From the Bourdieu List: Bourdieu about fundamentalism

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Dedicated to all the Brock Vonds who supported the fundamentalists and are 
now astonished and horrified about the results:
>From: "john.kaman" <john.kaman at wanadoo.fr>
>To: <bourdieu at lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
>Subject: RE: [BOU:] Bourdieu on Islam
>Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2004 17:08:32 +0100
>Sender: owner-bourdieu at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>Reply-To: bourdieu at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>
>I apologize for some of the awkwardness in sentence structure that may
>rightly be criticised; however, I am not a translator.  I hope the following
>gives you a fair sense of the gist of the ideas:
>
>Question: As for present problems, do you see in religious fundamentalism a
>form of resistance to globalization?
>
>Bourdieu: Islamic fundamentalism is an extreme but understandable reaction
>to the condition of Arab and Islamic peoples and states. The logic which
>rules today in the economic and political universe, that of the double
>standard, "two weights, two measures," contributes to this development.  I
>think that every person who participates by one means or another, directly
>or indirectly, in Arab or Islamic life, experiences daily attacks or
>humiliations, by action, political decisions and speech. And if the problem
>of Israel/Palestine is found to be at the heart of the experience of this
>scandalous injustice, it is because this same logic is represented there,
>despite all the seeming solutions, in a condensed and concentrated form.
>
>Question: How does one confront all that and what is the task of the
>intellectual in this situation?
>
>Bourdieu: Algerian, Syrien, Egyptian, Iranian and Libanase intellectuals
>have not ceased to call for support from the nations that call themselves
>democratic and their intellectuals. They have seen that the combat they lead
>in their own countries against the advocates of the brutalization (literally
>"stupefaction") of the masses is condemned to failure to the extent that
>politics becomes that of the double standard--accompanied by the
>indifference of western intellectuals who favor this development in doing
>nothing or almost nothing to combat it.
>
>Question: How do explain the rise of fundamentalism?
>
>Bourdieu: If the resistance to western cultural and economic imperialism,
>and in particular that of the USA, has taken the form of religious
>fundamentalism it is perhaps because the countries touched by this
>imperialism have no other cultural resource capable of motivating and
>actually motivating the masses.  We can deplore--many Arabs and Muslims
>do--that the resistance against hegemony and imperialism has not found
>another means of expression other than that offered by traditional religion,
>often in a severe and archaic form.  But it shouldn't be forgotten moreover
>that the economic and social structures that have contributed to produce
>colonial and neo-colonial domination have not encouraged the modernization
>of the religious message and that the western countries and their secret
>services have worked relentlessly to smother in the embryo all progressive
>political and cultural movements--and that they continue to do so today.
>The drama of the wretched of the earth, Latin-Americans,Africans or
>Asiatics, is a tragic irony of history.  To defend their cause today, they
>cannot rely on individuals and peoples, conservative based as they are--and
>not simply religiously--have been used by the dominant forces that have long
>monopolized the interests of people involved in the struggle for liberation.
>The alliance between Bush and Putin with regard to the Afghans and the
>Chechens symbolizes this in a tragic manner.

kwp
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20040105/6909a3b2/attachment.html>