Respect as a strategy of condescension

A strategy of condescension is a performative act in which an individual in a position of higher power temporarily humbles themselves before someone of lower power to enhance their symbolic capital, according to Bourdieu (1981). One example occurred when a French politician was praised for speaking a few lines in Occitan in front of a rural Southern French community. In appearance, he showed recognition to the community, but in reality, he was expressing his greater power as he had the freedom to choose a subordinate language and still get praise.

Oppressed communities often internalize condescension and enforce it. Examples include the self-acceptance of euphemisms to designate aspects of their identity. Euphemisms are strategies of censorship to avoid debate on the circumstances of social oppression and injustice. They divert the discussion from structural inequalities towards superficial hesitation on word choice. They carry the hidden message that some identity is “wrong”, thus its plain designation must be softened. Euphemisms imply an obnoxious concept of “respect” that legitimizes segregation and discourages cross-cultural communication and collaboration. The oppressed communities internalize “respect” to counteract violence from the oppressive culture. They demand “respect” as a strategy to defend their identities. However, “respect” is like a beautiful arrow full of poison that the colonized community embrace as a weapon which, in the end, intoxicate their own identities.

“Respect” in English is a social recognition to be earned by moving through upward ritual milestones (Covarrubias, 2002). This contrasts with the Spanish term “respeto”, which designates the consideration every individual deserves for being a human being. Situations of social distance would require an overt expression of “respeto” through terms of address (usted, doctor, doctora, señor or señora), which may neutralize in situations of social closeness (among close friends, people of the same age). The “respect” of oppressed communities and ethnicities in English, on the contrary, implies the idea that the oppressed went through ritual stages of social recognition because of the historical violence they received from the white community. Thus, “respect” signals the need of suffering to reach a visibility by the Western Progressiveness as the result of a sacrificial passage embedded in Christianity. Every discussion on how specific ethnicities must be named allows the progressive-minded individual to enjoy the moral superiority of awarding martyr status to the community they’ve been oppressing for a long time.

Several are the adverse effects of “respect”:

• It discourages the oppressor-community from facing uncomfortable discussions regarding racism, social oppression, and inequalities. Respect turns such discussions into a dangerous territory where any statement can be labelled as racist. This greatly discourages anthropological, linguistic and sociological research, cooperation, and collaboration among scholars of diverse backgrounds. This is quite convenient for present-day agents of structural inequalities who benefit from avoiding such discussion.
• It legitimizes functional laziness and justifies lack of learning effort. It becomes easier to “respect” a language by not learning it, or avoid the discomfort of learning various cultural practices with the excuse of “cultural misappropriation.” Avoiding topics because they are “sensitive” just hides the lack of effort to learn about those topics. This situation is not recent, it happened in colonial histories where some languages were labeled as wild just to justify the laziness of the colonizers to learn those languages. In the same way, today’s colonizers label certain languages as respectable to keep the distance and mask their laziness. Paradoxically, fundamentalist religious colonizers were those willing to engage in such effort. There should be some bigotry in someone ready to learn multiple languages. The mild-thinkers just sit calm and find excuses.
• It hinders disclosure of situations of social conflict inside oppressed communities, as well as the existence of intra-group oppressors. As Bourdieu would put it, even the oppressed have their own “markets” of symbolic power. Gender and domestic violence may be legitimate under certain cultural and religious traditions, which the lazy progressive wings may choose to “respect” just to save their own morals. Political corruption may exist in every human society even when traditionally oppressed, and those politicians who drain the resources of their own impoverished communities must just be “respected.”
• Hyper-criticism of cultural appropriation deprives oppressed communities of economic exchanges. As active agents in a capitalist society, an outsider should be able to purchase a ticket to a native ritual, taste their traditional cuisine, wear the earrings they bought at a fair, and stay at a traditional dwelling, as long as they abide by the tribal rules. Nowadays there’s stigma to being a “tourist,” especially in Europe, where “too many tourists” (including me) ruins the perfect picture. However, tourism plays a vital role in marginalized economies and in revival of cultural artifacts. Native communities improve their economies by selling their cultural products, offering language and dancing lessons, even when this includes the re-invention of an ancient ritual that attracts tourists’ money.
• Specific grants and scholarships require awardees to engage in certain educational program, then return to their home communities. This is infuriating as treats awardees as children who need to be told where to stay, as if the were unable to make the best choices for them and their communities. In addition, it implies the fact that the granting institution is paying for individuals to keep at a long-term distance. It blocks multiple avenues of revenue and multicultural exchange that derive from individuals who stay outside their communities. Usually grant money is not free to use by the receiving community. The money giver conditions on how the money should be spent.
• Self-censorship of humor happens in communities that embrace this harmful notion of “respect”. Humor is inherent to being human, as it is the vehicle to express criticism against injustice and increases bonding and communication among individuals. The making of high-quality humor involves openly challenging prohibitions, assumptions, social norms, and whatever is considered sacred inside a community. When an oppressed community adopts the foreign notion of “respect”, they often censor their own expressions of irreverence. This is a dangerous path towards the authentic expression of identities, open disclosure of criticism, and laughter as a form of social connection.
• Also self-censorship of explicit sexual content in their traditional teachings is legitimized as “respect.” For certain non-Western cultures sexual intercourse is a ceremonial space often discussed in folk stories and traditional teachings, but they have noticed that the Christian overhearers react negatively to those stories, or just they have been historically punished when expressing sexuality in their vernacular styles. When the story tellers choose to omit stories to the white researcher, or ask the researcher keep certain story secret, it is possibly due to containing explicit sex that the outsider won’t understand. The choice is made because of fear of judgment concealed under the convenient concept of “respect.”
• There may be other expressions of identity that the oppressed communities feel the need to hide in front of the Christians for fear of being wrongly judged. This gradually shapes cultural behaviors towards the colonizer in a way that satisfies stereotypes to maintain the sacred status they have earned through suffering. Fear of being disrespected hinders the spontaneous expressions of identity.
• “Respect” involves the assumption that the other is a sacred “object.” Sacred objects are untouchable and dangerous as they may defy an irrational deity. Pressive minds who embrace “respect” then avoid such risk by not being involved in any matter concerning the “respectable” Other. Feminist criticism defied the notion of “respecting” women as a loaded attitude that stigmatized female sexual expression. In the same way, respecting certain ethnicities or cultural expressions may obscure the recognition of their humanity, which is inherently complex, imperfect, sometimes incoherent, with highs and lows, deep philosophies and also vain behaviors.
• “Respecting” a culture may involve an expectation of how they must behave according to positive stereotypes. As the outsider lacks knowledge, they may abide by stereotypes that ultimately wrongly stigmatize individuals who do not abide by their expectations. An indigenous person is supposed to be ceremonial, not irreverent; a Latino must remain festive, never sarcastic; an Asian must remain shy and focused on studies, never lazy or outgoing; an African American must remain a hip-hop artist or athlete, not a doctor. Then they may display selective recognition of diversity towards certain individuals who behave as they expect, and others may become ostracized, isolated, ignored, or even silenced. The Chosen one stays in the altar of their own morality and that awards them license to openly display violence against other prototypes of the same minority.
• “Respect” frames other cultural praxis as holistic. The word “holistic” involves the unified connection of spirit, mind and body, in a wholesome philosophy where every aspect of an individual stays together. However, a deep analysis of Non-Western cultures exhibit clear-cut (not wholesome) categories, encoded in multiple grammatical nuances and numerical systems. Knowledge of plants, animals, stars, and earth comprises well-defined taxonomies with multiple variables and an intellectual understanding of existence. Knowledge involves classification, separation, distinction, nomination, cross-tabulation, and other mental operations that are not holistic at all. They seem holistic to the eye of someone who has not delved deeply enough into their epistemologies.
• Isolation and segregation are harmful effects of a “respect”-based ideology. In fact, territorial and structural ghettoes are at the heart of North American culture, and this ideology is pervasive across cultural contacts. Cultures are recognized as important and valuable as long as they do not mix up too much.

Respect may also have positive effects in providing tools to oppressed communities to defend themselves against economic exploitation, extraction of mineral resources and political sovereignty. In this cases, the notion as “respect” is just too weak to be invoked. While helicopters arrive to contaminate the environment of a weak ecosystem, you can demand such helicopters to respect your land and they would just laugh at you. Actually, they can show a respectful demeanor by seeking permission from the authorities, and perform a cleaning ceremony to wash their consciousness as they disrupt harmful minerals which later will endanger individuals, and later offer grant money to grow mutant sheep.

When dialogue happens in the assumption of equality, also, the notion of respect becomes unnecessary. Demanding “respect” implies recognizing oneself as an inferior requiring distance from an outside intruder. It would be more powerful to set up a stance towards the colonizer as an equal through open conversation, dialogue, or even confrontation. The progressive-minded person would try to find other strategies of condescension, but the refusal to play the respectful game would be a powerful strategy of freedom and self-determination.

References:

Bourdieu, P. (1981). Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges linguistiques (p. 68). Paris: Fayard. — Translated in Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (J. B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Covarrubias, P. (2002). Culture, communication, and cooperation: Interpersonal relations and pronominal address in a Mexican organization. Rowman & Littlefield.

Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion. Harcourt.