one path” view of the future. Neither feudal lords, civil service administrators, military strategists nor religious leaders find alternative critical renderings of history, present or future, of great utility since they do not help maintain a coherent center, and have little instrumentalist value.

Being handcuffed to the future means that one ascribes to a view that is expert-based (bureaucracy-driven) in terms of knowledge, state-oriented in terms of the parameters of what is real, and realpolitik-driven in terms of the possibilities of what can happen.  Alternative rendering of the real by peoples and organizations that exist outside State formations (local, national, regional and global), different accounts of power –spiritual, women’s, critical, visionary, for example– are all seen as escapist, idealist, and impractical since they do not conform to the vision of the state planner or his academic counterpart, the Harvard or Oxford-trained economist. Of course, the viewpoint of groups outside of the State nexus is that State power and epistemology imprisons us in a limited view of the world, while those at the periphery –by understanding the dominant view and their own view– have a broader as well as emancipatory view of knowledge.[iv] Statecraft then from a women’s view is merely Mancraft, creating a world where only functionaries and bureaucrats matter, where the value of women and future generations are diminished if not erased.

The South Asian academic discourse has thus remained focused on historical investigations and mired in feudal social relations.  The future, in particular, has become fugitive and, when apprehended, it is made trivial as in the case with the five year plan.  Again, this is largely because of the style, content and structure of South Asian colonial and post-colonial intellectual/State relations.  This has been by and large administered by the civil service wherein appeasing the chief minister is far more important than independent intellectual inquiry. It is the State that gives academic discourse legitimacy since it is the State that has captured civil society.  The paucity of socioeconomic and political resources for the Academy exacerbates, if not causes, this situation.

The South Asian intellectual style is strong on philosophical inquiry (debates over the various schools of Indian philosophy, for example), on history (the dynastic rise and fall of leaders) and commentary (on religious texts and the works of others) but weak at social sciences (hypothesis development, correlation, causation and critical debate) and futures studies (as well as peace studies, ecological studies and women studies). Creativity, as might be expected, is also a non-process in educational sites; memorization of facts (with little attention paid to the social, historical and epistemological context which creates these “facts”), and memorization of particular texts (The Quran or the Vedas) is more important than the meaning that these facts and texts embody.  Their literal memorization does not allow their internalization, thus keeping power in the hands of authority, traditionally the mullah or Brahmin and more recently, the bureaucrat or technocrat.

While most believe that it is the myths of religion that bind the creative and independent mind, the mythology of Statecraft and dynastic oriented colonial history are equally damaging.  This colonial history has produced an overarching paradigm –of neo-realism and developmentalism–that even the interpreters of the hadith and Vedanta must relinquish their authority to.  Caught in a battle of ego expansion and self-interest, nations function like self-interested egoistic individuals. Economic development can only take place at the national level with communities (and thus the traditional ecology of ethnic and religious groups) absent from participation.  Only real politics with hidden motives behind every actor and action makes sense in this neo-realist discourse. The task then is explaining the actions of a nation or of functionaries of the State.

Envisioning other possibilities for “nation” or “state” and their interrelationships, that is, the assumptions that define what is considered eligible for academic discourse, remains unattempted.  Structural analysis such as center/periphery theory (a step beyond conspiracy theory) is intelligible but only with respect to the West not with respect to internal structures or with respect to how minorities within each South Asian nation are brutally suppressed. Attempts to recreate the paradigm of international relations, strategic studies and development theory through women studies, world system research, historical social change analysis, peace studies, participatory action research or the social movements are considered naive and too idealistic.   We are truly chained to the past, present and future. Our categories of the real and their representation in the world of politics make sure of our imprisonment.

Yet idealism does exist, but, in the quest for modernity it has been marginalized.  Visions remain limited to evening prayer or meditation or personal peace, and they have no place in politics or structural peace, except at the level of the State which uses religious practices to buttress its own power and control over competing classes.  The State appropriates visions into its own strategic discourse.  When non-modernist visions do enter politics, they enter in modernist frameworks creating “mullahism” and syndicated “hinduism,” thereby once again reducing the plurality of thought and action.

Finally, because of the dominance of the international relations and national development models of the social, only two types of legitimate texts are possible in the South Asian discourse. The first is the definitive history that explains partition or independence (in India, texts of India’s ancient history are also acceptable); the second is the text that explains the causes of economic underdevelopment.  In Pakistan, doctoral dissertations must travel along the path of national integration, asking the same tired questions: Is Pakistan an eternal state or is it recent? Why has national integration been so problematic? It is the text that defines Pakistani politics and academic life; all other texts remain within its contours.  Those writing in a more technical manner (economics or development) must write on the causes of underdevelopment.  A book on the future, unless it is framed by realist strategic politics or development policies, would be unfamiliar.  To break out of our handcuffs, among other exercises we need to disturb power relations and official representations (and loyal critiques) of the real as reinforced in official and educational texts.  An epistemic change is needed.

The disappointment of post-colonial society has already worn heavy on the South Asian psyche.  Betrayals by leaders and calls for more sacrifices from the people for yet another promised plan are unlikely to transform the weight of the past and the abyss of the present.  But to unchain the future from past and present, visions must not only be able to reconcile the past with the future, but they must also be able to point out the structural limits of change while allowing for the possibility of radical transformation.  Visions must be contextual even as they challenge the context they emerge from; they must spring from metaphor and deconstruct their metaphorical basis. The future, that is liberated, must be a continuous process; it must neither give into cynicism nor succumb to simplistic positive thinking.

Visions of the Future

Fortunately, there are alternative visions for South Asia[v] outside of conventional categories as we show by summarizing the perspectives of various South Asian futurists.

Q. K. Ahmed[vi], for instance, envisions a South Asia based on sustainable development model with economic equity and people’s participation –especially, women, youth and NGOs– in creating indigenous knowledge and action models.  This vision includes increased power for communities and villages as well as basic rights: a right to peace, to work, to education, to housing, to technology, to health services, to information, and to a clean and safe environment.  For Ahmed, political and economic power must be democratized.  If not, we can anticipate continued violence from the unemployed and from ethnic minorities whose voices are not heard, who must be forcibly integrated into the nation-state.  Rights, Ahmed argues, should not be given in “a patronizing sense of providing ordinary income earning opportunities through certain governmental and non-governmental programs, leaving aside the question that they are in reality the source of all power.”[vii]

Other writers have continued this vein but focused primarily on the environment. For example, Barun Gurung[viii] believes that the Himalayan region’s already fragile ecosystem will be ruined by commercialization, development interventions and the resultant population growth.  This will in turn lead to further destruction of Bangladesh as well as northern India. However, Gurung believes that through a radical Buddhism an ecological ethic could develop. The future is not pre-determined and individuals can transform the trends.  For Gurung and others such as Ashis Nandy, it is not religion that is the problem; in fact, it is the secular state in its commitment to develop individuals and regions that has created a violent State.[ix]  What is needed then is a critical traditionalism; a new balance between the secular and the religious, one where the State is fair to all parties and does not privilege the Secular.

Sri Lankan community activist A. T. Ariyaratne[x] envisions a future that links the spiritual and the material.  Ariyaratne sees development as an awakening process that takes place in socioeconomic and individual realms. Individuals remain caught in the State and Developmentalist paradigm and become cynical of what is possible because power remains in the hands of the national and international elites. Ariyaratne’s way out of the present is through social movements focused on community development, self-reliance, and cultural strength. “A simple lifestyle is particularly relevant when the limits to the planet’s capacity to sustain an extravagant materially affluence lifestyle has become clear.”[xi] As with Gandhi, Ariyaratne’s vision of the future then is a global community of villages marked by full participation and the welfare of all.  “Millions of self-governing communities will emerge and to a large extent they will be self-sustaining.”[xii] In this context of awakening, the need for coercive governments will disappear.  Political parties will not attempt to use violence to stay in power and reduce the electoral territory of others.

In Pakistan, for example, there are at least five possibilities.[xiii] The first is a “Disciplined Capitalist Society” in which the military and a strong centrist civil service create the conditions for the development of a national bourgeoisie.[xiv]  The second scenario is “Islamic Socialism” in which basic needs are met through State control of the economy but not State control of cultural and religious life–these remain syncretic and personal.  While populist and egalitarian, this view is still industrial, demanding sacrifices from the people so as to create rich developed nation.

The third scenario is the “Return of the Ideal,” the original intention of Pakistan as a land of the pure and the search for the ideal Islamic polity that existed at the time of the Prophet. While this has remained the ideal, the cognitive dissonance between the Ideal and the reality of vicious politics, ethnic violence, and political corruption has led to a deep cynicism.  Part of the problem has been the nature of the Islamic State. The search for perfection and its unattainability is of course the central problem of Islamic political theory.  Muslims believe that they did have a perfect State and society, and to recover just that becomes the present task. Instead of rethinking the impossible ideal, or developing structures to balance one-man power, advice is given on how to tolerate tyranny.  The result has been an overdeveloped (too much power) State and an underdeveloped civil society (not enough public participation).  Modernity has added to this duality by making the cynicism even more pervasive.

The fourth scenario is the “End of Sovereignty” through military intervention by India, cultural intervention from the U.S., and internal breakdown of the nation into many states.  This fearful perception often leads to extremist renderings of reality, where local culture is saved at the expense of basic human freedoms. The fifth scenario is “No Change” or the continuation of the grand disillusionment, the general malaise, with escape from South Asia as the only rational response.  The poor and middle class travel to the Middle-East while the rich flee to the United States.  The problem is fundamentally moral: how to live with one’s own moral failure when morality is central to personal and social valuation?

Ways out of these particular chains in Pakistan and South Asia might revolve around three vectors; (1) an acceptance of differences instead of a forced unity, (2) decentralization of power and economy, and (3) social design of the future, that is futures where identity and social purpose are reimagined.  The challenge is to create a culture of tolerance, where politics is about negotiating desired futures instead of efforts to paint the Other as the national enemy, as less than pure.  Once the Other becomes the enemy, then the chains of history, of difference, become a noose that daily tightens until all others are the enemy, until no one is quite Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist enough.

But even as we create new visions, the day to day reality is structural constraints imposed by external world authorities.  World Bank enforced privatization, for example, argues B.M. Sinha[xv] only make the chaos of India’s present worse. What is needed are futures focused on social movements that are committed to developing cooperatives, women’s rights, animal rights, and protection for the environment. Without dramatic changes such as limits to land and wealth ownership, new models of growth and distribution, and a balance between spiritual and material life, India will plunge into a massive chaotic and violent revolution.  Sinha looks to new social movements and ideologies, such as P.R. Sarkar’s Progressive Utilization Theory and his samaj (or cultural and bioregional) movements for the answers to the future.  He argues that the city Ananda Nagar, designed by Sarkar, is one example of appropriate ecological and social development, of economic democracy.

However, while these visions offer us hope and inspiration, we need to remember that more than other group it is women who are handcuffed, often by governmental power. Most visions of the future do not recognize how women know the world, their categories of reality, their particular histories, or their alternative visions of the future.  For example, activist Nandini Joshi[xvi] reminds us that it is women who have suffered the most in South Asia.  While changing social attitudes are important it is productive employment for them that would lead to their liberation–to economic security, social status and individual dignity. Without empowering South Asian women, South Asia’s future is bleak.  Joshi’s particular future is Gandhian, specifically she calls for the local manufacturing of cloth in small scale hut industries.  By remaining in the village and recovering traditional local economies, the family can be maintained and women seen as Goddesses not as commodities.

But we do not need to be committed to her particular view of women, which some might argue is Orientalist.  Womanist writer Shivani Banerjee Chakravorty[xvii] believes that a return to a village economy is too simple a solution as it denies the pervasiveness of modernity.  Moreover, the village community does not necessarily guarantee a better future for women as it too is male dominated and vertically structured.  Merely weaving cloth will not create a new future for India or South Asia, more dramatic steps are necessary.  Among them, a reconstitution of women in South Asian thought outside of the nationalist discourse (as in “Mother” India) is a necessary first step. For Chakravorty, women must confront modernity and in collaboration with men create new social structures where women are neither commodified nor deified.  “This is a society where women have not lost the depth and strength of their cultural heritage, but have been able to acquire new strengths from the process of development and are able effectively to transform their quest for gender justice into establishing gender justice with the cooperation … of men.”[xviii] This means seeing women as real people not as archetypes existing primarily in myth.  At the same time, this requires men to find their own place. However, given that South Asia is in a disadvantaged position in the world capitalist economy, meaning unemployment is rampant, it is often easier to blame and abuse those that are the most defenseless–women and children. Gender and power must be reconceptualized in neither modernist nor traditional frames of meaning.

Sensitive to postmodern articulations of power/knowledge, men/women, secular/religious, Sankaran Krishna[xix] has argued for an alternative approach to the task of imaging the future of South Asia, particularly India.  For him, we need to imagine other structural possibilities rather than the peculiar nation-state divisions that presently exist.  However, Krishna does not call for a particular vision rather he seeks to open up conceptual space for a range of new South Asias.  He does however criticize the nationalist discourse. For Krishna continued efforts to protect national sovereignty at the cost of endless human lives is clearly not a preferred future. In the name of national security and identity–most recently in Kashmir–all sorts of violence are committed.  We thus need to radically redefine security and sovereignty and create a world where dissidents can safely walk the streets.  However, this effort is often literally laughed out of course since “national security is serious business … best left to the hard headed, amoral, rational and ever-watchful realists.[xx] Being called idealist is one thing, but often the charge against those who create a counter discourse to national security is that they are traitorous.  Charged such, the debate ends and the discourse of nationalism continues.

But while postmodern visions provide us with theoretical comfort, we cannot forget the visions of war ahead, as in the Yugoslavia exemplar we develop below.  For example, peace researcher, Johan Galtung[xxi] has compared South Asia, particularly India, to the emerging European Community.  This intriguing perspective gives some distance and allows unexpected similarities to emerge.  Both have a memory of past glories, both have a social structure that can carry this mantle and both have a national culture which can provide legitimacy for leadership. Galtung thus sees the future of South Asia as strongly India dominated with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal as peripheries.  Galtung however does not stay in the International Relations discourse as he reminds us that as with all rises to superpower status, the decline is not too far way either.  The cost of the rise, however, will be untold suffering for many and glory for the few as territorial or economic expansion always comes at a cost. While the structural and cosmological reasons for this scenario are evident, certainly this projection of South Asia’s future is one that only center elites would prefer.  Galtung asks, “Does that drama … that prison … have to be enacted again? Why don’t we ever learn?”[xxii]

For Zia Sardar,[xxiii] South Asia is trapped by its past.  Its imagination fitted into an imitative mould.   But equally dangerous is an active and instrumental modernity. South Asia “does not know which way to turn: all roads to the future, it appears, pass through the valley of death … the Indian subcontinent is in the imminent danger of being killed by its own progeny.”[xxiv] Both traditional ideology as well as modernist rationalist fabrications of identity and State must be dealt with. Doing so would unleash the creative imagination that sustains the mythologies of the culture that is South Asia.  The first step in doing needs to be some sort of partnership between South Asian nations and traditions. They must find a place to meet, to transform their recent past and recreate their present. Sardar’s concludes his essay with two words: “come together.”[xxv]

Scenarios

To break out of the past and present, we first need to rid ourselves the socialist state/collective centered model and the market nation/individual centered model as well as the ideologization of religion and tradition.  In terms of alternatives, we have a range of possibilities, as described in the nine scenarios below.  These scenarios should be seen not as predictions but as points of discussion, as reflections on what might happen given various historical trends, and as calls for transformation. They serve as points of possibility and points of warning.

The first is continued chaos and collapse–ethnic violence (and possible fission into many small nations), war, poverty, and powerlessness. This is the Yugoslav situation with ethnicities finding themselves in intractable wars.  Kashmir, for example, has been constructed by all parties as necessary for their national survival, without which national identity is at stake.

The second is hegemony by one actor (India) or by one gender (men) or by one model of economy (market industrialization), and one form of politics (bureaucracy-led with various levels of military intervention).

The third is a return to a communitarian form of life: based on universal spiritual values; local knowledge and endogenous models of development; local forms of economic exchange, and the safeguarding of the environment.   Each culture is able to find spiritual values from their own traditions and use it to recover an ecology of tolerance, of meeting basic needs.

The fourth is some type of dramatic transformation or rupture, whether through a new confederation of South Asia, a new identity, or a new theory of growth/distribution, knowledge/science, and history/future. In this scenario, it is not merely a return to an imagined past, but a creation of a new future. This means that both realism and history must be challenged.

The above visions above are different from the present optimistic mood held by governments, which believe that South Asia will become one the new tigers.  In this fifth scenario, through free trade, smaller more efficient governments, exports will rise and a new South Asian middle class will emerge.[xxvi] This growth leads to an economic confederation (an expanded SAARC), the only way South Asia can survive economically (against the EC, Nafta, APEC) and forth.  It is business with its economic incentives that reduces the power of national identity, thus weakening the link between self, nation and territory.  This could lead to the peripheralization of the smaller nations or could lead to positive lock-ins and increasing returns and growth for all areas: a positive cycle of growth.  Thus a bourgeois revolution would help create a new class more committed material comforts and educational opportunities than tired historical mythologies.  At the same time, such a revolution, while creating a middle class, would further erode the conditions of peasants and proletariat.  Environmental degradation would worsen, and as in the West, the future would be robbed from future generations.

A sixth scenario is that of nuclear war.  This is given great attention to in Western texts[xxvii], although far less in South Asian texts since nuclear weapons occupy privileged nationalistic space.  But to argue against nuclear weapons is to locate oneself as a traitor; one who has betrayed independence, even if going nuclear is certainly the road to economic bankruptcy[xxviii] (As Zulfikar Ali Bhutto promised and accurately predicted: Pakistanis will eat grass to gain nuclear power).

A seventh scenario that is perhaps more creative, certainly less bounded to historical experience, is a Village high-tech model.  In this model, modernity is bypassed and South Asia enters the post-industrial society through computer intelligence, genetic engineering and other sorts of dazzling but miniature new “appropriate” technologies.  Further negative affects of modern industrialism are then minimized.  Not only does a bourgeois revolution occur but it does so without the traditional costs of development–the loss of community.

A related but not as dramatic eighth scenario is focused less on economic or political factors and more on the ability of culture to both destroy and recreate the traditional.[xxix] In this scenario, cultural intertwining through television, videos, connections of South Asian overseas, a type of cultural renaissance from Hong Kong to Abu Dubai led perhaps by Asian VTV and Star Television all create a fundamentally new Asian culture.  This might mean a loss of cultural uniqueness, a loss of cultural integrity, and the commodification of religious and tribal culture but it also might lead to innovativeness and new types of cultural forms such as Bangra Rap, leading to intensified economic activity (for example, new wave, punk, rock and rap are billion dollar industries for the US and England).

In our final ninth scenario, we anticipate a breakdown of South Asia from its present national structures into numerous states.  Each nation within itself would become more of a federation, allowing more rights for minorities.  This is different than the first scenario in that the tension between the local and global is peacefully resolved; economy, culture and polity becoming decentralized but rights becoming more universal.  An independent Kashmir or Khalistan or the division of Sri Lanka might begin such a trend, forcing nations to address the concerns of minorities.

Unfortunately while visions help us out of the present, we are often too soon returned to the national.  The emphasis on mutual hate and fear of the Other continues to dominate discourses on the future and make efforts at critical thought to merely appear as idealistic words, fine for poets and philosophers but inappropriate for the important task of politics.

But our concern is not so much in creating scenarios for their theoretical or aesthetic elegance but in finding ways in which South Asians can increase intimacy among themselves, that is, to create a personal ecology wherein many histories and many futures can co-exist (and thus challenge the nationalist “monology” of unity and fear as the co-drivers of South Asian personal and community identity).  Scenarios are neither true nor false but points of departure which should help us reframe the present.[xxx] The first step in creating an Other is in imagining its possibility. Can we imagine an alternative South Asia where we do not live in such a situation of heightened epistemological distance?  The tragedy remains that Pakistanis and Indians continue to ask each other what does the other look like?

Our effort above has been suggestive, in creating possible pathways out of the present.  To return to intimacy, we can either unlock the handcuffs in history, that is return back in time, or we can go forward in time, to an alternative future.

The question to ask is what might each scenario mean across different variables–how would it affect the State’s coercive power, how would family relations change, how would tradition and culture be transformed?  And more importantly if we believed in a particular vision, if we believed that a scenario could transform reality, we could ask how would that change one’s policy prescriptions, one’s day to day actions? Finally, we could assume a particular scenario had occurred and then backcast into the present, conjecturing on what trends, events, and movements allowed for the victory of one particular discourse.  Backcasting, while useful, in filling events and trends that shape the future, also has an empowering utility, as it helps individuals see that the impossible is often possible.

Spatial Distance

Another way out of the straitjacket of historical and realist discourse is to not move temporally but to move spatially.  We can ask, for example, what can South Asian learn from the breakup of Yugoslavia?  In many ways, Yugoslavia’s present is South Asia’s past: ethnic cleansing, the break-up of a larger State, continued violence between segments of the former State, and extensive outside interference were realities and continue to be concerns for most South Asians since independence from the British.  Yugoslavia can perhaps best learn from the failure–as evidenced by continued violence, poverty cycles, and betrayal of the peoples by the leadership–of South Asian political structures.  But there are important lessons for South Asia as well, particularly with respect to Kashmir, which remains contested cultural, geographical and identity terrain for Pakistan and India as well as Kashmir itself.  To draw out these lessons, we need to first examine the similarities between the two.

Both nations were constructed by outside forces, Western Europeans.  Both regions are cultural diverse, multi-civilizational, multi-religious.  Both have an ancient sense of history but many of their ethnic problems are recent, created by political parties in search of nations rather than nations in search of a State, as the case with indigenous movements such as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.  While certainly one can take a historical view to understand primordial ethnic urges, often is local political leaders who use the politics of ethnicity, of difference, most easily noticeable in ethnicity, to gain their own political power.  In underdeveloped polities gaining State power means gaining economic power, military power and identity power.  Creating ethnic consciousness then is the first step towards political victory (and eventual suicide) as Milosovic in Yugoslavia and untold many in South Asia have found out.  Ethnic consciousness is further conflated with religion, once again with easily recognizable difference. History is used to create a pure mythology of greatness that others cannot enter: the myth of the Orthodox Serbian people (who resisted the Other of Turkey) or of Pakistan as the purest land of Muslims.

If we examine the present crises in both areas, we see a loose structural correlation. Croatia, it can be argued, is similar to Pakistan, as both are carved out from the larger and more powerful nation, India and Serbia.  Both have sordid pasts: Croatia’s collusion with the Nazis during the second world war and Pakistan’s despicable actions against Bangladesh during the 1971 war.

Using this analogy, Kashmir and Bosnia are both isomorphic. In both cases, the majority are Muslim but there are real minorities.  The Croation bosnians are similar to Kashmiris who want to join with the Pakistanis and the Kashmiri hindus are like the Bosnian serbs who want to join with the mother land, India and Serbia.  That these similarities emerge is not accidental: the politics of nation-state formation, the artificial boundaries created among ethnicities, the playing of religious groups for power by politicians, the interference by external powers, all join to create isomorphisms. The brutality of the Serbs towards the Bosnian muslims and the Indians towards the Kashmiri muslims is similar.  And as can be expected, both justify their actions by arguing that they are merely trying to keep their rightful boundaries in tact; they do not want to lose their land, their nation-state, their sovereign state.  Serbian leader Milosevic did not want a confederation because he feared a breakdown of Yugoslavia.  The Indian argument is the same as was Pakistan’s when East Pakistan wanted more provincial autonomy.  And yet, paradoxically and perhaps causally, each group is intimate with the other (Bosnian muslims with Serb orthodox and Croat catholics in the former Yugoslavia and Muslims with Hindus in India) and each has lived for periods in a peaceful and thriving local ecology. The enemy is both intimate and distant: love and violence stand in proximity to each other–with often only the fragility of civil society, of cultural power, of an ethos of a larger humanity allowing the former to remain.

Finally, many of the problems of these two regions have been externally created by centuries of colonialism, of the external creation of difference.  Turkish rule over Yugoslavia and British rule over South Asia helped create many of these ethnic and religious differences.  Yugoslavia at its independence, however, attempted to create a federation of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians while India’s independence immediately led to the breakdown of the Indian State into the new State of Pakistan (and then Bangladesh).

Each group as well has a history of believing it is oppressed. Serbs believe they were oppressed by Turkish muslims and now by the world community.  Hindus believe they were oppressed by Mogul muslims and then by the British. Both Serbs and Hindus have looked to outside powers for safety: Serbs and Hindus with Russia (and the breakaway states have forged alliances with the traditional rivals of these powers; Pakistan with the USA and Croatia with Germany).

There are fundamental differences as well and thus we should not push this analysis too far. For example, Pakistan is far more similar to Bosnia, as both are intended states, whose identity has been recently invented, unlike Croatia, Serbia, and India, who have much longer “national” histories.

Clearly, these are different regions, with different histories, and much of the similarity is correlation not causation based, albeit given the history of nation-state and the suppression of ethnicities in this development, and given both nations location in an asymmetrical world-economy, we should not be surprised to see so many isomorphisms. In any case, the purpose of this analysis is to open up possibilities of new frameworks not become bogged down in a search for similitude nor to develop a comparative theory of nation building and nation failing.

Futures and Kashmir

Given these structural similarities what can we deduce about possible policies with respect to the peace in the regions’ future? That is, what can we learn from the breakdown of the Yugoslav state in understanding and potentially diffusing the current crisis in Kashmir.  Kashmir is important, particularly for Pakistan and India, in that it is the symptom of perpetual crisis, the rallying cry used to gain weapons of horror, of diverting funds from education to war, of creating a syndicated Hinduism and an extremist, hard Islam.  Solving the problem of Kashmir would then begin a process of reconciliation, of peace, and thus the creation of positive cycles of trust, cultural exchange, and economic interdependence.  What follows are a series of policy prescriptions that might aid in minimizing the loss of human life and help in keeping the future open in Kashmir in particular and in the region in general.

(1)        Early recognition without peacekeeping forces is a mistake. The world community should not recognize an independent Kashmir without strategically located peace forces. Recognition will invite a free-for-all far worse than the present battle between Pakistan and India.  As with the Yugoslav case, it will increase violence and almost certainly lead to a prolonged three or four nation war.  However, if there are enough reasons for recognition then peace forces must be first activated.

(2)        But before peace forces can be activated one needs peace building.  Much of the violence in Yugoslavia could have been averted if people’s organizations, women’s groups, and other social movements were stronger. We need to encourage transnational peace groups, women’s groups, human rights groups, spiritual groups and others outside the nation-state fabric to build bridges, to create possibilities for intimacy within Kashmir and between India and Pakistan. Doing so would allow for alternative futures then present. However, one might argue that it is already too late given the escalation of violence. Certainly this is largely the case, but the question remains: is it possible to build peace through people’s organizations not wedded to state-centered solutions that deny women, labor, child and human rights as an explanatory framework and as a basis for policy formulation in Kashmir? Certainly Statist solutions merely expand the crisis: from Kashmir to Sindh, for example in Pakistan. Military solutions merely strengthen the military bureaucracy creating a discourse from which escapeways continue to narrow.[xxxi]

(3)        At the level of theory development, we need to remember that ethnicity and religion are not Platonic categories but categories used by political parties to gain electoral power. In this sense they are recent.  Milosevic was victorious because he promised that Serbs would never again be oppressed.  He used ancient Serb identity–suppressed by Tito’s communism–to increase his own power (as with the BJP, for example).  These efforts must be intellectually resisted and we must create alternative renderings of history that see ethnicity as politically and socially created. Localism in the form of economic incentives for local groups to, for example, resist international capital and the drainage of wealth and ideas that follow needs to be encouraged. But localism must be based on a larger universalism, committed to enhancing material benefits.

(4)        Finally, U.N. economic sanctions against any of the parties is a mistake. In case Indian brutality increases, sanctions should not occur. They only reproduce nation (uniting India against the outside Other and hardening positions that might previously have been negotiable) and ethnicity and succeed in only destroying the power base of the local opposition Party (since it is now seen as counter to national interest).  The main economic result is the impoverishment of the elderly, women and the middle class and the creation of a new class of international smugglers. Sanctions represent a failure in developing creative solutions to the problem of aggression against minorities and against other States.  We need to find other forms of “sticks” and “carrots” examining not only military and economic power but people’s and cultural power. We also need to understand that leadership in most states is not representative of the “will” of the people.  Elections are often fraudulent and coercive measures are used by the ruling Party so it can stay in power–Milosevic and Saddam Hussain are prime examples. Sanctions do not create help in dislodging an unpopular ruler; they merely lead to more extreme positions, creating a psychosis of fear.

The policy and theoretical task is both to keep the past and future open and be cognizant how both can be used by various political forces for their own gain.  Opening up past, present and future allow for a more negotiable future, however, it also allows for fictions of natural superiority to pollute the discourse. The opening of temporality must be done in the context of a humanistic ethics, of understanding the categories and reality of the Other.

We thus need to find ways to keep the future open in Kashmir and South Asia in general.  Part of this is a struggle of             developing competing understandings of the real: of the problematic nature of ethnicity, representation and democracy, and of finding ways of legitimating alternative histories and futures into popular discourse.

Conclusion

Given the visions, scenarios, and comparative analysis above, can we narrow our prognosis? Are there chances for positive peace ahead?

For South Asia, economic and cultural confederation based on sustainable development and rights for all minorities is preferred–since it promises peace and cultural interaction–but given the present paradigm: how national identity is structured, how history is taught, and the dominance of the language of statecraft, it is unlikely.

At the same time, cultural history (an agreed upon origin) and cultural authenticity is far more problematic with sovereignty threatened from above and below. Thus, while there are strong reasons for the continuation of the present, the breakdown of history and culture, from the globalizing forces of technology (modern technologies and postmodern ones such as genetics, virtual reality, and robotics) and capitalist development make the present problematic, indeed, unlikely.

Globalization can lead to another possibility for the entire region: a fundamentalist future.[xxxii] Fundamentalism occurs when change is too quick, when religious authorities lose their traditional place in society, when knowledge is no longer hierarchical, that is, when the place of traditional experts in society is dislodged.  However we have had twenty years of this in Pakistan and few years of this process in India.  In Pakistan’s case, the bourgeois forces may prove much stronger than fundamentalist or feudal forces as the brief success of Moin Querishi hinted at.  While India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh have not been as fortunate to have a South Asian leader who had a career outside national political power, who was in power to leave official power, similar forces are operating there. However, this is not to argue that these States will continue along a simplistic Western modeled secular path, rather a new configuration of the religious and the secular has to be forged–this will be an indigenous good that has some transcendental appeal much as Western democracy, i.e. the separation of the civil and the religious, has had in the last few hundred years.  Creative futures for South Asia will depend on that type of alternative political and social theory.  Without these visions, with the present unlikely and the trends towards peace difficult, if we are not careful then continued war will be our future.

Our purpose has been to make past and present more porous, to use the future to rethink the past and the present. There are always many pasts, many presents and many futures.  We need to find ways in which we can peacefully negotiate them. But it will be difficult to break from history and conventional images of the future.  Deep animosities exist among South Asians.  Just as the Serbs feel that Bosnian muslims are double traitors, since they converted to Islam and now to a new State, Indians have the same perception of Pakistanis.  At some time in history, muslims left some hindu sect and then finally left the nation itself.  This feeling of betrayal takes time to heal and understand.

For Pakistanis, far more important than national integration is the need to place faith on human rights, economic justice, on differences between themselves instead of using India as an enemy to create national unity. This type of unifying strategy is only successful for the short run.  In the long run it creates an inner enemy, an inner demon, that destroys one’s mind and heart leading to the deep betrayal of civil society; a betrayal India and Sri Lanka are now discovering.  Hopefully by looking forward and by looking around we can avoid this type of future and instead create one based on difference and unity, on creative renderings of history and of the local and the universal.

This means committing ourselves to the needs and concerns of future generations, of taking policy steps, of finding theoretical frames that allow for more open pluralistic futures; futures that can then be enjoyed by our children and their children, whether Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, or Bhutanese. Whatever the local identity of future generations, let us hope that they are first of all humans who happen to live in South Asia and act in ways to preserve and expand our essential humanity.

Notes

[i] This story was told to me through e-mail by Acharya Prasidananda Avadhuta, who has with all such stories, heard it from another monk.  E-mail transmission, 1993.

[ii] See Sohail Inayatullah, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Future,” Futures (March 1990).

[iii] As one Pakistani professor born in the 1930’s commented: “We are the lost generation, with no hope or vision, only the inhumanity of a world war, the bitterness of partition and the mockery of post-colonial society. We cannot create the future.”

[iv] Joyce McCarl Nielsen, “Introduction” in Joyce McCarl Nielsen, ed. Feminist Research Methods.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.  P. 10.

[v] These are based on a special issue of Futures (November 1992) guest edited by Sohail Inayatullah. See, Sohail Inayatullah, “Introducing the Futures of South Asia,” Futures (November 1992).

[vi] Q.K. Ahmed, “Policies and Strategies for sustainable development in Bangladesh,” Futures (November 1992).

[vii] Q.K. Ahmad, “South Asia: Economic Growth and Human Development with Equity, Security and Sustainability–National and Regional Perspectives,” 15 in Sohail Inayatullah, Alternative Futures for South Asia (forthcoming).

[viii] Barun Gurung, “Towards Sustainable Development: A Case in the Eastern Himalayas,” Futures (November 1992).

[ix] Ashis Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony and Violence. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.

[x] A. T. Ariyaratne, “A Society Based on Eternal Laws,” in Sohail Inayatullah, ed., Alternative Futures for South Asia (forthcoming).

[xi] Ibid., p. 21.

[xii] ibid., p. 26.

[xiii] Sohail Inayatullah, “Images of Pakistan’s Future,” Futures (November 1992).

[xiv] “Born to Rule,” The Herald (June 1991), pp. 31-33.

[xv] B.M. Sinha, “India Towards a Social Revolution,” Futures (November 1992).

[xvi] Nandini Joshi, “Women Can Change the Future” Futures (November 1992).

[xvii] Shivani Banerjee Chakravorty, “Can Women Change the Future?” Futures (November 1992).

[xviii] Ibid., p. 941.

[xix] Sankaran Krishna, “Oppressive Pasts and Desired Futures: Re-Imagining India,” Futures (November 1992).

[xx] Ibid., p. 865.

[xxi] Johan Galtung, “On The Way to Superpower Status: India and the EC Compared,” Futures (November 1992).

[xxii] ibid., p. 928.

[xxiii] Zia Sardar, “On Serpents, Inevitability and the South Asian Imagination,” Futures 24/9 (1992).  pp. 942-949.

[xxiv] Ibid,. p. 942.

[xxv] Ibid., p. 949.

[xxvi] Lee Kuan Yew has made a case for this possibility.  But to achieve this vision there needs to be land reform, and then technology and investment from an external dynamo (perhaps south-east asia), complimented with a long term focus on technical education (and not the hereafter), as well as consensus politics.  See Lee Kuan Yew, “The Vision for Asia,” The Muslim, 20 March 1992, p. 2.

[xxvii] See, for example, Richard Lamm, Mega-Traumas. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

[xxviii] See Dr. Inayatullah, “The Nuclear Arms Race Between Super Powers: Some Lessons for Pakistan and India,”(Paper Prepared for Pakistan Social Science Forum, 1993).

[xxix] For a series of essays that develop this perspective by authors such as Zia Sardar, Ashis Nandy, and Susantha Goonatilake, see Yogesh Atal and Eleonora Masini, eds., The Futures of Asian Cultures. Bangkok: UNESCO, 1994.

[xxx] For further analysis of this position, see Sohail Inayatullah, “From Who am I to When am I” Futures (May 1990).

[xxxi] Dr. Inayatullah, “Creating Order Without Law and Justice: An Elusive Chase,” (Paper Prepared for the Pakistan Social Science Forum, 1992).

[xxxii] For more on this, see Sohail Inayatullah, “Why Khomeni Wants Rushdie Dead: Understanding the Postmodern World,” Third Text (Summer 1992).

By Sohail Inayatullah

Some Perspectives on the Futures of Asian Cultures

Published in Eleonora Masini and Yogesh Atal, eds., The Futures of Asian Cultures (Bangkok, UNESCO, 1993

March 15, 1993

ABSTRACT

Using culture in a variety of ways–culture in opposition to neo-realist views of economism and power; culture as essentially alive, always more than our definition of it; culture as fundamentally an essence, the original state of affairs; culture as an original state of affairs that declines over time and culture as a social practice–we explore a variety of cultural futures: (1) The unravelling of the traditional Asian self, (2) The breakdown of the self and culture, the schizophrenic model of reality, (3) Women’s cultural futures particularly the role of resentment as the emotion of future; (4) A new cultural renaissance from the periphery; (5) the rise of East Asian sensate culture; (6) Technological cultures from virtual reality, genetic engineering, and robotics; and, (7) Conflicts between types of time and a search for a cultural frames that incorporate a diversity of “times.”

Introduction:
Now considered the last unified discourse, culture is believed to be the voice of community, of a coherent set of meanings and relationships, the core of the Good Society, of humanity. Culture appears to be the last hope standing in counter point to the inequity of the market and the obtrusive power of the State. Through the language of civil society–globally and locally–culture presents us with the ideals of love and tolerance; peace and beauty; hope and vision. In this humanist model of society, culture is the last remnant of the past not infiltrated by technocratic capitalist market relations. Culture is then the voice of the past and the hope of the future.

Living cultures put on the way side of the linear march of history are now studied and celebrated (from Ladakh to Indian tribals) because we believe them to have a coherent voice and vision, to exist in a society where social relations stand before instrumental relations, where the transcendental is placed before the secular, and where the body has yet to have been placed in the surveillance grid of modern society. Asian cultures (south, east and south-east) in particular are believed to represent this traditional or ancient relationship with earth and heaven. But this may no longer be the case, for the Asian voice has begun to unravel. Travel, television, video, Westernization, modernity, and independence–as well as the reaction to the oppressive strength of feudal and hierarchical forces of the past, whether Confucianist, Hindu or Muslim–all have made problematic a unified Asian self. New technologies, forms of music, patterns of resistance and post-Asian visions of the future may make Asia’s contribution to the future of culture far more unexpected in form and content, more like a novel (a text of many voices) than a serious piece of non-fiction (a consolidated text, often a sermon, with a clear author). To begin our analysis we need to first distinguish between local, Center and pseudo culture. Local culture is often strong at providing identity but weak at intellectual, social, capital and physical mobility. Center culture (the culture of the dominant power) in contrast is weak at identity but strong on capital and individual mobility, that is economic growth. Local culture has survived because of its relationship to the land, in helping members meet basic needs. However, local culture has not been able to compete with modernity’s promise of providing economic rewards, of the glitter of city life, where one always hears of someone winning the lottery. Communism provided basic needs but not identity and mobility. Modernity, however, provides unity and identity in the idea of Man–Man as consumer and producer. Instead of the logos of God standing benevolently above the skies, it is the new symbols of Coco-Cola and McDonalds that provide global participation.
Modernity succeeds largely by creating a bridgehead based on pseudo-culture between Core and local culture, leaving local culture ridiculed, weak, and most importantly–inferior. Local’s judge their beauty, mind, history from the eyes of the foreign culture. Bengali activist and social philosopher Sarkar says it like this (1982: 53-54).
The subtler and sweeter expressions of human life are generally termed “culture.” Human culture is one, but there are some local variations in its expression. That particular community which is motivated by socio-sentiment (race, groupism, nationalism) to exploit others tries to destroy the local cultural expressions of other communities. It forcibly imposes its language, dress and ideas on other communities, and thus paves the way for exploitation by paralysing those people psychologically. So if some people by virtue of their wealth impose (their culture) on others, this will break their backs, they will become paralysed … If the cultural backbone is broken then all their struggles will end in nothing.

This is pseudo-culture. However–and this is where we differ from traditional humanists–efforts to transform pseudo-culture or to criticize colonial culture are often based on an idealized past not an ideal or alternative future. These are attempts to resurrect myths before the changes wrought by colonialism. But rarely are there efforts to envision alternative futures (that take dimensions of traditional and modern yet yearn for a different voice, a post-Asian voice, if you will), except, of course, for more recent efforts by the peace movements, the ecological groups, the women’s groups and a few spiritual movements–the anti-systemic movements.

Culture then as the voice of humanity against the technocratic State machine of late capitalism may tell us more about a particular idealized past then the futures ahead. While culture as a coherent voice of sanity–the voice of humanity against the technocratic State machine of late capitalism–may be the illuminated side of the darkness of the present, reflecting the bold vision of the renaissance humanists, of the moral philosophers, it tells us very little of the chaos ahead, of the new forms of cultures emerging, of transformations ahead. As Frantz Fanon (1967) has written, culture often deteriorates into custom losing its critical innovative edge, its spiritual vision and inspiration. Paradoxically, it is after culture has lost its edge that it is glorified and then “museumized.” However, even as a particular form of culture may lose its critical edge, there are always new forms of culture challenging dominant models of reality, of political-economy, of State power. Living culture then is often a step ahead of our mapping abilities, our attempts to rationalize and locate it.

In discussing the futures of Asian cultures, we take a variety of approaches. Beginning with an epistemological approach in which we look at how the “cultural” is constituted, particularly official culture, we move to an analysis of culture, gender and structure. We then examine the futures of cultures from the model of schizophrenia, using it as a way to comment on peripheral challenges to center and pseudo-culture. We also examine the impact of new technologies on traditional images of culture. We conclude with an analysis of the cultural construction of time.

Towards a Critical Futures Studies:

Before we can enter into a discussion of the futures of cultures, we need to ask as a preliminary, what are the frames of reference, the meaning boundaries from which this question, this investigation gains eligibility into our discourse? How is it that we can ask that question: what is the futures of cultures, specifically in a socially imagined place called Asia?

Futures studies itself, to begin with, can be understood in many ways. Roy Amara, for example, uses the division of preferable, probable and possible (1981). We take an alternative route and use the division of: predictive, interpretive and critical (Inayatullah, 1990).

The first aims at controlling and taming the future and thus making uncertainty less fearful. Finding empirical–accurate, valid and repeatable–indicators of culture and cultural futures is the task in this approach. Culture in this perspective is segmented, merely one more variable in a complex cross-impact scenario analysis, that is, culture along with economy and polity. The second is not concerned with predicting the future but with understanding the meanings we give to the future. This view assumes that the future is constructed in distinct ways by different cultures; cultural comparison and diversity in interpretations is the key here. The task for research is not to know one particular future but to explore a range of alternative futures–to expand the discourse on what can be and what has been! The third view goes perhaps a step further and asks, what are the knowing boundaries of what can be? From this view, futures research aids not in shedding more light, in giving more answers, but in making events, trends, scenarios and others tools of the future problematic, by asking how is that we accept conventional categories of analysis in the first place. Michel Foucault (1984), for example, did not seek to predict the future of societies but instead asked how is that we have become a population instead of a subject or a community or a people. The task is not so much to compare or predict, that is to conduct an analysis based on a prior agreed upon definition, but to bring into the discourse different possible meanings. Culture then ceases to be an essentialized reified category but becomes a particular way of knowing that has historically come about at the expense of other possible cultures. Even though we may construct culture in humanist terms as our possible savior, no culture is innocent, every reality displaces another possibility.

This third view then looks for the social costs, the politics of a particular culture. In exploring the futures of cultures, we could then ask what knowledge interests does a particular social formation serve? How does one vision of the future or one view of the future privilege a particular episteme (historical boundaries of knowledge) and favor a particular interest group or particular class.
Most important even while most discussions of the future of cultures rightly attempt to move culture outside of economistic categories, “culture”–within this critical framework–exists centrally in the “political,” the ability to define what is important and what is insignificant; what is real. This takes culture out of frivolous discussions of eating, dress, and smell (although these too can tell us a great deal) or even values and habits, to culture as resistance.

Defining culture as resistance leads to a more critical analysis of the location of culture in social change. In Hawaii, for example, local people have developed a language of resistance called pidgin-English. While ridiculed by U.S. Mainland Americans as poor English, more than anything else, pidgin-English serves to differentiate outsiders and insiders and to help insiders gain some advantage in an Island that has increasingly lost control of its own future through integration into the world capitalist system (particularly US Mainland culture). Through local resistance efforts–language, music and dance, as well as efforts to regain lost land–Hawaiian culture intends to return to its traditional cosmology, and thereby cease to represent a romanticized Orientalist narrative of cultural harmony, the land of swaying coconut trees and hula girls. The recovery of Hawaiian cosmology then becomes the best defense against modernity’s commodification of the native (Agard and Dudley, 1990).

Within the critical framework, we do not abandon scenarios, focusing only critical analysis. Rather, scenarios become textual strategic tools to distance us from the present, to gain a fresh perspective on cultures. This is important for as Franz Kafka has warned us, our consciousness may be more our enemy than our ally, since there is no world out there waiting for us to apprehend. Rather, we are complicit in creating the reality that is us. In Kafka’s story “The Burrow,” the creature digging the burrow cannot tell to what extent the danger it experiences is created by outside enemies or by its own digging.

Eventually, the creature becomes aware that the sole evidence of the existence of its enemies is noise. Beginning in a romanticized state of silence and tranquility, as its efforts to create an impregnable burrow proceed, the creature draws disparate conclusions about the whistling it begins to hear in the walls. Its inability to determine whether noises are produced by its own burrowing or by a predator can be read allegorically as pertaining to interpretation in general (Shapiro, 1992: 123).

How then to distinguish the act of knowing from that which is to be known? One cannot simply look up culture to find its definition. There is no transparent encyclopedia in which the real is cataloged for us. Indeed, the catalog, the index, in itself frames that which we are in search for; the index is complicit in our definition of culture. Ultimately there is no culture existing out there for us to discover, we are part of the process of discovering, even though we are often ignorant of our own site of understanding.

The humanistic response to this has been a plea for creating the conditions for enhancing cultural diversity, for situations wherein the Other culture can reveal things in us that have remained hidden. While this is important, two additional perspectives are needed. One is that “we” ourselves within this plea for cultural diversity exist in a larger (unknowable to us even as we self-deconstruct) matrix of the real–the historical boundaries of knowledge, the societal constructs of intelligibility that frame our questioning and knowing. At the same time, we need to find an anchor from which to interpret, from which to focus our gaze lest we become lost in a sea of endless relativities with no knowing or positive action at all possible. The futures of Asian cultures, for this essay, will be our ground, the landscape in which we hope to create some cultural fruits.

Within this critical framework, we can then attempt to imagine alternative societies (and create) not merely to predict or forecast the future but to gain distance from the present, so as to see it anew. We can ask a range of what-if questions to loosen the bounds of the present, to shift through our terrain and find different spaces of intelligibility. For example, what would a society look like that had no culture? What would a society look like if it was entirely cultural ? Or entirely acultural? What would a culturally rich society look like? Culturally poor? We could also more specifically ask: what would world culture be like if Manila instead of Paris was the cultural capital of the world? These types of questions could lead to a range of dialogues and useful scenario building. At the same time, the empirical view is important in that we have a context from which to enter the future lest scenarios be idiosyncratic reflections of the future. History and structure should guide but not bind our explorations into the future.

State/Airport Culture: Korea’s Intangible Asset Program

In our attempts to examine the futures of cultures, we often assume that culture is discernable through our rational mind. But if we assume culture has unconscious mythological/epistemic aspects, that is, culture is an unconscious process–less visible to official Power and more evasive the closer we seek to define it–then we need to find other avenues of inquiry into the futures of cultures.
As an important case study, both North and South Korea are conscious of the possibility of losing their culture. Japanese imperialism and Westernization (pseudo-culture) have made it imperative to save culture, to collect it for the future.

Culture has become a central strategy in moving forward and competing on the world stage, the Seoul Olympics as the most obvious example. As with other third world nations (conscious of becoming significant actors on the world field) culture has been given official status, sponsored much as in the feudal era when a wealthy merchant would sponsor an artist. But in Korea this is more than merely creating an Institute for the Arts, to spur creativity, rather culture is seen as a national asset, part of the drive towards full sovereignty.

South Korea has gone even further having established an Office of Cultural Assets which designates certain individuals as Intangible Cultural Assets. Upon designation a numeral is assigned to them. Upon death of the asset, the senior most student is given intangible asset status (Howard, 1986).

If we examine a brochure from a recent performance in Hawaii, we gain insight into one dimension of the future of Asian culture. For example, Ms. Yang studied with the grand master Kim Juk-Pa, who was recognized as the Intangible Cultural Asset No. 23 by the government of Korea. After the death of her teacher, Ms. Yang was assigned by the Korean government in 1988 as the Exclusive Candidate for Intangible Cultural Asset No. 23. She is expected to be officially named an Intangible Cultural Asset when she turns 50″ (Center for Korean Studies). Also from the same performance brochure, we learn of Mr. Bark who is designated as “the preserver of the Important Intangible Cultural Asset No. 5” (Center for Korean Studies).

It is the State then that bears the onus of cultural preservation. Of course South Korea believes that it is only in North Korea where culture has been “officialized;” in the South it has tradition that is being kept alive. Yet the contradictions are obvious. Pansori, for example, or story telling cannot be preserved through State power. It is a living form of entertainment–community culture–based on ridiculing authority, uncovering duplicity in morality, and of frank sexual talk. Attempts to make it eternal do so at the risk of losing the edge, the creative innovativeness, of the art. Art and culture as vehicles of limiting power or enhancing cultural resistance become resituated in the context of the State. In addition, while traditional Confucian culture was community based, in the Intangible Asset Program culture has become individual based, the group dimension of the art having been re-represented as the Korean State. Ultimately, this is not that different from North Korean efforts to develop an art and culture based on the glorification of Kim Il Sung.

In defense of South Korean preservation efforts, without State support there is fear that culture will become modernized–fast music and commodified culture–and local dress, food, and music marginalized.

Even if official recognition preserves the past it does so at a cost for it forces artists to endear themselves to the special board that decides who will become a cultural asset. Art becomes technical, patterned itself after recent successes, not creative but imitative. Thus, intangible assets remove themselves for that which they claim to represent, the history of the people. Culture becomes museumized even as individual artists gain recognition. Culture then is seen either as Western or traditional Korean, efforts to develop other forms of art have no space in this binary opposition–moreover if a Post-Asian art or culture developed would we be able to recognize it as art or culture?

The logical extension of State art is what is commonly seen as Airport Culture: a few icons representing past, present and future, to be consumed quickly before one’s flight is called. Hawaii has excelled at this with hula girls, leis and music to greet disembarking passengers (far more indicative of actual culture would be not the hula but immigration warnings, custom’s procedures, dogs in search of contraband, as well as other entry requirements).

Commodification and officialization then are the two main trends in the future of Asian culture. In the first recent Western categories of beauty and culture are imported and Asian categories of thought denied. In the second, culture is controlled by official boards, art is necessary to unify a nation, to use to cast a distance, a measure of sovereignty from other cultures. Extrapolating we can imagine a scenario in which all the world’s cultural assets are lined up and numbered. With instant access video technologies, we will then be able to easily locate a nation and call for Intangible cultural asset number 4500 and have it played for us. But then by that time, real culture will again have spontaneously developed outside of conventional discourse, in other places. Culture then is not State owned or State run, it is resistance, constantly slithering out of attempts to capture it and escaping the Official discourse. The Korean word for that is “chôki.” It means somewhere else, a place we don’t quite know where, but somewhere else. Intangible. Not realizable nor quantifiable. Quite different from the State Intangible program which in its attempt to preserve that which is considered intangible–art, beauty–has left the world of metaphor and interpretation and entered the economic and political discourse. Even dissidence might find itself being allocated an cultural asset number. Of course, the positive side is that culture is protected from the commodification of capitalism, from the market–a market which would prefer electric guitars to kagyam. But which cultural period, which Korea, should be protected. Korea, for example, was matriarchal (shamanistic), then Buddhist, then Confucian and finally modern. During the Japanese occupation, traditional Korean ways were sloganized but these were of the medieval Chôson period, a time of considerable oppression of women. Nationalist leaders did not choose to recover the social relations of the shamanistic or Buddhist period, rather they took the more State oriented and hierarchically rigid Chôson period to use as a defense against Japanese imperialism. Each nation or collectivity then has many pasts, many cultural histories which can be appropriated in the creation of a future. While through the recovery of the Confucian Chôson, a strong nation based on “Korean ways” was created, the cost was the suppression of women’s rights and labor participation in the political-economy: the championing of one cultural history meant the suppression of another.

Dorothy and the Return to Oz:

We learn more about the problematic nature of culture from the American movie Return to Oz. In this movie Dorothy of Kansas returns to Oz finding it captured by the Gnome King (who is made of solid rock, indeed, is a mountain). To rescue her friends she must go through a range of hazards. In one scene she tries to escape the wicked witch. To do that, her friend the pumpkinhead tells her of a mysterious life creating potent he has seen the witch use. By using a moosehead, some palm leaves, a old couch, she creates a flying mooseplane. To bring it to life she sprinkles the magic potent on the moosehead. Nothing happens. She asks the scarecrow what has gone wrong. He says there must be a word that enlivens the potent. She asks what is it. He responds how could he know since he wasn’t alive at the time that it was used on him. And that is the problem, much of what we want to know, the secrets of life, the grand philosophical questions, the nature of God, the structure of the superconscious are outside of our knowing boundaries (or answers to them are bounded by the episteme that formulates the rule of eligibility). Dorothy’s resolution of the problem of Being and Knowing (We are always more than we know ) is simple. She reads the ingredients and says the magic word. The mooseplane takes off. For us as well, the answer to our desire to transcend our problems, to remove our fears is obvious. We read the magic words of Text and the world is made right. Evil disappears and Truth stands firm. Whether Bible, Talmud, Quran, Sayings of Mao-tse Tung or Mantra, reading re-represents the world to us, we enter the flight of the metaphor and reality no longer appears as concrete. We can fly! We have entered cultural space.

After Dorothy defeats the witch, she travels to the mountain of the Gnome king. It is he who holds the others in captivity, in concrete. Again, she uses the mantra, the magic word of “OZ” to bring the kingdom to life. The Gnome king is defeated when he accidentally swallows a chicken egg. As biological life enters him, he falls apart and the world comes alive again. The word represents her Being and when uttered the battle is won and the earlier conditions, the earlier romantic biological–indeed women’s culture–is regained. All is fine. Culture has defeated evil, metaphor has defeated literalism, and women’s biological power has defeated male power.

Structure, Gender and Culture:

While Dorothy raises issues of Being and Knowing, metaphor and literalism, providing us with a way out of our quandaries, in a recent Chinese movie it is structure (patriarchy) that overwhelms culture. In Raising the Red Lantern, we gain further insight into the interrelationships between culture, gender and structure. Sold by her poor countryside father, the newly married wife finds herself as mistress number four. During the first nine days of marriage she has the husband all to herself, but on the tenth day, like the other wives she must stand outside in the courtyard to find out who will receive the red lantern. Not only does the red lantern mean a night with the husband as well as a foot massage but the right to choose the menu for the next day as well. When she asks why things are done in this way, the new mistress is told by the elderly first wife that these are the family traditions, the family culture. In the span of two hours we see how the architecture of the house and the structure of four vying for one creates competition between the women. Hysteria results. The husband keeps all the women in line by switching the red lantern to whomever is most obedient. But above the visible household structure is another invisible room. Located on the side of the roof, near where the women can meet away from the man, is hidden a small room, where other women who attempted to reverse the patriarchal structure have met their violent death. The new wife tries to look inside but the door is padlocked. Access to this reality is denied. Meanwhile, wife number three having understood the male structure develops a secret lover. This is her only way out of the competitive world the husband has created (she increases the supply of men). Wife number two–who has gained the confidence of the other wives by pretending to be sweet and nice–discovers the affair and tells the husband, hoping to gain some leverage. Wife number three is immediately hanged. The newly married mistress upon seeing this cannot keep her self together and she breaks down, unable to explode outwardly (to change patriarchal relations) and unable to violate morality by finding her own lover (as she is the from the traditional village), she implodes spending the rest of her life aloof from her previous self, the self created by the male structure. She is now free in the misery of her madness. We are vividly shown the points where culture and structure meet. Culture ceases to be self-evident and is shown to be mediating through various social forces, in this movie, male social and architectural structures. The movie ends with wife number five arriving asking who is that mad women there. We should not be surprised at this ending as in male culture there is an endless supply of vessels of pleasure. More rooms can always be built, although only room is needed far above to keep the entire structure concrete. Resistance then is impossible; cooption to patriarchy is the only possible future. But in the long run, the costs of cooption is the breakdown of the self.

Schizophrenia as the Model of the Future:

This movie then gives us insight into the most important trend of the future: the rise of cultures of schizophrenia, of madness. This the breakdown of any coherent self, leading to a variety of selves that are not integrated by any sense of culture, history or any imposed structural self, the self of the modern world, for example. As a metaphor, schizophrenia helps in deconstructing the real and opening up spaces that the modern world has closed. However, while romanticized by movies and by postmodernists, as a disease it remains one of the most painful human conditions known to humanity, AIDS appears like a relief when compared to schizophrenia. An epistemologically open pluralist self or system with some level of integration is still distant.

An example of a movie that romanticizes mental illness (while making some very important points about work and play, violence and peace) is The King of Hearts. In the opening scene a French town is abandoned by the retreating Germans. The townspeople rush out as well when they find out that the Germans have left behind a bomb that will explode at midnight. A Scottish officer is sent by the liberating allied forces to remove the bomb. When he gets there, the lunatic asylum has been opened and now the schizophrenics have taken the roles of the townspeople (showing again that it is structure that creates selves). One is a duchess, the other a Madame, the third the General, the fourth a barber. Life to them is a game. Time is immediate. Play is central. The Scottish officer desperately tries to warn them of the impending danger, their death. They respond by showing him the whimsical nature of life, its fleeting nature. Finally, when the British and Germans march back into the town, discovering each other, they immediately open fire and all the soldiers are killed. At that point, one of the schizophrenics comments: “They seem to be overacting”– taking their roles too seriously forgetting that the Self is liminal not solid. It is only when the townspeople return, that the lunatics rush back to the asylum understanding that they can no longer freely create time and space, the social construction of reality now has fallen back to normalcy, the rigidity of common sense has returned. The Scottish officer now must decide to stay with the army and continue fighting (have a fixed self) or enter himself into the asylum. He strips off his clothes leaving behind the self of society and joins the alternative self of the mad. While others have phrased this battle between the self of the desert and the self of the city, the self of the mystic versus the self of the institution, in King of Hearts it is the schizophrenic who has seen modernity and rejected it. The Scottish officer leaves the modern world, the modern self, to an earlier historically playful self (or indeed a post industrial self outside of the bondage of work). However, as he walks into the asylum we see him holding a bird in a cage, reminding us that the soul is still imprisoned even in the relative freedom of madness.

While apparently a European movie, the story told is equally valuable for understanding Asian culture. However in the Asian setting, the schizophrenic has been located less in the medical discourse and more in the mystical discourse. Like classical Hindu and Buddhist texts, the schizophrenic has understood that life is suffering but instead of transcending the suffering and creating a new self that is enlightened, the self breaks down neither normal nor enlightened. In the Asian version of the movie, there would be an enlightened soul pointing out the third alternative ; neither the world of madness nor the world of normalcy but a third supramental consciousness where reality is viewed as layered–shallow and deep–the deeper layers less gross, less material, more ideational and spiritual. The enlightened individual would not remark that killing was overacting but comment instead that death is temporary for the souls lives on with killing a result of ignorance, greed and fear. The schizophrenic unable to transcend ignorance and fear, yet critical of conventional models of Reality, opts out for an earlier time when life was simple (our mythological vision of traditional society) and everything was play acting. Thus the final scene in an Asian rendering–Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, or Sufi–would have the Scottish officer suddenly realize the incompleteness of both worlds–the world of the insane and the world of the normal. Furthermore in the Asian view, more open to many ways of knowing, schizophrenia would be able to find a place to stand in the world with many possible paths, with the 99 names of Allah and a 1000 renderings of Brahman and the eternal return of the bodhisattva.

While this movie shows the contradictions of the neo-realist paradigm –of individuals and nations seeking to maximize self-interest–the mistake it makes is to believe that schizophrenics would be able to create a conflict-free community of the mentally ill. Like the humanist vision of culture, it is constructed with a coherent past based on a romantic voice of the Good. This perspective reiterates the image of the native or of traditional Asian culture where man lived in harmony with each other. Unfortunately, outside of the movie world there would be many kings (and sovereign nations) with no consensus creating so as to create a community of the mentally different. Each would make claims for leadership and fear the other, at least in the short run. In the long run with no concrete Self to provide a persistent and consistent Self, peace and non-violence would reassert itself. In any case, in romanticized renderings of mental illness (as with renderings of the traditional Asian self) while the pain of normal society is laid bare, the pain of mental difference, the pain of mental illness is not. The asylum then becomes our representation of culture outside of the instrumental and violent voices of the modern world.

Moving away from this treatment of schizophrenia, we can speculate on what the world would be like if schizophrenia was the dominant psychological model. To begin with, like the future, we are uncertain as to the nature of schizophrenia, but we know that it demands our attention. There are many discourses that are used to describe both schizophrenia and the future: the technocratic, the biological, the genetic, the spiritual, the social, the political and the economic (Torrey 1988, 1992).

Schizophrenia then can be seen in many ways. Most people view it as a brain disease, something that can be cured with the right drug, the technological discourse. Others see it as a dietary problem, previously many saw it from the psychological discourse–bad parenting, conflicts between parents and so forth. While there is a great deal of literature in this area it appears that the biological-chemical discourse has won out. But despite this victory, schizophrenia can also be viewed from a cultural perspective, helping us see what each culture thinks as normal and as abherent behavior. Schizophrenics, for example, confront us with our fears. Sensitive, misunderstood, with nothing to lose, they remind us that the king and queen are naked. Unfortunately for those of us in polite society, they show us by undressing themselves.

But while they show us our reality, they do some from a position of paranoia (an exaggeration of fear) not metanoia (a transcendence of fear). For example, they believe they are God and the rest of us are not. At the same time the breakdown in the self of the “mentally ill” is (as shown in the King of Hearts) is partly a response to the irrational self of the modernity or Westernization from the Asian perspective. The self breaks down for it cannot make sense of irrational paradoxes: why is there is so much wealth amidst so much hunger; why is there democracy within nations but not a world democracy; why do some people achieve so much wealth so quickly and others don’t; why is there is so much killing by those who claim the Good, the True and the Beautiful; why don’t the poor rise up and smite the rich? While most of us can find rational(ized) explanations to give meanings to these paradoxes, schizophrenics do not. They remain caught, trapped and instead of breaking apart the problem through logic, or living the sensate existence of “eat, drink and be merry,” many of them find their self breaking apart, thereby becoming many people. As Asia continues to modernizes and Westernizes we can but expect increased occurrences of this type of lunacy. And with traditional knowledge systems breaking down (or modernizing and adopting Western scientific models) thereby reducing epistemological pluralism and the family losing its strength, schizophrenia will become “medicalized” as in the West. Urbanization, unemployment, cultural penetration from the http://aic.org.uk/cialis-generic/ West will further unravel the Asian self creating the broken down mind; a mind that can be described by schizophrenia, as in the following quote from Louis Sass’ Madness and Civilization.

Schizophrenia results in detachment from the rational rhythms of the body and entrapment in a sort of morbid wakefulness or hyperawareness. Schizophrenic individuals often describe themselves as feeling dead yet hyperalert–a sort of corpse with insomnia; thus one such patient spoke of having been ‘translated’ into what he called a ‘death-mood’ yet he also experienced his thoughts as somehow electric–heated up and intensified (Sass, 1992: 7-8).

Colonialism has created the feeling of death while modernity has created intensity, and when put together has led to a culture of corpses with insomnia. Traditional time, cyclical time has broken down yet modernized time in Asia remains a caricature of the Westernized model. Few have attempted to create a post-Asian model of time, one that includes cyclical, spiritual (timeless), structural, linear, efficient, and women’s time (Inayatullah, 1993).
Like postmodernists, schizophrenics understand that the real world is one particular construction of the universe, having no order, fundamentally unintelligible. They contest the real world, the bottom line, the final cut, making reality much more mysterious, unclear, uncut and unfortunately for them frightening and horrifying. Like eskimos, who answer, “we do not believe, we fear”–that is, fear is not mediated by external forms such as a global media, pop futurists and other fear mongers (Shapiro, 1992: 126). Fear becomes an epistemological category not something one experiences on the news. For schizophrenics, as well, who might spend a week locked in a mortal combat with a cockroach, fear is not an indulgence, it crawls into one’s back, up the urethra, and into one’s eyes.

While historically schizophrenics had their space–existing in the cultural ecology of the Asian village–now in the city, we fear them. Their laughter is not in step with our humor. Often for long minutes they may break out into uncontrollable laughter. We can only withdraw our gaze, hoping that they will fall back into conventional behavior, before we are confronted with our own proximity to madness. If common sense is culture then their defiance illuminates the rational. Laughter is fine but only in reference to another’s comment. There is a regime or discipline to laughter that we unconsciously follow. As he or she does with other daily events, a schizophrenic makes that regime problematic, often leading for calls to have the mentally ill “policized,” to be removed from the premises. Those in any society, whether feudal or bourgeois, have rules of where we can stand, how we should act, what type of questions one should ask (questions must be coherent within an intellectual framework, for example). But schizophrenics do not exist in that regime of common sense and culture, they exist in alternative intellectual and social space. They might, for example, respond to “would you leave” by wood ewe leaf, thus speaking intelligently but from a different way of knowing.

Through colonialism and modernization, the historical Asian self has broken down, adopting a foreign self, foreign categories of reality. More than from the anthropologist or the philosopher it is from the schizophrenic that we can learn a great deal; we can learn about our cultural norms by watching how they disturb us. Among other insights, they show us the tightening grid of the State, of the straitjacket of conventional reality.

But from the viewpoint of modernity, schizophrenics exist in a world of metaphor not burdened with day to day data. Living in a world without boundaries, they are postmodernists with a vengeance, moving in and out of metaphor until the metaphor ceases to relate to the empirical world or the ideational world, merely become an extravagance until itself.

If the battle between the future is between those that exist in metaphor and thus search for “better” (more peaceful or more enabling) not truer model of reality and those that exist in the literal world (living in the objective and true) then schizophrenics offer a third alternative outside of metaphor and literalism. They exist in both but with an extremism, outside the edges of our reality, living in and out of metaphorical relativity and literal truth.

Are we moving to such a global culture where there is no one model of reality but many individual models with no way to communicate, with inter-subjective reality terminally delinked? Schizophrenics when denied their reality, however, do not merely smile. They attack our reality often with anger and violence, at the same time, they create new versions of their own reality. If the schizophrenic is a king, after our denial, he becomes an emperor.

Like the international relations model of the nation-state, each denial leads to an escalation of demands, of desires for further power over reality and the territorial and epistemic expansion of our own particular reality (Shapiro and Der Derian, 1989; Walker and Mendlovitz, 1990). Imagine then the world if schizophrenia was the model of social relations. Or is it already? Don’t we already exist in common sense theories of this reality: realism, neo-realism, political science, economics, that makes sense of this world such that its extremism, its particularity, its utter madness is inaudible to us.

What voices are we hearing? What are our hallucinations? Leaders fear other Presidents, each thinking they should rule the world. The other nation becomes the enemy. It is the structure of the world system that creates a schizophrenia wherein one can be democratic inside ones borders but totalitarian outside. One can practice voting inside but war outside. The hallucinations of the schizophrenic become isomorphic with the desire of State leaders for power over others. Increasingly in this structure of power, it becomes difficult to distinguish what is cockroach, what is dragon. All is inflamed and nothing is left but terminal madness.

Within this world system the rational comes to be defined by the epistemological model of the dominant powers, as one goes down the scale from core to periphery, knowledge systems are increasingly seen as irrational. Just as in the present world economic system, where the periphery provides raw material to the core, in the world cultural system, the periphery provides the cultural, the exotic, to the Core. The Core uses culture then to devise theories of existence and humanity, to explain its sordid past to itself. Semi-peripheral regions are those then that have elements of the irrational and the modern, the rapidly developing East Asian nations, for example.

But most people do see through the ability of the powerful to define the rational (to see Asian cultures as irrational or in loyal opposition as the seat of all wisdom). The common response to international relations and world politics is, “It is all crazy.” Is the system to difficult to understand or does it defy common sense leaving only conventional theories of politics (or rationalizations) to buttress it? Or does the international system violate our basic sense of decency and human culture? Clearly it is crazy. We feel the chasm between the ideal and the world we live, between our theories and world they contend to explain.
Instead of a world capitalist system, we can also talk (loosely) about a world system based on schizophrenia. Each nation sees paranoia all around, delusions of fear and delusions of grander, voices of all around–the idea of an integrated self or an integrated world system without individual selves or nations, but a unity of humanity or even Gaia remains unreal, instead the real world remains the world of the schizophrenic, fragmented, filled with unintelligible voices and flooded with illusions and delusions.

One possible scenario for the future then is a world where we are all schizophrenic. Without any dominant model of the real, and in the midst of the end of the modern world, with the post-Asian yet shaping (ideally an integrated schizophrenic perspective), no coherent vision of self, culture or future exists. Unlike other eras where there was a authoritative discourse (a agreed upon worldview), there exists a plethora of discourses of selves, each vying for supremacy. At one level the end of Stalinism reduces the hallucinations, at the same time the global self is less focused as that which give unity–the binary structure of East-West relations-has disappeared. For the patient the villain has disappeared, either one can search for a new enemy or implode within–structural transformation, reintegration at a higher lever, is of course the preferred by elusive dream.

Crime and Self:

At the level of the individual, Richard Ball (1985) has argued in “Crimes Problems of the Future,” that the key trend of the future is the lack of a responsible self, the end of any integrated set of experiences and functions. For Ball there is a direct relationship between criminality and individuation. Early women and men lived in a condition where the group was more real than any self. Indeed according to Julian Jaynes in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the brain in itself was not joined, early man located his or her thoughts not as internal voices but as external sounds of Gods and Goddesses. It is in modernity that the self has become integrated causing Michel Foucault (1971) to argue that we are more recent than we think. It was with Freud that criminality became biological with social constraint largely concerned with sexually deviant behavior. In the media dominated modern world, instant gratification has created people without any essential self. Without an essential self, any combinations of beliefs can be readily be abandoned for another are being created. The real self of antiquity (the communitarian self of the voice of culture) has been displaced by temporary selves of modernity. Communications becomes impression management, law and order cease to provide social limits since the self conducting the illegal act is disconnected with the other self–in one word: cultural schizophrenia. Within this context, with the breakdown of the self and no self to apprehend, the key problem for society in the future is that of criminality. Self anyone? The Asian self, as we have argued above, is particularly susceptible, as it is caught between conflicting cultural demands (tradition, colonialism, nationalism and globalism), between rapid economic growth and rapid impoverishment, between the breakdown of the traditional Asian self and the lack of a new self. Of course we would expect this to resolve itself differently in East Asia, China, South Asia, South East Asia, and West Asia as the cultural forces are varied in these regions.

But while Foucault (1971) argues that we are recent and like a sand castle likely to disappear with the next epistemological wave, grand social theorists like Sarkar or Khaldun or Sorokin or Ssu-Ma Chien remind us that a breakdown in the self (and a search for the self of the prior era) is a predictable occurrence when a society is in between eras–there is no reality to hang on to, total skepticism or agnosticism hardly being an integrated worldview (Galtung and Inayatullah, 1993). For Sarkar (1984) the world is at the end of the capitalist system and waiting for the next social cultural cycle. No authoritative discourse exists rather there is a struggle for the creation and acceptance of a new worldview. For Sorokin (1957) as well we are in-between his stages of ideational, sensate and idealistic, the break when the sensate world disintegrates, when the world is turned upside down, and the new synthetic era begins. For 14th century macrohistorian Khaldun (1967), unity among and within groups disappears and the world awaits a new authoritative discourse, usually from the periphery not from core political economic or social structures, or selves that are centered, rather from those outside the vortex of the immediate and of the powerful –the social movements, the women’s movement, in our interpretation. For ancient Chinese philosopher Ssu-Ma Chien (1958), this cultural decline is part of the natural decline in dynasties when learning and tao disengage and loose opinions spread, that is, when there no longer exists a unified theory of knowledge. Thus the future consists of breakdown at all levels: self, epistemology, economy and polity and the search for a new integrative model; whether this model will be the recovery of a particular past–ancient, classical or feudal–or the creation of a Post-Asian model remains to be seen.

Han and Resentment:

An alternative to the schizophrenic breakdown at the individual level or at the global level of humanity is internal repression, a path followed largely by women, especially Korean women. In Women and Han in the Chosôn Period, Young-hee Lee (1992) argues us that the rigidity of the neo-Confucian structure of male dominance did not give females an escape valve–what resulted was han, or deep resentment. This is the inability to transform present conditions leading to deep inner resentment towards Power, particularly male dominance. With further justification from Buddhism, women were told to accept their suffering and live with their karma, while men could escape the rigid family structure through kisaeng (dancing girls) and mistresses, women could not. Like the wives in Raising the Red Lantern they had no way to express their frustration. While Korea is known as the land of the morning calm, underneath this calm lies centuries of han. Men too enter the han discourse but not from the problems of daily life but from the shame of many defeats to the Chinese and Japanese; it is a territorial han based on lack of national sovereignty (now further exacerbated by the division of the Koreas).

Out of this han, this sustained suffering, came new fields of women literature and women’s expression. Because women had no way to stay in touch with their families they developed letter writing (also they were compelled to by their in-laws) and special literature and songs called naebang kasa (court songs) and minyo (popular songs). Because of han, a great albeit invisible cultural renaissance resulted.

Is this then the world future, not structural change or implosion but deep repression and resentment?. Even Shamanism (which has allowed for occasional individual transcendence) and Christianity (which has energized women into social groups but without changing the male neo-confucian social structure) has not succeeded in transforming han in the Korean context. The feminist women movement has often been sidetracked by nationalist efforts, as the case in Korea, where women’s resistance to the Japanese became far more important than the transformation of patriarchy (Bonnie Oh, 1982). Moreover in the larger Asian context, feminism has been seen as a Western force, the search for a women’s movement authentic to the history and categories of Asian women is still in its formative phase (Jayawardena, 1986). With further Westernization (in the form of East Asian capitalism) we should expect increased han, especially for women, unless an Asian women’s perspective (a post-feminist voice) combining ancient shamanistic principles and modern social organization can transform women’s condition.

From the Asian women’s perspective, han then is the dominant cultural formation of the future. Han could also be a precursor to the breakdown of the self especially as Westernization and travel intensify the resentment women experience. While a united Korea might lead to an attempt to undo thousands of years of han for male Koreans, a transformation of patriarchy still seems far off.
In any case the main point is that any discussion of the futures of Asian cultures must deal with women’s experience of their social reality and their efforts to negotiate patriarchal social relations. In addition, Asian strategies in dealing with power–whether colonialism and developmentalism–have a strong han component: the face shown, for example, to the colonialist (the lazy worker image in the Philippines) is markedly different than the face shown to one’s same class and ethnicity.

Part of the return to the shamanistic past will be a recovery of not spirituality (the search for unity of the self with the cosmos) but of spiritualism, a search for connectedness with the dead. This alternative then is the search for new forms of association. With the breakdown of modern society and with the inability of modern spaces and categories of thought to give answers, it is then too other worlds where we will flock. Whether these are ancestral spirits, souls claiming to represent the Anointed One Him or Herself, or nature spirits is unclear, but as the self breaks down and as answers to change and transformation and our world problems become increasingly immediate and pressing–channeling (not changing channels as in the modern response) will be one of the waves and the ways of the future. While this has begun in California and throughout Asia, we should expect new sources of self-sustenance, primarily those from the spirit world. At the same time, we should anticipate increased and more potent women’s movements working alone and tied into ecological, cooperative, and consumer associations. A new Asian women’s culture might emerge from these efforts.

Culture as Resistance:

If it is through resistance that new cultural forms will rise, then we need to look at the periphery to better understand the future of cultures. These are the anti-systemic movements, the counter civilizational projects, the spiritual, ecological and social movements that hold the keys for our potential futures. One former periphery is East Asia. While previously Western culture was paraded before the rest of humanity as the standard, oriental culture has received high marks in recent years. Considered closer to the Nature, less rigid then Western epistemology–more open to contradictions existing in an ecology of truth statements–and closer to traditional culture when the cosmos, society and individual were in harmony, before commodification, developmentalism and center-periphery structures were not the universal drivers.

But what aspects of Oriental culture might become universal in the next century? Vegetarianism (most likely because of the politics of health and food production), taking shoes off at the door (again likely as ceremonialized politeness), complex social relations in which discourse is understood not by what is uttered but by who utters it and when it is uttered (far less likely, too difficult for others cultures to gain entry into this social network), spiritual practices (from zen to yoga, again likely, since they can be easily appropriated). Finally, what type of icons might become universal? Most likely stories from the village, the Indian cow (instead of the American mouse), the village well (instead of the shopping mall), and the bodhi tree (instead of the highway). One can imagine a drama with all these symbols coming to life, interacting with each other, creating an East Asian form of universal cultural representation. How quick Disney will buy these Asian experiences out is easy to guess.

But what are some less likely scenarios? One can easily imagine a Manila-Calcutta-Bombay-Dubai link as a next major center of culture in the next century. Besides having been oppressed (and thus creating the possibility for the return of cultural pendulum), factors such as sophisticated and deep mysticism, a rich artistic heritage, an advanced intellectual climate providing the high culture; in addition there is Bombay, as the center of movie audiences, providing the mass culture. For instance, on one side there is someone like the late P.R. Sarkar–developing on Gandhi and Tagore–with his thousands of spiritual songs, a range of new indigenous theories of science, society and culture, numerous social movements as well ecological centers to create a new society, and artists and writers associations to legitimize and enliven in and on the other side the filmi mass culture that provides a voice counter to the “pop” of the West. All these combine to provide the necessary ingredients for cultural revival.

The other contender would by Hong Kong and Star TV, basically some level of Asian creativity but still developed within the overarching cultural categories of the West. The question then is: Hong Kong or Calcutta?

A resurgent Philippines also is a possible scenario. Centuries of resistance, of failed revolutions, of cultural eclecticism, of mysticism and pseudo-culture make it a potential cultural center. This is more likely than the present rich Asian states, where modernity and the victory of the official discourse has produced wealth but at the expense of trimming of deviance–Singapore as the obvious example. Islam as a cultural force is possible but again since politically it is in a decline, this may force a rigidification of culture, a straightening of diversity so as to uphold the State and the Text. Conversely, if decline leads to inner reflection and self-criticism then cultural renewal and creativity is possible. Islam then would have to reconstruct itself as a cultural epistemological force and not as a political Statist force. With the breakdown of the USSR and the potential breakdown of China, we could then easily see a cultural renaissance in three areas: an Islamic south-west, a Westernized Hong Kong (or Taiwan after 1997) and a Manila-Calcutta-Bombay-Dubai crescent.

Fitting into the Hong Kong Star TV scenario, is the rise of a sensate Asia. Lee Kuan Yew wondered if there was any solution to the rampant sexuality of East Asians. With a new Hong Kong Chinese MTV (music television) developing, we can assume that sex is the future of East-Asia. This is possible with Confucianism providing the commodification of women, (women as servers of men), Buddhism removing any guilt related to sex. Instead of 1 billion consumers of coke, we can well imagine one billion sexually repressed Chinese waiting for a modernist China with fast time, fast sex, and fast music. East Asia then would be the center of modernist music, art, and sexuality for the next century, taking over the exhausted West. Only AIDS and virtual sex stand in the way. With developments in the latter, we could see dramatic transformations in both Bangkok and Manila, sex having moved to the virtual mind instead of the bodies of young village girls.

Technology:

So far we have focused on social and political forces, but how mights advances in technology transform asian cultures? Developments in Virtual Reality, Genetic Engineering and Robotics all promise to dramatically alter our perceptions of culture and the cultural. These new technologies will have far wider impact then television and video. In some ways they will intensify Westernization and in other ways they will transform it. These technologies to begin will transform our understanding of social reality, Nature (or mother nature) and human culture, displacing all three. New forms of resistance against the technologies will also result. As with electronic culture where faxes, videos and electronic viruses can be used again official government sponsored reality, these technologies will lead to attacks on the “artificial” world they have created and of the way that life will be managed through genetic engineering, for example. At the same time, just as television and the video bring us the new electronic family hearth, united not by conversation but by viewerism, but at least still united, these new technologies will create their own paradoxes. We will first review these potential transformations and then discuss the cultural implications resulting from them and embedded in them.

Through Virtual reality we can don a helmet and practice safe travel, safe sex (indeed it is this that will bring computers in our homes in the next century, not banking, nor games, but virtual reality sex). Technology will have finally captured nature–making it obsolete. The problem of the original text especially for fundamentalists will be further complicated since distinctions between types of reality will be blurred. Will religions then offer virtual reality experiences of their image of God? Perhaps the redeemer, whether Jesus, the Mahdi, the taraka brahma, is returning and will be available to all, at all times. Will culture then become miniaturized and available to us all in our virtual reality cassettes–Travelog but with the sensual experience of the place we are traveling to. It would be real since we would (could) not distinguish between the two. Of course, the important job will be creating the miniaturized culture. And the most important question for futures researchers is: what will be the resistance to “virtualized” cultures–a return to natural cultures? But how? And will virtual reality centers be the next museums, the final effort to carry the seeds of the past into our journey to strange new world ahead?

While experiments in genetic engineering will start out quite harmless since all of us want to avoid abnormalities, or various genetic diseases, we will soon all want to be checked by our family genetic engineer. This will soon lead not only to disease prevention but to capacity enhancement. Intelligence, memory, body type and beauty will all be open for discussion and interpretation. Birthing will eventually be managed by State factories and we will be the last generation to produce children the old fashioned way. It will be the final victory of the feminists and their final defeat. The biological cycle will have been terminated by technology and women will essentially be not any different than men once their reproductive capabilities become unnecessary. The causes of alarm are there (and the negative scenarios almost infinite: increasing inequity between north-south, between rich-poor and the tightening grid of the surveillance State and the managed genetically engineered self) but perhaps when everyone can be beautiful it will be moral and spiritual potential that will matter the most. With fewer genetic diseases our differences will become once again charming instead of attributes that keep us from uniting as humans. Perhaps genetic engineering will paradoxically lead not to sameness but to difference and to a greater humanity. Of course, as developed within the present regime of science and center-periphery nations, genetic engineering means only one thing–the final end of peripheral culture–and the reversal of demographic patterns that are seeing the rise of Asian and African population and a decrease in American and European populations.

But cultures need not be human, they can also be robotic, robots can be sentient creatures potentially living with humans and potentially displacing humans. Japanese society, for example, already has glorified Mr. Roboto. Often seen as friendly, a helper, it would not be too long before we are engaged in discussions of the rites and rights of robots. Concomitant with ways of thinking that see everything as alive (quantum physics, Hawaiian cosmology, Buddhism, animism and Indian thought) and with advances in artificial intelligence, we can envisage a time when robots will be seen as alive. Their utility value will be surpassed by their existential value. While a robot uprising is unlikely, the move from robots as represented as machines, to be seen as dumb but lovable animals and then to gaining similar rights as children is quite easy to believe. Conversely, it may be that the robot mind will become the metaphor for our brain, and thus the despiritualization of the self. While it is doubtful if robots will pray five times a day, facing Mecca will be easy but will they feel the unity that this act implies?
For capitalists these new technologies promise a renewal, a rejuvenation from the exhaustion that has set in. They promise to revive the idea of progress and push back cultural revival, ethnic history, and local knowledge. Thus, it is not cultural humanists who will provide the vitality to the dying modern world but the new technologies and the cultural codes embedded in them. These new technologies pose the most dramatic problems for those who consider the natural as fixed instead of as constantly changing and in the process of recreation. Fundamentalists, in particular, will find the next twenty or thirty years the best and worst times for their movements. The best because the forces of tradition will flock to them; worst because the technological imperative and humanity’s struggle to constantly recreate itself (and thus nature) will not be easily reversed. Even biological spills will most likely not be controlled by State regulations but by new technologies themselves. However, the answer to these type of problems may be in newer advanced–physically, mentally and spiritually–technologies. It is important to remember that technologies in themselves will be redefined in this process as not merely material processes but mental and spiritual processes embedded in particular cultures. This redefinition will come about from non-Western renderings of science (Inayatullah, 1991; Rudreshananda, 1993; Sardar 1984; Sheldrake, 1992).

Genetic technology or biological technology could yield new viruses, new types of life that end our life. The planet itself, however, might not care, Gaia, argues James Lovelock (1988) is a self-regulating mechanism that keeps life alive, humans might not be needed, just an experiment that went wrong. She might “choose” rabbits instead of monkeys this time, thus ending human culture as we know it or removing the supremacy of humans, making us just one more sentient life form that quietly inhabits the planet with all other creation (Jones, 1989). But this fate is unlikely, as “humanity” then will be caught in a battle against its new creations, the West now competing not only with its own social periphery, but with its own created periphery.

But while the values behind genetic engineering and robotics are based on competition–on linear models of evolution and time–we can hope for models of the future coming from cooperation. Scientist Lynn Margulis writes that while competition might be natural at the level of mammals, at the microlevel of the cell, an ecology of cooperation where differences lead to higher unity is normal. The cells need each other, through each other they can transform. The success of our cellular system might be a far better model for giving us cultural hope than the failure of the war and competition model. In her words: “Destructive species come and go but cooperation increases through time. Mitochondria peacefully inhabit our cells, providing us with energy in return for a place to stay. Evolution either evokes challenge or cooperation” (Margulis, 1992: 27). Once again, while the model of cooperation provides an alternative more hopeful vision of Asia, new technologies promise to continue the process of the unraveling of the Asian self and Asian society and to create the conditions for a Post-Asian culture as well as new forms of cultural resistance. Among the forms or resistance we can expect is a return to the classical life-cycle or seasonal aspects of Asian time. Part of the recovery of culture project is regaining the traditional sense of time–time as friendship, of sitting around a tree and placing relationships ahead of economic gain or personal ambition, of living in the way God meant the world to be. New technologies, however, enter traditional time disrupting local culture. The automobile is an excellent example. Pakistanis drive as fast as they can to reach a place–even as far as driving on the sidewalk–where they then wait for hours for friends to show up or for a bureaucrat to arrive. Or one rushes to get to tea time where one ritually relaxes. In the car then modernity becomes pervasive, the signifier of miles per hour stares at the driver (there is no sun dial or images of the seasons or other historical symbols), the car is a an imported technology with no local meanings to it.

With modernization we should expect decreased emphasis of the classical model of time, of the degeneration of time from the golden era to the iron age. In this model society degenerates with differentiation (as opposed to modernity wherein differentiation leads to evolution) eventually resulting in the iron age of materialism. Time then decreases in value from the golden era characterized by unity and spiritual development to the iron age characterized by materialism, chaos and confusion. At the end of the dark iron age, the redeemer sets the world right and the golden era begins again. The search then is for a redeemer to end the darkness of the present, to create a new future. Decolonization and political independence was to be the beginning of the golden age with the national founders the redeemers. But this has not turned out, leaving the individual unto him or herself.

In recent news, Jesus was to return on October 1992, according to Bank-ik Ha, one of the young prophets allegedly predicted by the Bible (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1992: A-39). The mark of evil is the computer bar code for it mathematically represents the Beast (666) with the unification of Europe as the final sign before Judgement Day. In Korea, the State in itself attempted to intervene as households left the work force in preparation for the final days. While these might be the final days of the modern world, claims that this is the end of the world are far more problematic. In any case, we still have until 1999 before Judgement day. As it turns out the Prophet was arrested for even though he claimed that the world was to end in October 1992, he had recently purchased bonds that would expire in the year 2000.

Modernity then emphasizes quantitative, linear time. Instead of the appearance of the redeemer to bring on the golden age, it is Confucian capitalism that will herald the new era. Time then in this model cannot be repeated or reversed otherwise we could remember the future. Instead of degeneration there is forward development. Culture as a response to the economism of modernity is precisely about time pluralism, about living in many types of time without allowing any one to dominate, particularly linear time. Others see cultural revival as part of a return to a more natural type of time cognizant that all societies rise and fall, all economies go up and down, what is most important then is one’s relationship to nature, community and the transcendental.

When thinking about the futures of cultures, particularly Asian cultures, we should expect increased diversity in the models of time. For the schizophrenic, modern linear time ceases to be important, seasonal and timeless time are far more central to his or her worldview. We should also expect increased conflicts between types of time and efforts to synthesize different constructions of time. Clearly an ideal society would be able to find ways to negotiate the many types of time: seasonal, rise and fall, dramatic, mythological, expansion/contraction, cosmic, linear/efficient, social-cyclical as well as the intervention of the timeless in the world of time. These must be associated with notions of social structure: individual and transcendental agency. In what ways is time personal, in what ways do macrostructures give us time, and how does the role of the transcendental reshape time? The ancient cycle alone leads to a culture of fatalism and the linear pattern alone leads to cultural imperialism wherein particular collectivities can be placed along the ladder of economic success. Transcendental time alone leads to focus on the cosmos and neglect of economic progress and social development. While it is joyous, the bills must still be paid. For an empowering theory of the future, all three are needed.
But few manage to include all these characteristics ; rather, we privilege certain types of time and avoid or marginalize others. Developing a theory of society that coherently integrates the many types of time alluded to above is not any easy task and would be an important task in a global emerging culture. Having an enriched theory of time would be a necessary criteria in an alternative theory of cultural development.

If we wish to understand the futures of cultures than among the most important areas of investigation is conflicts and contradictions between types of time. Modern time versus traditional time; spiritual time versus deadline time; cosmic time versus linear time, for example. We also need to imagine new forms of time as well.

Conclusion:

Finally to conclude we have used culture in many different ways: (1) Culture in opposition to neo-realist view of economism and power (competing individuals and states);
(2) Culture as always changing, creating new forms of society and technology, as essentially alive, always more than our definition of it;
(3) Culture as fundamentally an essence, the original state of affairs;
(4) Culture as on original state of affairs that declines over time (whether because of internal reasons, creativity to imitation or external reasons, conquest by colonial forms); and,
(5) Culture as a social practice, we “culture” the real; there is not intrinsic “culture” to be found.

We have also discussed many possible cultural futures, to list the important: (1) The unravelling of the traditional Asian self, (2) The breakdown of the self and culture, the schizophrenic model of unending differences, (3) Women’s cultural futures particularly the role of resentment as the emotion of future, (4) A new cultural Renaissance from the periphery; (5) The rise of East Asian sensate culture; (6) Technological cultures from virtual reality, genetic engineering and robotics; (7) Conflicts between types of time and a search for a cultural frames that incorporate a diversity of “times.”

But when we move away from our critical analysis, what is important is a vision of new cultures, not visions that take away the possibility of new cultures, but visions like the Renaissance which created ever new visions. In this sense finding unity within our differences still remains crucial: the imagery of roses in a bouquet (with some of the roses virtual, some genetically grown, and others grown through the soil) symbolizing individual cultures and planetary culture still remains an important integrative dream–a Post-Asian dream perhaps.