Gentle perspectivism

The notion of gentle perspectivism refers most particularly to how scholarly work on ‘external’ phenomena should be approached by academics but blends in this argument below about the foreign gaze as well. As to the clip: just a gentle take on manners and this obsession with ties that British men accross the class divide display at every possible public occasion. 

As Albert Schutz explained, cultural description is a process analogous to the experience of any foreigner learning the culture of a host society. Schutz noted that in the weeks and months following the immigrant’s arrival in the new society, what she previously took for granted as knowledge about that society turns out to be unreliable if not obviously false. In addition, areas of ignorance previously of not importance come to take great significance, overcoming them being necessary for the pursuit of important goals, perhaps even for the foreigner’s very survival in the new environment. In the process of ‘integration’ and learning how to participate in social relations in the new society, the foreigner gradually acquires an ‘inside’ knowledge of it, which supplants her previous ‘external’ knowledge. Schutz argued that by virtue of being forced to understand the culture of the host society in this way, the foreigner acquires a sense of objectivity not available to native citizens. This form of what Schutz also called gentle perspectivism allows the foreigner observing that the inside members of a culture are quite unable to see it as anything but a reflection of ‘‘how the world is’, something that as Sutchz explains in various articles (1960, 70) as well as in his seminal Phenomenology of the Social World (1972) revolves around the idea of “the natural attitude”: a disposition and / or frame of mind and opinion, in other words, whereby the fundamentally context-specific and culture-bound set of believes shaping the visions, in our case, of the indigenous ethnic majority population in Britain are mostly unconsciously taken for granted in a very common-sense, mundane way.

Dealing with the topic and issue of inter-cultural relations (particularly in Britain) responds to the same process of knowledge building. Since culture is also ordinary and everyone participates in it (Raymond Williams, Keywords, 1976, Culture, 1981) so most people feel to have something to say and to hold an opinion about it, from the lay member in the street on to the informed citizen, journalist and / or politician not to mention the expert scholar from many a field in the humanities. However, in the process of a foreign academic learning, trying to understand and explaining the complex forces acting upon the relations between community, culture and identity within the confines of a given dominant but declining State formation, one is perhaps the main single belief and attitude across the board, which adequately distilled through common sense, appears as much taken for granted in current debates be they on multiculturalism / inter-culturalism and the (postmodern) politics of identity and difference, or the discussions on the interactions between citizenship and the nation, among others: it is the general assumption that, when addressing the conspicuous issue of the foreign body the common frame of reference in regards to the prominent topics of “cultural integration” and / or “social inclusion” ought to be the values, customs, laws, language and culture of the “guest society”.

This, in turn, offers the foreign other a highly liberal and individual(ist) choice: … and if you don’t like it, you leave!