04.16 // Module IV: Race, Ethnicity, Culture Lecture

World Systems Theory

Ahmed began with an overview of World Systems Theory. The term was coined by Immanuel Wallerstein, who explained it as a way of structuring the global economy that was triggered by colonization of the Americas and the Industrial Revolution.

Janet Abu Lughod, however, argues that the transition to the modern economy began before colonization. She explains that that there was a rich exchange of trade and ideas in the 13th century among the Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Malian empires. Europe in comparison was a marginal but rising actor in the world system. It was a pluriverse, a world in which many worlds fit — in contrast to the modern, monoversal, globalized world facilitated by colonization.

Colonization

The European Renaissance (itself facilitated by exchange with the Islamic empires) gave way to Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors who traveled westward to the Americas. More than 80% of the population was killed off by disease, and a complex hierarchy of race based on “biological essentialism” was developed by the Europeans. One’s place in the hierarchy depended on the purity of their white blood.

Ahmed referred to Baron Thomas Farrer who developed a classification by which Europeans judge others. At the bottom were the “savages” and “subhumans,” those being the slaves and natives. Next were the semi-civilized peoples of the fallen empires of India, China, and the Islamicate. At the top were Europeans.

Vivieros de Castro explains that Europeans questioned whether natives were human and had a soul at all. For the natives, all beings had a soul, but they questioned whether Europeans were humans or spirits. For Europeans, human-ness depends on the existence of the soul, which meant that until the natives and slaves converted, they were considered sub-human. This then led to the proselytization of Christianity, mass conversions, and missionary work across the globe.

In this, European colonization was distinct from other invasions because 1) it introduced the concept of race and 2) the Europeans never ‘went native.’ Because of the hierarchy of races, they kept themselves separate and distinct from the peoples they colonized.

Orientalism

Ahmed touched on the concept of Orientalism introduced by Edward Said, which argued that, though seen as human, people of the Orient (those east of Europe, such as China, Persia, India, and the Middle East) are exoticized and caricaturized in literature and other forms of media.

Cosmological Perspectivism

Ahmed then spoke briefly about cosmological perspectivism. He explained that how you relate to reality is determined culturally, and thus we cannot make sense of other people’s worlds. Nevertheless, because of the aforementioned hierarchy, Europeans claim their own perspective is superior and others are inferior, and this was essentially formalized as laws in America.

Decolonization

Theorists like Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar argue that colonialism did not end with decolonization, but that the impacts and remnants of ‘coloniality’ permeate through our culture and systems still. The unique ways colonized people perceived the world were modernized and made European, and thus they lost their connection to their precolonial past. Moreover, through globalization, our cultures become flattened and homogenous. Modernity then is coloniality, because everything in modernity is Anglo-European in origin.

Mignolo and Escobar oppose this Modern world system (One World World System), arguing that we need to go back to a pluriversal model. The flattening of culture and erasure of histories leads to fragility where we no longer have culturally indigenous knowledge to adapt to issues like climate change.

Culture

Ahmed spoke about Watsuji Tetsuro’s book, Fudo, which explains how, because cultures evolve to adapt to a particular environment, the environment and climate influences culture. This link is broken as a result of colonialism and erasure of histories. Ahmed asked the class to consider: with nature killed off, how will it continue to influence culture?

Design

Finally, Ahmed tied these ideas back to contemporary discourse in design.

• Design and a Sustainable Pluriverse is needed to adapt to climate change. We need to decolonize knowledge and our minds to bring indigenous knowledge systems back
• Humanitarian design raises questions about a new form of imperialism
• Cultural difference still exists, such as squat toilets versus seated toilets
• Our assumptions/conceptions of beauty and aesthetics such as typography are almost exclusively Western conceptions, while non-Western conceptions of aesthetics are never even taught
• Collectives such as the Decolonising Design group & Depatriarchise Design are working to change the dominant paradigms in design

Theorists

Ahmed referred to several theorists in this lecture:

• World Systems scholars: Janet abu Lughod and Immanuel Wallerstein
• Decolonial scholars: Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar
• Postcolonial scholar: Edward Said
• Perspectivism: Vivieros de Castro
• Nature & culture: Watsuji Tetsuro