Conversations I

ERIC HOBSBAWM

 

Ramin Jahanbegloo: In which way do you think that the work of a social historian can contribute to promote respect for cultural diversity and endorse intercultural dialogue in today’s world?

Eric Hobsbawm: Any historian, not only a social historian, contributes to promote respect for cultural diversity if he or she is interested in the major themes of history. As defined long ago by the great Ibn Khaldun: ‘The record of human society, a world civilization talks of the changes that take place in the nature of that society... of revolutions and uprisings by one set of people against another, of the different activities of men, whether for gaining their livelihood or in various sciences and crafts and, in general, of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.’

In short, history must deal with social and cultural transformations comparatively. Even Khaldun who made his career in the enormous cultural diversity of the Islamic world between Spain and Central Asia knew this well enough.

Today the historian deals with an even larger and multicultural universe and must be constantly be aware of this. In doing so he cannot but promote respect for cultural diversity. I am not sure that it is his function to endorse intercultural dialogue in this world as a historian, although as a citizen I am naturally in favour of this. The relations between cultures in a multicultural universe or in any other are too complex to be reduced simply to the necessity for dialogue. It is the historian’s job to analyze and explain this complexity, even when it does not lead to better relations between cultures.

 

As a general fact, the necessity of intercultural dialogue and recognition is paramount in this age of globalization to avoid political and intellectual imperialism. But how can a social historian attain the universality that historical thinking demands without raising the partial universality of one’s own cultural perspective to the pedestal?

I think both political and intellectual imperialism and its reverse, intellectual post-colonialism, are to be condemned. So is any attempt to over-privilege any form of collective identity, political or cultural, whether ethnic, national, in terms of religious exclusiveness or current lifestyle. All are hostile to good history and should be controverted. It is true that no historian can escape from his or her historical, cultural and existential context. Complete and definitive universality cannot be achieved, if only because every age will have different questions to ask about the past and may give different answers, valid insofar as they are compatible with the rules of evidence and logic. On the other hand, just as we are today far from the time when scholars could not transcend their religious backgrounds, so also it is possible today to transcend one’s own cultural perspective sufficiently to recognize that cultural differences are not necessarily and at all times to be ranked on a scale from superiority to inferiority.

 

Does one need a self-consciously interdisciplinary methodology to elaborate or justify such a theoretical position or social history as a distinctive method which is detailed and fixed on ordinary people and everyday life can provide us with a set of working assumptions on interculturality?

There is a difference between history which is fixed on ordinary people and one which is particularly concerned with everyday life, though the two are obviously connected. In my own historical work, I have been interested in ordinary people, that is to say people who rarely or never emerge from anonymity as individual historical agents, not only because they constitute the great bulk of humanity, but also because their collective historical agency may provide a clue to social change and transformation.

‘Everyday life’, while it can be a fascinating subject, does not in itself provide this possibility. On the other hand, the development and the relations between cultures cannot be entirely analyzed in terms of ordinary people and certainly not since the age of literacy and general education which comes to the bulk of the inheritance of any country or region in a matrix largely elaborated by elite of culture and power. They may be shaped and transformed in the subaltern world, but cannot be written out of the script. For one, today they provide the contents of schooling.

You ask for working assumptions on interculturality. I do not find this ambiguous term very useful. I would prefer to begin by studying the concrete relations within particular communities and between them and others, e.g., what are the limits or flexibilities of relations between genders, generations, higher and lower groups and how do they vary with time and occasion; who is monoglot or polyglot and on what occasions; how and how far are strangers kept separate or integrated into the community; what are the real or accepted boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Above all, how are innovations in the way of life received and by whom; under what circumstances are they received positively or negatively. Intracultural problems are as relevant to the subject as intercultural ones, e.g., the changing shift within the world’s Jewish community between religious, progressive – assimilating and national criteria for identity and self-definition.

 

It seems undeniable that the era of interconnected social history epitomized by your work was premised on a political vision and a set of intellectual assumptions. The strength of your historical work was made possible by a perspective with undisguised preferences and antipathies. What would be these preferences and antipathies in relation with the process of dialogue among cultures and societies?

My work was and remains based on a version of the Marxist methodology. As it happens this has gone with personal preferences and antipathies in politics but I hope that these have not skewed my analyses too obviously. I would hope that this is also so in relation to the dialogue amongst cultures and societies.

 

In your article in Social Research (vol. 63) you affirm: ‘The concept of a single, exclusive, and unchanging ethnic or cultural or other identity is a dangerous piece of brainwashing. Human mental identities are not like shoes, of which we can only wear one pair at a time. We are all multi-dimensional beings.’ What do you think of the systematic regionalization of states, which assimilates regions without special linguistic, ethnic, or other characteristics to the potentially separatist areas? Is this a move forward toward interculturality or is it a step backward toward sectarianism, exclusion and a late coming nationalism?

I stand by your quotation from my article in Social Research. I also remain hostile to separatism, i.e. the creation of small independent states on some nationalist or other basis. To assume that such small separate states are ethnically or culturally homogenous is as unreal as to assume that large states are. One-dimensional homogeneity is a political construction, not a cultural reality. I assume your question refers to some developments in India, about which I am ignorant. So I cannot express any opinion on them.

 

The Tower of Babel remained forever incomplete because God condemned the human race to everlasting linguistic conflict. Would peace remain impossible because the human race is condemned to an everlasting religious and cultural conflict?

God stopped the Tower of Babel from being completed, because he condemned the human race not to linguistic conflict but only to failure to understand one another. So as far as I know, no wars have been effectively conducted for linguistic reasons, except during the period of European nationalism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The world will almost certainly remain multilingual (including multidialectal) for the foreseeable future and, as for most of history, ways of overcoming this by second or by lesser languages of wider communication will continue. At the moment, speaking globally, English is such a language. If it were ever to lose its position it would need to be replaced by another or others.