Big words regularly fall short in providing meaningful answers to large questions. I just finished reading Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (Free Press, 2010), Ethan Watters case study expose of the cultural mediums through which various mental illnesses become normalized (in diagnosis) and standardized (in treatment) across the world. The book’s main argument is provocative and well-supported. The book is a good, solid 2-sit read. The problem I have, however, is one that I come across regularly and almost always overlook in other situations: the author freely interchanges “The West” with “America,” to a point where once again ”The West” becomes a trope for “The United States.” I have thought about “The West” for a long time: Its about time we started discussing just what exactly “The West” is.
By way of addressing what “The West is, one could do worse than asking just what exactly is to the west from where one is currently standing, sitting, lying down or what have you. From where I’m standing-sitting, “The West” could just as well be Japan as much as it is West Edmonton Mall. For others, ”The West” may be everything around them–same goes for east, north, south, etc. I do not want to come across as purposefully facetious or, worse, in denial. The lifestyles, habits, philosophies and societies that comprise “The West” are very real but also undeniably historicized. Another in the bottomless tool kit of making meaning through reduction. “The West” is a hollow term that serves only to rationalize power relations–regardless of where one stands–and has even less meaning in spatial terms.
Geographical expressions such as “The West” serve to further entrench the homogenization of places as small as neighbourhoods and as large as continents– at the same time we are supposedly striving to move away from such perceptions. Sure, its easy to blame “The West” for environmental and social woes but maybe its time to start asking which West is responsible. One could do worse than start by dropping “The,” replacing “W” with “w,” and start applying some meaningful modifiers like “male,” “white,” “rich,” “corporate,” etc. etc. Terms that actually means something at the same time they provoke. One could even throw in other direction/less words like North/east, South/west, or even, North/South or West/North.
Have I lost my sense of direction? Have you?
Such paradigm-shifts occur over long(ish) periods of time but they also develop through a process of (re) creating spaces. If The United States is “west” of India, for example, then West Vancouver is also “west” of the Downtown Eastside.
By way of conclusion, I must return to where my ‘obsession’ with West, and by extension East, began: Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” (1889). The history of the poem’s varying interpretations is an instructive way of seeing how enduring misconceptions and misunderstandings can be:
For a more complete discussion of the poem, read the following:
http://www.f.waseda.jp/buda/texts/ballad.html
And who could “Morrison” be? Well, its Jim “The Lizard King” of course:
“The West is the Best, Get Here and We’ll Do The Rest/The Blue Bus is Calling Us/Driver Where You Taking Us?”
What did The Lizard King mean? Was he responding to Kipling? Alas, we shall never know…
April 7, 2010
portagepain
