Making Pariahs: Stereotypes in Education Abroad

Why does your wicked mouth spit on me?
What harm is it to you
That my skin is dark...
And my hair Gypsy black?
From Isabelle the Catholic...
From Hitler to Franco...
We have been the victims
of their wars.

-Tony Gatlif "El pajaro negro" sung by La Caita in Gatlif's documentary Latcho Drom (Safe Journey, 1993)

The boundary between the darkness and the light was shifting all the time, but too subtly for us to be aware of it, except when it was too late.

-Michael Dibdin, And Then You Die (2002)

Respect in Education Abroad

At some level questions of respect for the identities of others are at the center of objectives in our professional field. Students are in the process of developing their own notions of who they are and who they wish to become. A benefit of studying abroad is that they are temporarily liberated from home and from the intersection of the many roles they are required or choose to perform there. In new spaces they have a privileged opportunity to unburden themselves. They encounter alternative ways of being and seeing as an individual, in society, and as member of some form of collective consciousness based upon faith, ideology, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, or any number of the variables that shape who we are through choice or necessity. In encountering the identities of others, they may aspire to rewrite the roles they play in the drama of their own lives.

They will learn that systems of belief are not universal and that patterns of behavior may not be the same as those with which they are familiar. An internship abroad may disrupt assumptions about work ethics and norms. Experiences beyond the classroom, situational learning, are likely to reveal unexpected hierarchical patterns in social interactions manifest, for example in many European languages. The French vous, Spanish usted, German sie, and Italian lei are formal modes of address in contrast to familiarity expressed by tu or du. These act as signifiers of respect for authority, status, or age that is an important element in appropriate social discourse. The distinction between the formal "you" and the informal "thou" had mostly disappeared in English usage by the seventeenth century, but other conventions of use, perhaps less obvious, may impact upon how students are perceived.

Respect may also be demonstrated by gestures that express recognition of others.

Within the study abroad program classroom, faculty are usually respectful of the heightened sensitivities of many American students to language thought of as politically or socially unacceptable, sometimes even as forms of micro-aggression. Respect for those sensibilities is relatively easy to maintain in that controlled environment. Outside of the classroom, common usage in the Anglophone world is likely to be less responsive to assumptions about what may or may not be said. Irony is, for example, part of common discourse in Ireland, Australia, and England. Humor is used to deflate perceived pomposity or self-regard. Learning to understand the difference between what is said and what is meant is a necessary part of gaining a more international perspective. American students, even in the English-speaking world, need to learn another language.

When students study abroad, they encounter differences in many and various contexts and therein lies a complex, critical challenge to the intellect and the emotions. This challenge is not limited to students of course. All of us generalize upon the basis of our own experience. That is both inevitable and necessary if we are to navigate through our environments. We see others through perspectives limited by the identities we construct and the experiences that shape who we are. The most cosmopolitan internationalist among us, however widely read and traveled, will form views based upon what sociologists call a very limited sample. We are naturally inclined to categorize that which is new to us, to make sense of otherwise random, confusing spaces.

In this process there is, though, some peril. Nuanced and provisional thought is required to avoid simplistic generalizations. It is tempting see the individuals we encounter as somehow representative of collective characteristics.

This reductive tendency is enforced by the baggage we carry when we enter new locations for the first time. None of us are explorers of virgin territory. In one sense or another, just like our students, we know something about the places to which we travel even if we have never been there before. We cross borders with expectations, assumptions, stereotypes that are as inevitable to the traveler as a passport. This is the baggage we carry into England, France, Japan, Germany, Spain, and all the lands that are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar to us. True or false, true and false, we enter countries with some sense of the national, collective identities that we anticipate confirming through engagement.

Let us, though, consider a fallacy demonstrated by meeting the fictional figures of William and Elizabeth in London. William, we observe, behaves in just the manner that aligns with our expectations of Englishness. Thus, we think he is "typically English." Elizabeth, in contrast, appears to be somewhat eccentric in that she behaves in ways that are puzzlingly deviant from our expectations. She is not, therefore, we assume "typically English." The assessment made derives, of course, from the constructed lenses through which we peer at people and places new to us. Whether those lenses were made in America or not, they offer a myopic view. The individuality of William and Elizabeth is obscured by barriers of preconception and expectation about what being English implies. What this simple fable demonstrates is that we may lose sight of the uniqueness of the personal in a theory of national identity.

There is a spectrum of possible consequences. Least harmful is that students may acquire great enthusiasm for, or aversion to, those things they perceive as European, or Italian, French, English etc. They may generalize from encounters abroad that had a significant impact. In those processes the parochial notion that American "culture" is the norm is disrupted.

The Culture Problem

However, that view may also carry an erroneous assumption that there is something we can recognize as representative of American or European "culture." Personal experiences become translated into subjective, sometimes stereotypical, conceptions of regional identity. Furthermore, creating a coherent singularity out of the profound diversity of geographical space enacts a misconception that is embedded in the discourse of education abroad and, indeed, in wider ideological contexts. As an Englishman, who has been a student of America for many years, I am aware that New York City and rural Georgia offer profoundly different versions of national identity.

"Africa" offers another instructive example of a process in which a single significance is invested in a space defined only by proximity. There are, of course, 54 countries in Africa and there is little to connect Tunisia with Togo. The rationale for the representation of Africa as a single space derives from poetry, myth, and the politics of identity. The notion of the Arab World is also a construct with few manifestations of political reality. T. E. Lawrence's vision of Pan-Arab unity did not survive internal differences or the aspirations of France and England at the end of World War I. The region is now fractured by deep divisions and seemingly endless conflict.

The reality of regional identity, and of the countries within, are that they emerge almost inevitably from wars, accidents colonialism, politics-made by man, not nature. The idea of regional or national culture is built upon a combination of generalization from selective evidence, the imposition of singularity upon diversity; an illusion that has entered the rhetoric of education abroad at the cost of clarity. Simply put, a country is not representative of a culture, however the concept is defined.

When students study abroad, they go from one country to another. The fact that countries do not align with cultures is a lesson from history that has been ignored. The most dramatic examples of the artificiality of national borders are offered by colonial history. The carving up of Africa into artificial units illustrates that borders do not define or constrain culture. In Europe, speaking of Italian, British, or Spanish culture requires a lack of nuanced understanding of regionalism and an indifference to history. The concept depends upon stereotypes of identity.

A Spectrum of Damage: When Stereotypes Kill

That is, nevertheless a relatively minor matter, an error of judgment. At the end of a spectrum of damage, there are far more catastrophic consequences deriving from translating perceived traits into collective identities.

The notion that Black skin denotes a lesser form of human development gave credence to the global slave trade. Post emancipation in the USA, this theory of racial eugenics led to the legalization of discrimination through Jim Crow laws. The notion of White identity is seductive to racist supremacists. Ideas of Black identity may have useful political value to activists challenging prejudicial discourses. But both concepts simplify complexity, create theories of collective identity that distort reality and construct discriminatory boundaries between us.

In early modern Europe,^[1] Roma and Jews were marked as different predominantly through dominant Christian mythologies. Both groups were seen as complicit in the suffering of Christ. That designation defined them as eternal outsiders, a threat to communities, unclean intruders, a problem in need of a solution that led inexorably to the gates of Auschwitz.

Creating identities rooted in discrimination is a necessary pre-condition for acts of inhumanity.

The Case of Max Jacob

The Rats are underneath the piles.
The Jew is underneath the lot

-T.S. Eliot in "Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar."

Questions of contested identities have been at the center of my research for some time now as I've considered how and why some individuals and groups are defined as outcasts, aliens, and subject to ridicule or hate.^[2] Most recently, I have studied individuals who were metaphorically and literally victims of the definition of hostile others. Among these was Max Jacobs (1876-1944), a poet and painter, friend of Picasso, and a figure in the development of modernism.^[3] He arrived in Paris from provincial Brittany in 1894 at a time of intense artistic innovation, and social and political change. He was born Jewish, converted to Catholicism, was homosexual, mystic, a moralist, and rarely restrained by conventional behavior. His lifelong struggle between the spiritual and the profane is captured in his poem "Agonies and More":

What will these lines be about
God whom you nag day in day out
God his angels and his priests
Or your love's infernal feasts
And their gobbling agonies

Jacob converted to Catholicism 20 years before his death. This did not save him from becoming a victim of French Nazi sympathizers. He died in the Drancy internment camp just outside Paris days before he was scheduled to join a transport to Auschwitz. The identity that Jacob chose for himself made no difference to those who defined him as a Jew, a pariah, a member of a group judged to be less than human.

In worst-case scenarios, invented identities can be used as spurious justification for prejudice, marginalization, discrimination, persecution, and genocide.

Identity in Education Abroad

We can deduce from these arguments that identities of individuals or groups are not inevitably a matter of will or choice. The idea that we construct our own identities applies, if at all, only to the most privileged among us. Individual agency is, in any case, limited.

In education abroad, students may come to understand that they too are subject to the perception of others; for any number of reasons, their individuality may be subsumed in a version of collective identity not of their own making. The profound life skill that we hope students acquire is resistance to reenacting the same sin of perception. Instead of assuming that any person is representative of collective traits, we must first recognize and respect the humanity of the individual.

This, in turn, is a lesson that reconnects international education with the ideals that drove the pioneering efforts of educators after 1945. It affirms the notion that a core purpose is to bring students together to create connections and interactions between diverse peoples that will result in enhanced understating of each other. That objective has become muted, almost anachronistic, in narratives of enhanced employability and personal benefit.

None of us should assume that we are the creators of our identities. With sometimes tragic consequences, others may make strangers, aliens, of any of us. We, in turn, may enact the same act of destructive invention. In understanding those processes and that danger, we take a first step towards global consciousness within which there is, blessedly, no space for the notion of pariah peoples.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with saints, and of the household of God.

-St. Paul's Epistle to the Philemon 2:4 (KJV)

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