Drawing on Foucault’s understanding of power and subjectivity, power operates through relationships in which people may categorise and objectify others. The labels attached to those who are objectified can shape how they are perceived, treated, and positioned within society.
As someone coming from a Scheduled Tribe community and studying outside my hometown, I have experienced differences in ways of living, dressing, talking, eating, singing, dancing, and so on and so forth.
Through these experiences, I have come to understand how people from mainland India (or megacities), and above all those who are unfamiliar with my community, have perceived us, or people from the Northeast, through preconceived notions of who we really are.
Drawing on Foucault’s ideas of subjectivity and power, one can understand how, generations ago, people objectified us as primitive, backward, hunters, outsiders, and so on. At the same time, they have been unable to understand how their own views and perceptions have already divided and cracked the mirror before they even see their own faces in it.
They centre their own ways of life in a dogmatic manner, and while struggling to understand us, they ultimately fall prey to the very assumptions that prevent them from discovering the truth behind the disparities they have created.
The racial slurs we are called, such as “chinky,” “momo,” “Nepali,” and “xing xang jong” (an imitation of Chinese speech), have become imprinted even on young children, alongside the behaviour of older people who stare at us from head to toe- reinforcing outsiders’ preconceived ideas of who we are.
At the same time, being categorised as a so-called “Scheduled Tribe” increases the stratification of people within academic and workplace settings, where we may be treated as inferior to those categorised as belonging to the so-called “general category” or higher castes.
These experiences reflect how communities can be objectified through social structures and systems that reproduce inequality and unequal relations of power.
One may draw on the philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1987), who distinguished between two different traditions of thought as abstract traditions and historical traditions, where we exist differently within these traditions, trying to understand one another and find ways to coexist.
To make such coexistence possible in our present world, we must remind ourselves of who we are and hold on to our traditional ways of life while finding ways to coexist with other traditions.
For these traditions are part of the cultural foundations that have shaped us, and we must develop knowledge and awareness of our history and existence. Concluding with the wise words from George Santayana, who famously once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue. The author is a student at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
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