I’m slowly getting back to reading and writing. I’ve recently finished the book The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (btw, turns out there are many books titled “Lies that Bind”).
I listened to this book on Audible. It’s narrated by the author. He has a great narration style, and the book reads calm, honest, level-headed. It’s a very relaxing experience even though it’s on a politically charged topic. In fact, one reason I like this book so much is that hearing someone else reflecting on this topic in such a calm and yet nuanced way reinstitutes my faith in abstract intellectual engagement.
The book discusses a number of salient identities in turn. I hesitate to name the nature of these discussions because they include a little bit of everything: some history, some sociology, some personal stories, frequent philosophical reflections. I have to admit that I considered it a little stream-of-consciousness-ie before I got to the end. It was enjoyable because of the writing style and interesting because of the topic, but it was hard to see where it was going (more on this later).
I enjoyed the ride, learning random facts about how many of the Indian and Indigenous people’s historic “not cisgender” options are often very different from what we would now call “transgender” or “nonbinary”, about how the Indian “untouchable” caste was solidified by British colonists trying to create a unified account of Indian society as a whole, about how “Europeans” as a collective identity emerged primarily to be in opposition to the Muslim world. The author makes a number of insightful observations along the way, also.
One observation is that identity usually comes with behavioural expectations. People say “I should do X because I am Y”. These expectations can be restrictive, of course, but they aren’t always. A Christian who says “I should go to church because I’m Christian” might as well be saying this with pride.
These expectations can be negotiated too. It used to be true that “I should stay at home because I’m a woman” but now that’s no longer true. But the negotiation is not an individual project. Some women have to convince enough women that they should work on this together, and then they have to convince enough non-women.
The last point is important, too. Other people have quite a bit of power over our own identities, though we are not entirely powerless. To recognize an identity is to recognize that some people do not have this identity and to imagine some similarities among people who share an identity. Sometimes these similarities track something that once was the case, but most likely they are entirely fabricated. Still, they represent something important to us.
I won’t try to summarize more of the book since the beauty really is in the journey itself. I mentioned earlier that I didn’t expect there to be a conclusion. But when we got there, I realized that the conclusion was not only made sense given what he had said earlier, but also contentious enough that I probably wouldn’t have agreed if it were presented to me without the rest of the book. (In other words: the argument worked even though I completely missed that there was one.)
The author argues against the notion of “cultural appropriation”. He explains that sometimes a person pretends to take on a culture only to mock it and those who practice it, and that is wrong regardless of whether the person is commonly considered as a part of that culture. It’s disrespectful etc. But there shouldn’t be anything intrinsically wrong with a person taking on a culture that they previously did not belong to as long as they are doing it seriously and respectfully. Nobody owns culture. Nobody is entitled to their culture purely through heritage alone. People become entitled to a culture through active engagement and participation, and through practice, they also gain the right to change it. It’s a pretty radical view when laid out like this, but there’s also a certain gentleness about it that I quite like.
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