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Structures of domination are, therefore, perpetuated through the
seizure of indigenous knowledge of the Others "to become
consumer fodder for the West, to be recycled and exported back
to non-western cultures." Sardar draws attention to Anita
Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, who often argues in
her writings and advertisements how her ideas and discoveries
are based on her travels to the Third World, where she "saw
raw ingredients being used, as they have been for centuries, to
polish the skin, cleanse the hair." In Mexico, for example,
she discovered how aloe plants are kept at hand in every home to
be applied on burns. This knowledge is there for anyone in the
western world to grab, but if a non-western woman was to go to
Paris and ask for know-how about some skin preparation she would
either have to pay patent fees or be completely denied. Thus, The
Body Shop becomes a typical postmodern symbol of
appropriating knowledge, ideas, experiences from the non-western
cultures, repackaging them in bright colours and then recycling
them back to the societies from where they came in the name of
multiculturalism and plurality. Experience gained from other
cultures turns into a marketing ideology. The consumption of the
goods by the natives reinforces the inferiority of indigenous
cultures as well as the entrenchment of the myth of western
goods being superior and more worthy of use. Interestingly,
Roddick claims that her "business is inspired by Mahatma
Gandhi, Martin Luther King and African tribal chiefs." This
accomplishes the process of appropriation.
Similarly, the
commodification of a simple and innocent therapeutic practice in
the East of massage, turns in the hands of the West into a
"euphemism for prostitution," transforming whole
cities like Bangkok into the markets of sex; it is almost
impossible to have a therapeutic massage in South-East Asia. The
chain stores in the West such as The East India Company, Banana
Republic and Safari Clothing and British India,
similarly wipe out the bloody histories of the colonised world
by lionising colonialism which becomes a joyful experience,
especially inside a shop that is decorated to exhibit bowler
hats, old guns and pictures of whites on elephants enjoying a
hunting trip in an Indian jungle while the natives stand in
waiting. The garments come with a leaflet narrating the history
of the East India Company, how a new trade route was established
and how the "adventures" of the English traders
resulted in durable and utilitarian garments; amusingly, no
mention is made of the real motives of the company and its
encounters with the natives. Injustice of imperialism is thus
legitimised. History stands reconstructed. All sense of
historical continuity and memory, which gives the colonial
subject his sense of authenticity and selfhood, is abandoned by
the postmodernist western world. The white postmodernist
consumer begins to feel at home all over the world strutting
around always confident, chic and with excessive pockets on
his/her trousers indicating western commercial power. The Other
thus becomes, as in Orientalism, the passive object "a
negative awaiting its overwriting in order to become human,
predictable, able to be included in its process of political,
social and economic control."
And the only way
of fighting this onslaught of postmodernist control is to build
the culture of resistance. The model that Sardar offers is the
model of tradition and not traditionalism, a model that is
dynamic as well as ever-changing, based on living memory and
reinterpreted history. The antithesis to postmodern obsessions
with rupture, fragmentation and discontinuity is a culture
imbued with striving towards interconnections, maintaining
continuity of meaning with the sole aim of recuperating the
Self. This will make its present and future something different
and new, not ossified in any way which traditionalism signifies.
The "demonisation" of the Other will stop once the
inherent quality of egoism celebrated by postmodernism is
overcome. Traditionalism stands only for what is known and its
retention; it is synonymous with fundamentalism, a pathological
factor of postmodernism. Cultural representation in
postmodernity, therefore, no longer refers to the real, but
instead reduces the real to a spectacle, a nostalgic retrieval
without ideological motivation. Tradition, on the other hand, is
the true discovery of the Self, without being oppressive or
backward-looking. It is a way of knowing, as Sardar clearly
argues.
The book is a
far-reaching critique from a non-western perspective. It takes
into consideration diverse fields such as architecture, film,
television, pop music, and consumer lifestyles to show how
postmodern attitude retards the objectives of non-western
cultures marginalising them further. The thesis accuses the West
of marketing an insidiously domineering and clever revisionism
with the sole aim of power and control.
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POSTMODERNISM
has been seen as a theory of liberation that promotes alterity or
pluralism, thereby bestowing a broad representation to the
minorities/marginalised. But is postmodernism also not manipulative?
Ziauddin Sardar in his recent book argues that far from being a new
theory of liberation, postmodernism, particularly from the
perspective of the other, the non-western cultures, is "simply
a new wave of domination riding on the crest of colonialism and
modernity."
