Culture as Creative Refusal

Abstract

Many aspects of culture that we are used to interpreting in essentialist or even tacitly evolutionist terms might better be seen as acts of self-conscious rejection, or as formed through a schizmogenetic process of mutual definition against the values of neighbouring societies. What have been called “heroic societies,” for instance, seem to have formed in conscious rejection of the values of urban civilizations of the Bronze Age. A consideration of the origins and early history of the Malagasy suggests a conscious rejection of the world of the Islamic ecumene of the Indian Ocean, effecting a social order that could justifiably be described as self-consciously antiheroic. The author puts forward a hypothesis that the culture known today as Malagasy has its origins in a rebel ideology of escaped slaves, and that the moment of “synthesis” in which it came together can best be thought of as a self-conscious movement of collective refusal directed against representatives of a larger world-system. The cascading series of gestures of refusal, reincorporation, and renewed refusal are described in schematic forms. Heroic societies emerge as a rejection of commercial bureaucratic ones. Some of the logic of heroic society becomes recovered and reincorporated into urban civilizations, leading to a new round of schizmogenesis whereby they are rejected and social orders created around the very rejection of those heroic elements. Thus becomes possible to re-examine world history as a series of such acts of creative refusal, just how far such an approach could ultimately go.