Ideology and Identity: An Approach from History

Abstract

The problem of “otherness” in cultural history is as old as Adam and Eve, and is not really my subject here. Yet something may usefully be said about it at the close of a volume concerned with the realities of a “Third World” whose very name derives only from a relationship with other “worlds,” above all with the “world” of industrialized states and their economic structures, and which other-wise has no such identity or corresponding awareness of itself. This exercise may possibly be more than useful: it may even be necessary to any further unfolding of “our” understanding of “them” —coming from whichever “side” you may prefer—and therefore to the fruitfulness of work projected by studies such as these. For if the pursuit of health, wealth, and happiness—and to the old formula should we not now add liberty?—makes all men brothers (assuming sisters, naturally, while the collective noun seems lacking), then where along the resulting relationship-continuum, as between one “world” and another, stands person A or person B? Or again, where along that continuum from the merely mystifying to the validly heuristic is the place for objectivity to take its stand: for science, that is, and synthesis? Is there any such place for objectivity, and, if not, what is that subjectivity which can be useful instrumentally, not only to “them” as well as to “us” but also to a collective “them/us”? We can answer this question for “us” and apply the answer that we find to “them,” and this is what we are doing all the time even when we prefer not to say so: but how can we know, in truth, that we are prescribing for more than ourselves?