This week’s readings brought to mind an intense argument I had with a friend who studies law at UVic. At the time I thought our argument was about human rights, accommodation, and Canada’s colonial history, but in retrospect it seems more about the uncritical application of critique (especially in cases where minorities and spirituality are involved).
My story requires some digression: the law building at UVic is currently named the Frasier Building after UVic’s first dean of Law, but it used to be named the Begbie Building for Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie. I couldn’t find any in-depth record of the law building having been named for Begbie, though my friend recounted the story to me and it is also briefly noted, though not explained, here (http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/courses/lawdemo/mod03/MOD3A1.HTM). All that remains of the former name is a bronze statue of Begbie in the building’s lobby. Or at least that was true until a year ago: someone pilfered the statue.
Begbie was the Crown Colony of British Columbia’s first Chief of Justice. He was also known as the “Hanging Judge” for the high percentage of his trials that ended in execution. In the majority of these cases (22 of his 25 guilty verdicts prior to 1871) the hung parties were First Nations; the executed in the other 3 cases were white. This said, my preliminary research has also suggested that Begbie was more culturally tolerant of British Columbia’s First Nations and Chinese populations than was common at the period. Regardless, the Faculty of Law found this history of either/both Begbie’s racialized trial track record and history of capital punishment sufficient to warrant changing the name of their building. There was also a contingent of faculty and students who wanted to remove a 3-foot high statue of Begbie from the building, or at least from its predominant placement in the school’s lobby.
There had been debates about what to do about the statue in departmental meetings and classes, but they never resulted in a consolidated decision since Begbie disappeared over the Christmas break in 2009. Almost everyone at the law school was vexed with its disappearance because considerate deliberation was not allowed to manifest in action. Furthermore, no one really knew what motivated the Begbie-napping, be it anger at Begbie, frustration with the constant cycle of debates and lack of action at the school, or just a purposeless prank.
Here is where the disagreement with my friend begins: someone within the department invited a First Nations elder to come to the Frasier Building and perform a ceremony where the statue had been. I didn’t witness the ceremony and I don’t know what its particular focus was, be it forgiveness, peace, acknowledgement, etc. but whereas I’m usually concerned about the cursory nature of such evocations of Canada’s First Nations in university proceedings, my friend was livid that what she understood to be a religious ceremony not only occurred within but was solicited by the school of law.
Her critique of the ceremony was that universities are public spaces funded by the government, and that there is (and should be) a strict separation between government-funded institutions (such as the university) and religion. I found this argument unsound on several levels, especially that a blanket separation between church and state should apply to institutions funded by the state (how do religious studies function in such an system?), and I also challenged her suggestion that a Salish ceremony constituted “religion” as understood by such separations, drawing a distinction between religion and what I saw as spirituality in this case. My friend was further frustrated that a community outside of the school of law had been brought into a debate that (as far as she was concerned) was neither involved in nor affected by the statue’s disappearance. For her, the elder’s ceremony offered nothing to the school or its students. Still, her primary concern was that such a ceremony had been paid for by university funds and constituted a breach of separation between church and state, which, when taken to its logical extreme, she argued, could be interpreted as the state endorsing/enforcing the religion of West Coast natives. She found such event particularly offensive in a law school.
I countered by arguing that the legal separation between church and state is, regardless of its value in contemporary practice, an epistemology imposed with colonization that neither fully considered nor addresses First Nations’ spirituality. I also was vehement that such a ceremony might not have been intended for the students or the faculty of law but for the First Nations community who are undeniably involved in the discourse of colonial legacies (such as that of Judge Begbie) in Victoria and elsewhere; if the ceremony meant nothing to her yet had the potential to be meaningful to others, should she really feel personally slighted by its performance? I also suggested that while a similar ceremony may not have been performed at other law schools, UVic has a university-wide, explicit commitment to the inclusion of West Coast First Nations in study, research, and university management, something she should have considered before choosing to attend this particular school if such involvement and its iconography/history/spirituality bothered her.
The debate got nasty: in the end she considered me a bleeding-heart English major who was attempting to compensate for colonial atrocities by privileging First Nations rights over those of other Canadians (a reversal of what Mahmood discusses on 88 concerning the unbalanced nature of law which sees all as equals yet must maintains order for the majority). I saw her as blindly applying law and critique without turning such keen criticism to the application or interpretation of law in postcolonial settings. We fought, it sucked, and we never really resolved anything.
Still with me? I apologize for the length of this response, but this experience gets me to my central question: is secular critique culturally callous, or, more to the point, how can I perform culturally attuned critique in an increasingly globalized world? What amazes me about the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy is how a conservative-leaning newspaper with a relatively small circulation of 120,000 readers in Denmark was taken up not just in the Middle East but worldwide: critique no longer circulates strictly within its own cultural spheres, but has become globally accessible and (I would argue) accountable. Mahmood discusses how Western critique fails to consider its own origins. She hints at, but never quite discusses, the role that cultural sensitivity and compassion could have, but failed to, play in the critique offered in by these cartoons. Does critique reject compassion or cultural sensitivity for fear of appearing uncritical? Put another way, is cultural sensitivity inherently uncritical? These questions evoke Marx’s distinction of critique and criticism (discussed by Brown on 12), and make me wonder if criticism is a culturally callous wolf in critique’s clothing. Does cultural critique have any obligation to respect other epistemological systems, especially in postcolonial or transcultural situations? What does critique loose if we answer this question in the negative?
In retrospect, I understand my friend’s arguments as rooted in a defence of secularism in schools dedicated to critique, and not so much about the legal implications of a government-funded school supporting an ostensibly religious ceremony. Still, I feel valid in challenging her automatic and uncritical application of critique. I tried then and am trying here to trouble critique’s seeming obviousness, its supposed impartiality, by emphasizing secular traditions of critique’s cultural bias. We can defend culturally insensitive critique so much as we’d like, but ultimately I can only see this resulting in a deepening of our cultural embeddedness and the ossification of our critical faculties.
No comments:
Post a Comment