ABSTRACT
This theme will take a more macro look at how society constructs the foreign Other on our behalf.
UNIT A3.1 CULTURAL REFUGEE
We have been different to what we are now
Experience
This unit will look at the issue of refugees, not just because it is extremely important in today’s world, but because the refugee predicament as cultural traveller with problematic status serves to teach us a lot about the nature of culture and cultural representation. Consider Example A3.1.1:
Example A3.1.1 Life before
Deconstruction
In this example we see Martha working with Reza, a refugee in her language class, according to representations of the foreign Other which are present in society. She then discovers that he is very different to these representations. Reza’s plight is not dissimilar to that of several of the people who are culturally misunderstood in these units; and Martha is no more or less to blame for not seeing his reality than other people who misunderstand them. This unit does not tell a different story, but focuses on a different aspect of how cultural misunderstanding comes about – through the following sources of representation in influencing Martha in the way she sees Reza:
To deal with this, we shall discuss the need to:
Media images
A major source of Martha’s prejudging of Reza, a refugee from Afghanistan, is the information she gets from the national media. In modern society we are constantly fed images of the foreign Other by the television, radio and press, in the explicit form of news, documentaries and current affairs discussion, which report and describe people and events across the world, often with graphic visual material, and more subtly through the images of people and places that we see creatively manipulated in advertising and elsewhere. Afghanistan is a particularly good example here because of the very large amount of material there has been about the ‘war against terrorism’ which has depicted many, but very similar, images of the country and its people. It is not therefore at all surprising that Martha should see Reza in these terms – derelict, war-ruined streets with little evidence of urban facilities, and a society in which women are covered up and deprived of the most basic rights. It is not just Afghanistan which suffers from such a limited media image. Many more countries less well known to the West, usually in the developing world, are represented very selectively by the world media in terms of their most saleable, sensational, ‘exotic’ images which are the basis of the reductive orientalism discussed in Unit A2.3. Hence, it would be easy for many Western people not to know that many Arabs do not wear the kufiyah (traditional shawl-like headwear for men), that many Arabs are not Muslim, that many Muslim women do not wear the hejab or veil, that many people in the developing world do not live in traditional souks, bazaars, shanty towns, thatched villages or war-torn streets with livestock, and that a very large slice of the population all over the world is middle class, owns cars and computers, lives in orderly suburbs, and dresses and goes about their daily business very much like ‘we’ do. Significant for Martha to know is that many refugees, though they have fallen on hard times because of war, political oppression or economic catastrophe, have in the not too distant past been leading sophisticated, educated lives.
