The Imagery of a Newspaper
Bruno Latour observes, “Here it’s the CEO of a big company who deplores the fact that five years after the merger the firm’s various branches are still not fully integrated. She wonders how to ‘promote a common corporate culture’. A few lines further down finds an anthropologist explaining that there is no ‘ethnic’ difference between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, but that it’s really a ‘class difference’ that has been ‘instrumentalized’ by colonialists and then ‘naturalized’ as a ‘cultural’ one. In the letters section, a Scot reminds his readers of the ‘Glorious Alliance’ between France and Mary Queen of Scots, which explains why Scotland should not share the rabid Europhobia of Englishmen. A correspondent from France tries to explain why second generation girls from Algeria that show up at school with an Islamic veil are seen by their teachers as ‘fanatics’ who ‘exclude themselves’ from the French Republic.”
The newspaper evidence particularizes the course of constructing groups and disassembling them. The CEO’s declaration depicts the unintegrated groups in the organization that have made it unmanageable to have an amalgamated culture. The content reading the ‘Hutus and Tutsis’ indicates progression of decomposing the foremost ethnicities in Rwanda. Furthermore, the allusion to ‘Glorious Alliance’ typifies the conception of a group of ‘Europhobics and the English people’. Furthermore, ‘the Algeria girls’ donning of a veil results in their pigeonholing as a group of fanatics. All in all, the content in the newspaper is foregrounded on grouping individuals based on their partialities, exceptionalities and philosophies.
“Shirley Strum’s baboons”
Shirley Strum writes, “‘Still, I knew my work painted a picture of baboon societies that others would find difficult to accept. My shocking discovery was that males had no dominance hierarchy; that baboons possessed social strategies; that finesse triumphed over force; that social skill and social reciprocity took precedence over aggression. This was the beginning of sexual politics, where males and females exchanged favors in return for other favors. It appeared that baboons had to work hard to create their social world, but the way in which they created it made them seem ‘‘nicer’’ than people. They needed one another in order to survive at the most basic level—the protection and advantage that group living offered the individual—and also at the most sophisticated level, one marked by social strategies of competition and defense.”
Strum accentuates the baboon’s social nature, which aids these animals in constructing a society in which they coexist like humans. Had Strum omitted the term baboon in her elucidations, a reader would have clinched that she is cataloguing humans. The mutuality which is evident among the baboons boosts their existence and diminishes the need for disparaging hostility. Humans ought to imitate the example of baboons by expending social aids to progress their civilizations.
