Cultural Ontology

The recent debates on the burqa in France and Quebec point to a uniquely contemporary problem: the strange short-circuits we encounter today between the private and the public. I do not mean to be perversely provocative when I draw comparisons between the burqa debate and the popularity of more and more lurid kinds of reality television, but I do see a kind of underground connection that may clarify both our notions of privacy today and the disproportional anxiety that the burqa seems to cause to secular society, whether in Europe or North America. We live today in a media culture in which the notion of privacy seems quaint and outdated. Teenage celebrities are sure to be at the center of sex-tape or sexting scandals; we are fascinated by people like Tiger Woods with unique and extraordinary talents, not for those remarkable talents, but for the banal sexual appetites (always for porn stars and cocktail waitresses, the poutine of the sexual world) that make them just like a

     Multiculturalism depends upon the explicitly stated desire to be together. This desire is the public face of the multicultural ideal. It says "Let's talk to each other. You tell me about your way of doing things and I'll tell you about mine. I'll eat your cooking and you eat mine. I'll do a dance on your holiday and you light a candle on mine." Without this public proclamation of good will (and the proclamation must be not only public but ongoing; it doesn't count unless it is proclaimed as a regular part of our public discourse) there could be no understanding between cultures, races, language groups, religious beliefs. We all know this.           What we may not know is that there is another side to this open invitation into our lives. There is another proclamation, not so public, but enacted in public every day by every one of us. That proclamation is "Leave me alone." Just as we cannot live together unless we are open to bein

When my friend Karen adopted her daughter Jessica from Haiti she knew that she would face challenges. The problems adjusting to a new life, to a school where she was one of the only black children were to be expected. Jessica's terrible insomnia made for many anxious nights for her mother, and a divorce tested the limits of Karen's resilience. But through the years it was apparent that Jessica was growing up into an interesting person with a ribald sense of humor, and a sharp intuitive sense of people. However, it is one of the most intractable problems that Karen faces that has made me think about the difficulties of raising a child from Haiti in an almost all white environment and neighborhood: the problem of language. And I am not referring to what we Quebecers usually mean by "the problem of language" but rather something much closer to a universal human concern: how to give children the language to speak their experience. In any family this is a delicat

One of the most profound yet mysterious claims of psychoanalysis is that "our desire is always the other's desire." Like many truths, this one flies in the face of common sense. "My desire," I want to argue, "is my own. It involves me and only me. It is what is most private and intimate about me, and if I do not own my desires, I do not truly own myself." And that statement would be true if I lived in the glorious isolation of the solipsist. But it is a position that falls apart the moment it is subjected to the test of real life. My desires are not my own. In some uncanny way, the desires of others -- their dreams, their goals, their fantasies -- lend texture and shape and color to my own. This lesson came home to me a few years ago when I was showing a friend of mine from Japan around Montreal. I have come to the terms with the fact that I am constitutionally incapable of showing people this city without beaming with enthusiasm and pride

Avatar and Erotic Multiculturalism      I am about to offer a jaundiced vision of James Cameron's Avatar , and I feel a bit like the guest who kicks the magician at a children's party. I will certainly see Avatar again, if only to revel in the hallucinatory flora and fauna, the waterfalls tumbling from mid-air mountains, the leonine beauty of the Na'vi 's faces. I am more than excited by the possibilities of the technology that had to be invented to make this movie, technology so dazzling that had it been used to make a movie about talking squirrels colonizing Neptune I would have been equally impressed.                     In a strange way, the breathtaking CGI of Avatar serves the same purpose as the use of black and white in Spielberg's Schindler's List : it is an index of the film's moral seriousness. After all, if we are to narrate the moral fairy tale of how an edenic world is protected from evil, it is desirable that the audience be dra

A strange thing happens when you say the word "culture." It is like a confession, the telling of a deep dark secret. The minute I defend my culture as a culture, I have already taken a step back from it. I say "my culture teaches that…," and it can be a whole range of teachings: my culture teaches that my accomplishments do honor to my ancestors. My culture teaches that God is a father who watches over us. My culture teaches that learning is the highest value. The confession implicit in all of these statements is that my culture is just that: a culture. It is not the divinely ordained order of things. It is not the unquestionable product of nature. It is a culture, something that has been made by people over a period of time. And just as human work turns out new forms and ideals, so culture will always change and adapt. When we are safely ensconced in a culture we pay little attention to it as a culture. There are times and places where the clash of cult