Making the Invisible Visible: Resurgence of Culture in Shaping Public Policy

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. From Michael Muthukrishna’s book, A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going.

Culture is analogous to water in its significance and influence on human beings. We are often so deeply entrenched in our own thoughts and immersed in our preconceptions that we fail to see how the culture we live in structures our everyday lives.

Culture plays a significant role in shaping various aspects of our lives, including our identities, aspirations, symbolic exchanges, coordination, and the institutions and practices that facilitate social relationships. This encompasses various variables, including ethnicity, ritual practices, cultural history, social conventions, symbolic meanings, and belief systems. Yet, in the discourse of public policy and development, culture has been variously perceived as a primordial trap, a mystical haze, or a means of exerting dominant influence. The embeddedness of these perspectives in policy thinking have made it difficult to explore the interplay between culture and public policy.

This possibility is even more difficult in the context of India where socio-political realities during the two phases of colonialism distorted the meaning of how culture is perceived.

The colonial mentality, deeply entrenched in the post-colonial ruling elites, did not help with the matter much, as culture was continued to be seen as something backward, which needed to be reformed.

The Origin of Backwardness Thesis and the Long Shadow of Colonialism in India

The first phase of colonization, characterized by Islamic invasions and subsequent establishment of settlements, led to a direct attack on our cultural emblems and modes of existence. Numerous endeavors were undertaken with the aim of eradicating the Indian knowledge traditions and the cultural sensibilities associated with them.

In the aftermath of the initial phase of colonization, during which we endured significant trauma and psychological consequences, we found ourselves confronted with a subsequent colonization. This subsequent colonization, although characterized by subtlety, employed cunning methods that not only devalued our knowledge traditions but also severed our ability to access them.

The British employed various means, like education, law, and religious conversion, to convince us of our perceived cultural inferiority and the necessity of complete eradication of our cultural remnants in order to civilize us. The utilization of law as an ideological apparatus facilitated the transfer of authority over temples and other knowledge institutions into the possession of colonial powers, resulting in the deprivation of financial resources allocated to these very establishments, thus contributing to their gradual decline. Likewise, education was employed as a means of exerting epistemic control, leading to a profound alienation and disenchantment of individuals from their own knowledge and traditions. Epistemes here, as described by various scholars, refer to the ways of thinking and knowing. They establish the boundaries of ascertainable information, while also determining the criteria for valid knowledge and the legitimate methods for its acquisition (Meghji, 2021).

The enduring impact of colonization was the transformation of Indians from active creators and practitioners of knowledge to passive consumers.

The Indian population underwent a process of objectification, where they not only became objects to be categorized and dissected, but they also became easily accessible resource pools for various social experiments. This double separation of Indians from their own knowledge systems and cultural practices was part of the British policy of colonial difference: the idea that the colonized were inherently different from (and inferior to) the Western colonizers. This mindset of colonial differentiation was eventually the impetus for the creation of the artificial master categories such as caste, race, etc.

However, colonialism does not solely aim to exert control over a population and eradicate the native’s brain of all forms and content. Through a distorted form of reasoning, colonialism redirects its focus towards the historical experiences of marginalized individuals, subsequently distorting, disfiguring, and ultimately eradicating the natives’ collective experience. It imposes new identities and associated attributes, as Cornwallis boldly announced -

Every native of Hindustan, I verily believe, is corrupt.

The distortion and mis-characterization of Indians served the purpose of Indians eventually internalizing their own oppression (Fanon, 2008). Indians came to understand themselves as the British wanted them to be understood, under the process of what Hall (1997) describes as ‘the internalization of the self-as-other.’

Such a distortion has huge consequences for the natives’ own culture, as the long shadow of colonialism puts the colonized into the “zone of non-being”, where they never feel like themselves, and their schemes of self-recognition and valuation have entirely been ruptured.

Colonies like India turned into social laboratories. In his 1906 paper ‘The Value of the Study of Colonies for Sociology’, Albert Keller argued that “the colonies are ideal sociological laboratories because they provide us with data on what modern societies used to be like”. He states, “the study of such societies gives us our only starting-points for the scientific demonstration of the evolution of human institutions.”

The colonial countries reaped great benefits from colonialism and empire by treating the colonized countries as pools from which to gather meaningful data. As Connell (2010: 41) aptly puts it:

“The Colonized world, seen from the metropole, was a magnificent museum of primitiveness […] the colonized world offered a gallery of social forms, social customs, social groups. Theories in the metropole could, and did, array these data in a grid of race, levels of economic development, social integration or whatever principle of classification took their fancy. […] These cultures were, in their eyes, of interest precisely because they were more primitive, representing (as they thought) earlier stages of social development.”

The long colonial rule over India went on to build a perception (and self-perception among Indians) of India as a land lost in the past, with an outdated culture, whose people were shaped by the heat of their climate, the distinctive character of their religion, and the immorality of their social institutions. India became something of a laboratory for the creation of the secular-administrative state, and from there each of the state’s elements also became such labs: state-driven secular education, the codification of law, and top-down bureaucratic apparatus.

Economics, Metropoles and Colonial Origins of Public Policy

Unlike many other disciplines, pubilc policy did not ‘become’ colonized; rather, it was always colonial to begin with. By saying that public policy was colonial, we mean that public policy both internalized the logic of a colonial episteme, and also (re)-produced and bolstered that very episteme itself.

The West, which emerged as the major victor from the World War II, started expanding its economic tentacles under the assumption that there was only one way for decolonizing countries to become developed, which was to follow the Western development model. Western countries began to export their policy in the form of consultation to developing countries like India, in lieu of economic assistance. As this development model was firmly rooted in the economic restructuring of society, even a cursory thought of culture as an important variable was completely undermined in the development and policy thinking. While metropoles like London or Paris were the nucleus during the period of colonization, they were replaced by New York, which emerged as a new power-center. This was due to the fact that New York housed institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

As most of the policy thinking of these institutions was a derivative of mainstream economics, the act of devaluing knowledge from the global and financial south was continued, along with devaluing the very existence of the people who constructed those knowledge systems. It is only when these rather technocratic and overly-deterministic economic models - that informed the efforts of post-war institutions of development, such as the World Bank or the bilateral aid agencies - failed to find answers to policy and governance problems of 1980s, that development and policy-thinking starting to move towards the ‘culture’. By this time, policymakers also realized the futility of European ‘modernization’, the falsity that their notions of progress are universal, and the farce that their ahistoric formulas that could be applied anywhere. Critique by social scientists and the rise of participatory policy and development practices brought culture to the fore of development.

Cultural Turn in Social Theory: The Rise of Culturally-Informed, Culturally-Sensitive Public Policymaking

As Kate Nash (2001) argues, the cultural turn in the public policy discipline entered via two forms:

• The Epistemological Case: Culture is seen as universally constitutive of social relations and identities.
• The Historical Case: Culture is seen as playing an unprecedented role in constituting social relations and identities in contemporary society.

This approach to policy making stressed upon the need to work between frameworks, traditions, concepts and so on - to achieve the most critical paradigm of policymaking. Some scholars have labeled this epistemological approach as ‘pluriversality’, and some have described it as -

A horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions (Mbembe, 2016)

From Michael Muthukrisna’s work around the Cultural Evolutionary Behavioural Science in Public Policy (2023) to a seminal anthropological work by Marshall Sahlins (2013), scholars are now acknowledging culture as a versatile and dynamic force, on par with economics and politics, influencing the development and policy process. There is a growing consensus over using culture as an important variable to address the profound questions of what we value in terms of well-being, who defines these values, and how culture interacts with economic and social factors to distribute access to a good life. As Marshall Sahlins (2013) underscores in his book Culture and Practical Reason, different cultures construct their unique systems of practical reasoning. These cultures not only define what constitutes rational behavior, but they also create their own frameworks for interpreting the world around them.

Hence, culture has increasingly become a lens that opens a world of understanding and opportunities in the policy landscape.

Native culture is now regaining its place in the development and public-policy thinking. The time is ripe to approach it from a perspective of awe and wonder, rather than from a perspective of suspicion. As anthropologist Tulasi Srinivas (2018) argues -

Once we approach something from a perspective of awe and wonder, we seek to know more about it. We become curious to know about how things are the way they are and how they are connected to our deep and powerful emotions. Wonder brings us to compassion, for the earth, for others and for ourselves.

References:

1. Connell, R. (2018). Decolonizing sociology. Contemporary Sociology, 47(4), 399-407.

2. Fanon, F. (2008). Concerning violence (p. 32ff). London: Penguin.

3. Hall, S. (1997). Culture and power. Radical Philosophy, 86(27), 24-41.

4. Joseph Mbembe, A. (2016). Decolonizing the university: New directions. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education , 15 (1), 29-45.

5. Keller, A. G. (1906). The value of the study of colonies for Sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 12(3), 417-420.

6. Meghji, A. (2021). Decolonizing sociology: An introduction. John Wiley & Sons.

7. Nash, K. (2001). The Cultural Turn’in Social Theory: Towards a Theory of Cultural Politics. Sociology, 35(1), 77-92.

8. Sahlins, M. (2013). Culture and practical reason. University of Chicago Press.

9. Schimmelpfennig, R., & Muthukrishna, M. (2023). Cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy. Behavioural Public Policy, 1-31.

10. Srinivas, T. (2018). The cow in the elevator: an anthropology of wonder. Duke University Press.