PROCEDIMIENTOS VIGENTES DEL PROCESO SANCIONATORIO DE ALIMENTOS, ESTUDIO INELUDIBLE PARA ESTABLECER UN SOLO

‘Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past’ (Hall, 1998: 225). Hall (1994:122) explains that Freud’s concept of the unconscious and Lacan’s thesis of the contradictory origin of identity that overthrew the concept of a ‘rational scientific man’ so vigorously promoted by the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century form one of the key themes of postcolonial theory. Man’s identity remains always ‘in process,’ ‘incomplete’ as he tries to fill in the ‘lack of wholeness’ from the outside, he explains. Man is like a child who possesses no self-image as a whole person, so by looking into the mirror or at other human beings he imagines himself ‘whole.’ This looking at other men brings him into a symbolic system of language, culture and sexual difference. This entrance or transition is accompanied by contradictory feelings of love/hate for parents, good/bad parts, etc. that remain unresolved and leave him divided for life. However, a part of identity is stable and unchanging, the true self, that needs to be discovered and excavated.

This conception of cultural identity as being constantly processed by external forces has been used by postcolonial authors to explain the Oriental’s tendency to look up to the White man for reassurance of ‘wholeness,’ the colonist’s control of the native’s society through imposition of a secular culture of reform, and the spread of the discourse of modernity and progress (Hall, 1998). Ashcroft et al (1989:9) describe this state of affairs as:

A valid and active self may...have been destroyed by cultural denigration, the conscious and unconscious oppression of indigenous personality and culture by supposedly superior racial or cultural model.

Since the Western or American curricula are (often unhesitatingly) used in most of the postcolonial world, including Pakistan (as I explain in the next chapter), I have looked at the MBA curricula of my case study schools and my research participants’ ideas of progress, through interviews, observation studies and readings of schools’ official publications, to see whether these schools and students too look up to the Western models for determining their work values.

The coming together of multiple cultures has been described by Bhabha (1998) as

hybridity. The concept of hybridity comes from the genealogy o f difference and the idea of ‘cultural translation.’ When the latter concept, that sees all cultures as related to one another because of their symbolic activity, denies the incommensurability of cultures as promulgated by the former concept, hybridity emerges. This hybridity or Third space

gives rise to new positions and to a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation, with the original cultures informing the hybrid one. ‘Third space’ may

open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures but on the inscription and articulation of cultures’ hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ - the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in between space - that carries the burden of the managing of culture (Bhabha, 1994:38).

Hybridity proceeds by mimicking a new culture alongside one’s own. According to Bhabha (1994:86), mimicry is a ‘complex strategy o f reform, regulation and discipline. Describing the hybrid, Bakhtuin (in Bhabha, 1997:58) observes

[The] hybrid is not only double-voiced and double-accented...but is also double- languaged; for in it there are not only (and not even so much) two individual consciousnesses, two voices, two accents, as there are [doublings of] socio- linguistic consciousnesses, two epochs...that come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance. It is the collision between differing points of view on the world that are embedded in these forms.

Seeing students’ and teachers’ enculturation in foreign curricula, I too have looked for instances o f hybridity in the values expressed by my research participants.

Despite encouraging the subject to mimic the masters’ way, hybridity makes one of two distinct things by retaining distance necessary for subjugation (Young, 1995). For example, mimetic discourses can conceal the fact, through shifts in vocabulary used by authority, that hegemonic structures of authority are maintained (Bhabha, 1994). Challenging the entire concept of development, Bhabha (1994) writes that transfer of technology has not resulted in transfer of power, nor philanthropy in political control. In fact, he questions, ‘What is the desire of this repeated demand to modernize? Why does it insist, so compulsively, on its contemporaneous reality, its spatial dimension, its spectorial distance?’ (ibid: 244). However, he adds that mimicry also ‘poses an immanent threat’ to disciplinary powers as it is dependent on some difference between the colonist and the colonizer. Hybridity is not simply a compromise, but also subversion and transgression.

Hybridity unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of the colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze o f the discriminated back upon the eye of power (Bhabha, 1994:112).

Young (1995) adds that hybridity can be intentional or organic. When organic, it creates new spaces, but when intentional, it challenges dominant cultural power. In my research, I have therefore paid special attention to conflicts in mimicking foreign curricula and cultural values that some of my respondents brought out in their conversations.

Ahmad (1996:287) and Loomba (1998) express dissatisfaction with Bhabha’s concept of hybridity in that is undifferentiated by gender, class or race constraints. Dirlik (1996) also calls postcolonial theory to account because o f vagueness of this concept — failing to discriminate between diverse modalities of hybridity, postcolonial theory mimics the Western epistemology it sets out to repudiate.

Regarding his concepts of hybridity, Third Space and mimicry, Bhabha (1998) urges that intellectuals have the responsibility to intervene in such situations of political negotiation. In my research, I have thus looked at how the cultural identities of the MBA students are being influenced by their educational milieu, by the discourses prevalent in management academe, and whether there are instances o f hybridity between cultures o f Islam and the Western MBA, and if so, is any conflict acknowledged.

3.3.6 Not a nationalistic struggle

Several postcolonial authors are wary of a nationalistic struggle that ideas o f difference and an urge to recover one’s culture can produce. In Said’s (1993) opinion, nationalism is coercive and not a panacea for dealing with economic and social disparities. In fact, his concept of ‘Orientalism’ is precisely a rebuttal of the idea of forcing people and cultures into ‘distinct breeds or essences.’ He says

No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about (1994: 336).

Mongia (1996) and Dirlik (1996) too remain distrustful o f the nationalist project. My research too is not an attempt to devalue other cultures in a nationalistic spirit. On the contrary, it is aimed at (ultimately) recovering the Islamic values marginalized by the discourses dominant in the MBA culture.

In the preceding paragraphs I described salient features o f postcolonial theory that are unique to it. In the next section I look at those aspects of this theoretical perspective that it shares with other theoretical and philosophical perspectives.