The West in the Future: Cultural Hegemony and the Politics of Identity

I am writing to comment on Jonathan Friedman's recent article, "The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of Identity" (AA 94:837-859, 1992). In it Friedman sets a fine example of the type of analysis that is needed to understand the growing role identity politics plays in shaping world systems, as well as the role of global processes in shaping expressions of identity. As is the nature of such an endeavor, however, Friedman's conclusions are shaded by his limited sample (Greece and Hawaii). Here I present examples from my fieldwork with Maya cultural activists in Guatemala to make problematic some of Friedman's conclusions, and argue that perhaps Friedman is incorrect in correlating the current move toward global cultural dehomogenization with a decline of Western cultural hegemony. I must preface my comment with a note on the concept of Western culture. Friedman frequently uses the adjective Western (as in "Western identity and history" [p. 837], "the Western-dominated world" [p. 837], "Western hegemonic identity" [p. 840], and "Western social context" [p. 855]), but I am left unclear as to what level of abstraction he has in mind when referring to this arguably overused and ambiguous concept. In both social scientific and popular literature, the concept of Western culture is increasingly invoked to explain how global forces effect change in local contexts. While analyses of global systems require a high level of abstraction, scholars are too often lulled into treating the West as a homogenous entity that (re)acts similarly in situations of contact around the world. One cannot deny the many underlying, modernist assumptions about the world that have spread from Western Europe, but neither should one overlook internal diversity of this tradition. The post-World War II period of hegemonic expansion of the two main branches of 20th-century Western culture has juxtaposed cultural, political, and geographic borders, thus clouding frontiers between East and West. In matters of politics and economics, Japan is aligned with the United States and Western Europe, although culturally and geographically it remains part of the East; likewise, until their recent independence, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan were subjects of Soviet-style Western culture, although now their young leaders stress the Near Eastern heritage of the countries. My point is simply that, in such a confusing situation, when one invokes the concept of Western culture, one should clearly specify the variety of Western culture (e.g., as interpreted by Greece, the United States, orJapan) and the level of abstraction (e.g., elements of contemporary popular culture or underlying assumptions about science, progress, and the nature of the world). In Guatemala the United States acts as the prime bearer of contemporary Western culture. Thus, a Guatemala-centric view may equate the contemporary Western tradition with U.S. pop culture; and in fact, many Maya cultural activists use this equation to contemptuously dismiss Western values. Nonetheless, current Maya cultural activism-and the growth of identity politics around the world-arguably constitutes an expansion of central elements of the Western tradition, elements that predate the Cold War and that have been more thoroughly integrated into local traditions than any one trend of recent Euro-American pop culture. These elusive elements-most notably modernist ideas about the value and nature of science, progress, and economic development-are often presupposed by researcher and subject alike, a situation that may lead one to erroneously conclude that the present mutations and evolution of elements of Western culture