barcelona :: Anthropologists against 2004 Forum

For all that, the anthropologists met in this IX Congress in Barcelona, on the first week of September 2002, we want to express our repulse to the use of cultural differences as a justification for discriminatory immigration politics that deny fundamental human rights, and also our worry about the possibility of the Forum 2004 becoming an grandiloquent and empty spectacle, in the service of political and economical interests of their promoters.

The first week of September 2002, organized by Institut Català d'Antropologia (Catalan Institute of Anthropology), it was met the IX Congress of Anthropology of the Spanish Federation of Anthropologies Associations. During four days, more than six hundreds professionals from everywhere in Spain and nineteen other countries were debating about relations between policy and culture. In the concluding act of the Congress, on the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture) at the end of the evening of the 7th September 2002, the congressmen approved this


DECLARATION


Anthropology, some decades ago, reclaimed a protagonist role for the culture notion -central notion of our discipline- on debates about human diversity and inequality causes. With that idea we wanted to contribute, beside the advances of genetics, to scientifically deny the pretension of the existence of any "racial" fundament on human ways of thinking, doing and saying diversity, and much less on their conception as "superiors" or "inferiors". The origin of human heterogeneity kept installed, by the hand of that culture notion -as a changing dynamic decisive entity but also decided by history- into this human being capacity not for just living in a society, but changing incessantly the society they were living at. Some years have gone and this IX Congress of Anthropology has risen as a central effort making a balance of political uses that culture notion has finally received. The idea of culture is used today for very different even antagonist purposes, of those that anthropology wanted when called the attention of its importance on diversity explanation. Far of impugn the irrevocability of human differences, culture has become a mere succedaneum of the disparaged race idea and serves, much more keenly, for the same purposes, which are not others that the naturalization of social asymmetries and the ideological justification of social exclusion.
Discrimination, segregation and marginalization are today, essentially "cultural". What one day were called "inferior races" today are been called "incompatibles with our values" cultures. Xenophobic parties don't claim any more in favour of racial purity, but they notice the dangers that "cultural integrity" suffers of their respective nations. At the same time, the big politics institutions and majorities' parties use the culture idea to justify the disadvantage of thousands of human beings, promoting laws which deny the access to justice and equality. That pretensions can, although, make a public proclaim of their adhesion to values of "tolerance among cultures", that will become in his hands an empty and demagogic rhetoric. In the same frame, "multiculturalism" and "interculturality" serve to design politics frequently not based on the dynamic plurality of life styles presents in a society, but in the existence of a supposed mosaic of hermetic compartments that enclose any person in his own ethnic and "identity" and that insinuate the impossibility of a get away. Media uses culture notion again and again to trivialize and simplify some social conflicts insinuating that its causes have obscurely something to do with the cultural adhesions of their protagonists. The official antiracism assume this as his own discourse, based on a distorted appropriation of culture notion, and makes understand that is a better "comprehension among cultures" what will let us leave behind that brutal injustices that many persons are victims of. In these order of things, it's not easy to perceive how much the exaltation of the "cultural mestizaje" hides a racist premise: that is possible -although is proclaimed to be disagreeable- the existence of pure cultures somewhere.
What is happening today in Spain (2002) about immigration is an example of all this. Here, that use of cultural difference justifying any kinds of outrages is associated to new foreigners' politics (called the Ley de extranjería) which harm in a scandalous way basic human rights. Cultural diversity is shown again and again as something that makes impossible for a State being "of rights" as it's supposed, as if human heterogeneity were an insolvable obstacle to accomplish the basic democratic principles of equality and freedom. The real institutional behaviours involved to workers from other countries and their families - shown insistently as cultures of difficult integration in our society- consist in conquer them to outrageous arriving and staying conditions. A vague official discourse about "immigrants integration" is combined with the condemn of thousands of human beings - simply guilty of arriving here and being poor- to inconceivable working exploitations, to a legal treatment that doesn't recognise them as persons and to a police siege that becomes in arbitrary detentions, deportations with no guarantees and, sometimes, - if reports of different international organisations are true- to bad treatment and, sometimes, even to death. This is, in this moment, the reality of "multiculturalism" in the Spain.
In this context - characterized for institutional laws and practices that systematise and generalise injustice, brutality and exploitation against immigrants-, we are worried about Barcelona, city that lodge our Congress, preparing an maximum exaltation of "the cultures" as a political theme and media spectacle. The perspective of a big event as the Fòrum Universal de les Cultures 2004 (Universal Forum of the Cultures 2004) make us wonder if it will serve, as it pretends, to praise the fertile connivance among different people and the necessity and possibility to create equalitarian frames for surpassing the differences without deny them, or if it will know denounce abuses and inequalities that will happen in front of it. The project looks too loaded of institutional compromises and urban and private properties implications for not seeing it as submitted to plans of the city promotion for tourists and investors and politic self-legitimation face to its own citizenship.