National Identity, Pluralism and Libraries
Technicalities 42(3) Sept/Oct 2022: 13-16
Lately I have been worried about libraries and their roles, particularly how they contribute to the sense of national identity. And of course, when I say “libraries” I have particular concern for catalogs and metadata because these tools are an important service and even provide a sense of what it is to be a librarian. A few recent events have put me in this frame of mind.
First, as I write this I am on a research trip to Kosovo where with American and Kosovar colleagues we have been thinking about library services for this new nation that broke away from Serbia, the central remaining element of former Yugoslavia. The bulk of Kosovo’s population is defined as an ethno-linguistic group that speaks Albanian, distinct from the slavic Serbs, themselves an ethno-linguistic group and the largest in Europe. Kosovo declared itself as an independent state in 2008, though Serbia has not conceded. Although it is 92% Albanian and 97% Islamic, it defines itself as a multicultural nation, with Serb communities concentrated in the north, and includes Bosniaks, Turks and the Romani people. They also have special affinity with Albania—in a sentence, through history Kosovo has variously been joined administratively with Serbia and Albania, and now attempts to stand as an independent nation. And the challenge is this: How do you create a national identity out of pieces? It would be one thing to simply declare “Kosovo is Albanian” or “Kosovo is Serbian” (you see both spray-painted on walls) and create a national hegemonic identity. This is clearly the approach being advocated by some in other countries. For example, Marie Le Pen, who is dangerously close to winning the French presidency, claimed late last year “French delinquents in prison, foreigners on a plane!” and supports barring citizenship from those born in French territories.
The question of how to construct a national identity (or how to destroy one) took on an urgent new reality when Putin decided to invade Ukraine, claiming immediately beforehand that Ukraine had no distinct culture of its own, and could not and would not be separated from Russia. Is there a distinct Ukrainian national identity? It is clear that Putin would never admit to this being the case but it appears that much of the rest of the world has judged it to be so, and even more importantly a very large majority of Ukrainians themselves judge it to be so. Putin’s opinions rest on a series of dubious historical claims of common ancestry dating back to Kievan Rus’ circa 900 AD. Of course, on a cultural basis there is a clear distinction between Russia and Ukraine. But the real test of a hegemonic identity is pragmatic. It leads to social exclusions, deportations, and in the case of Ukraine, war and death. The endgame of social hierarchies is pretty bleak, and it is alarming to note how people who promote “softer” versions of social exclusion cannot quite bring themselves to critique Putin and the idea that strict national identities lead so easily to violence.
An alternative approach is to construct a national identity not around the sense of a single paramount group identity, but around a group of ideals. Some of those ideals would be a commitment to multiculturalism, or pluralism, where groups can interact without having to give up their particular identities in a peaceful coexistence. Such a pluralism is based on a concept of solidarity, that we have more to gain together than we do apart, and that we can have meaningful interactions, including the ability to construct a nation. Solidarity, as a concept, is perhaps distinct from unity, which says we are all one people and indistinguishable from each other, a concept that might work more at a political or legal level than as a cultural concept. And a commitment to pluralism is probably worthless without a commitment to justice and equity, as we know that some groupings historically have advantages conferred upon them. The concept of nationhood here is not a required element, and perhaps one that complicates matters, but I think we can for our purposes here today take it as a given, though in our utopian fantasies perhaps the concept would not hold the significance that it does today.
The challenge of course is how do you get people, or more specifically a majoritarian group of people, to give up their commitment to their group identity as the most important defining characteristic of the nation, and substitute instead a commitment to the peaceful and just coexistence of other peoples? At times the responsibilities of national citizenship, defined as a commitment to a set of ideals, will have to supercede one’s commitment to their own group’s status. For those in majoritarian groups, this can cause some discomfort as the demands of equity feel like favoring other groups, or in Ronald Reagan’s terminology, “special interests.” Paul Peterson at that time said “an interest is special if it consists of or is represented by a fairly small number of intense supporters who cannot expect that their cause will receive strong support from the general public except under unusual circumstances.”[1]Reagan’s trick was to conflate public disregard for special interests such as the coal industry or trial lawyers with those of cultural identity. By this reasoning, the gay community’s request for equal rights around the issue of say, marriage equality, is perceived as a special demand that must be weighed against the demands from other groups (e.g., religious fundamentalists who believe in the definition of marriage exclusively between a man and a woman) who also characterize national identity in some restrictive fashion. Pluralist social and political models require a commitment beyond simple group identity.
Knowledge is universal and/or local
I have for years advocated for a form of librarianship that points explicitly toward culture as its basis, and that means attending to both people and knowledge. Culture has obvious social dimensions, but the epistemic dimensions are less commonly articulated. Librarianship has long taken as its basis that knowledge is not one large undifferentiated mass but is divided into uses and kinds, and one basic division is by academic discipline. It is perhaps too obvious to state, but chemists use chemistry information, astronomers use astronomy information, and literature scholars use literature amongst other information. The disciplinary basis of both knowledge and people is so familiar to us that it comes to us as an obvious truth and without the need of any explanation. But the idea of disciplinarity is one with a history. Wellmon’s book Organizing Enlightenment[2]describes how the division of knowledge along with the creation of the research university was the German response to a problem we know all too well: how do we manage knowledge when there are too many books to read? The solution from the late eighteenth century was to appoint experts and split the labor up into groups so each group of experts was responsible for the cultivation of a particular area. Knowledge is divided up into disciplinary cultures.
But is knowledge divided into other cultures as well? There are some clear examples of this, such as developing local history collections, or collections for linguistic communities. Even an undergraduate college library, separate from the research library, is a tacit acknowledgment that different kinds of people need different kinds of information services. But can we be more specific?
Cait McKinney has written an interesting book about the role of information and the organization of information in establishing a lesbian history, and perhaps even a lesbian group identity. She defines an “information activist” within the context of a burgeoning lesbian feminist social movement. Such activists are:[3]
women who responded to their frustrated desire for information about lesbian history and lesbian life by generating that information themselves. Information activism describes a range of materials and processes constituting the collective, often unspectacular labor that sustains social movements. This concept brings together people, their visions of justice, and the media they use to organize, store, and provide access to information.
What is interesting in McKinnon’s definition is not merely how a group of people banded together to write their own history and produce knowledge, but how that knowledge and the social movement are co-constitutive. A group produces knowledge, but in some sense the knowledge produces the group as well. To what degree is this true of other groups and other kinds of knowledges—of social groups that are defined by their knowledge and document/knowledge groups that are defined by the people that use them? How is knowledge implicated or associated with various different group identities? Again, we see this is in disciplinary groupings, such as in Kahn’s definition of a field of study as an assembly of epistemic elements such as key theories, values, assumptions, instruments, methods and standard problems as well as standard demonstrations such as papers and books.[4]
What does all of this have to do with libraries?
In many ways the idea that libraries could serve as places of national and cultural conciliation seems quite obvious. By developing inclusive spaces, comprehensive collections and generous access policies, libraries would appear to be a public institution well suited to both demonstrating and developing a national civic culture of inclusion and interaction. A signal development in the history of libraries by these measures would be the work of Antonino Panizzi who famously built an expansive new reading room and a developing a catalog to accomodate large numbers of new readers, and broadening access by systematizing the means of discovering what was in the collections. Sadly, that reading room, a monument to the democratization of knowledge, is now walled off with marble and emblazoned with the Queen’s name, away from the public. It’s a sad testimony to a man who did so much in the service of public knowledge and culture.
Not to place all of the blame on the British Museum as librarians have often struggled to provide universal access, much less equitable access. Authoritarian regimes and segregated Southern states[5]all had libraries that were active agents of oppression. Librarianship carries within itself inestimable social values, but does not guarantee them.
So we must articulate a set of professional values that honors difference in people and doesn’t attempt to simply appropriate the knowledge of others. Caswell looks to religious pluralism to find four basic principles derived from the work of Diana Eck and applicable to the practice of information services: energetic engagement with diversity, understanding across lines of difference, encountering commitments, and the idea that pluralism is based on dialog. [6]She also identifies four criticisms or pitfalls of pluralism[7]—claims of universality, inattention to power, silencing dissent, and collapsing of difference—all having to do with the ethical encounter and reaction to pluralism. Designing information services means being aware of the limits of our own comprehension, and encountering others on equal terms. As Caswell says, “pluralism is not simply a description of the existence of … difference, but a committed interaction with that difference.”[8]
A commitment to pluralism is an essential professional value for fair and equitable information services and is often interpreted within that context as a set of practices for how individuals from different cultural groupings interact with each other. But just as importantly for the purposes of cataloging and other forms of knowledge organization is to understand the pluralistic nature of knowledge itself. We are not asked to opine or reflect on whether there are different kinds of knowledge—we must simply treat this as fact. We have treated disciplinary difference—in our classifications, and the construction and organization of our collections—as a basic principle. An ethical and cultural basis for librarianship must do so as well with other kinds of cultural groupings.
Knowledge is pluralized, and yet our practices continue to treat documents as if they can and should be described in a single standard way, and whose topics, meanings and uses are represented without complexity. When cataloging books from different cultures and different eras, we must work with sensitivity to difference and inequality. Too often the materials of other cultures are presented to our audiences without regard to the history or sense of exploitation of those resources. Can we develop important meta-narratives or counter-narratives in the representations of knowledge at the core of our access systems. If a document can be put to multiple uses, should we be developing multiple representations—or multi-faceted representations—of those documents? Another example from the British Museum may suffice here: the so-called Elgin Marbles. The bulk of the descriptions of the marbles in the museum is given over to what is literally depicted, with small effort to present a reading or interpretation of their significance. And hardly any effort is given to describe the controversial means by which those marbles were acquired, and the prolonged dispute over ownership. The British Museum ignores the ideas that those marbles might have something to say about the practices of British Empire or the continuing power differences between Greece and Britain, or the meanings of those marbles to those two different constituencies.
For us, then, a commitment to pluralism—in knowledge, amongst users, amongst the uses and meanings of documents—is an unwinding project whose logic has not yet been fully realized in the design of our tools and services. Cataloging has aimed for universal and invariant representations that have erased difference, primarily by interpreting objects for a bland contemporary “general” audience. Caswell cautions us that “pluralism must proceed cautiously regarding claims of universality.”[9] It is time to move beyond this admonishment and start to actually design systems appreciative of human cultural and epistemic difference.
Works Cited
[1]Peterson, Paul E. “The Rise and Fall of Special Interest Politics.” Political Science Quarterly 105, no. 4 (1990): 540-541, doi: 10.2307/2150934.
[2]Wellmon, C. Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
[3]McKinney, Cait. Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. Duke University Press, 2020: 2, doi:10.2307/j.ctv14t48t3.
[4]Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed., enlarged ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
[5]Selby, Mike. Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African Americans in the South. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
[6]Caswell, Michelle. “On Archival Pluralism: What Religious Pluralism (and Its Critics) Can Teach Us About Archives.” Archival Science 13, no. 4 (2013/12/01 2013): 281, doi: 10.1007/s10502-012-9197-y.
[7] Ibid., p. 282-284.
[8] Ibid., p. 285.
[9] Ibid., p. 287.
[10] Peterson, Paul E. “The Rise and Fall of Special Interest Politics.” Political Science Quarterly 105, no. 4 (1990): 540-541, doi: 10.2307/2150934.
[11] Wellmon, C. Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
[12] McKinney, Cait. Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. Duke University Press, 2020: 2, doi:10.2307/j.ctv14t48t3.
[13] Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed., enlarged ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
[14] Selby, Mike. Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African Americans in the South. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
[15] Caswell, Michelle. “On Archival Pluralism: What Religious Pluralism (and Its Critics) Can Teach Us About Archives.” Archival Science 13, no. 4 (2013/12/01): 281, doi: 10.1007/s10502-012-9197-y.
[16] Ibid., p. 282-284.
[17] Ibid., p. 285.
[18] Ibid., p. 287.