Insider / Outsider: Incomplete Reflections

In the search for the most basic political questions, the problem of identity may be said to rank as more fundamental than even the purpose of political organization, issues of justice and freedom and the conditions of obligation. The reason for this is simple. Who I am (or you are or s/he is, ad infinitum) predisposes me to choose one of these other fundamental questions over the others, to combine them, to address or not address them, to address them in a particular way, to call on certain and not other facts, experiences or principles in our explorations and explications. If I were another person, I might not have written this first paragraph in this manner, leave alone made certain political or personal choices.

That said, my identity is intrinsically problematic. I have many identities and I wear them as one might accessories like hats or shoes or purses. Sometimes I mix and match them, sometimes I grab whatever is handy, sometimes I feel driven to violate existing dress codes and sometimes I conform. In other words, I have not one identity (say ‘Indian’) but many (female, human, reader, alumna of my various schools and colleges, citizen, denizen, tenant, etc.). When I am talking with a former classmate, I am primarily a fellow alumna. When I am asked for my travel documents, I am foreign national. When I argue a position, I may argue as the member of an ethnic or political group. I consume goods and services in a manner largely consistent with my class identity. All these identities that I possess combine to predispose me, in an often inconsistent manner, towards one or another set of political concerns.

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I have been studying Sri Lanka for about six years now, and this is really quite a short time. In this time, however, like many before and after me, I have come to feel quite intensely about this small island.

‘Foreigners’ who study other countries often catch ‘localitis,’ someone told me when I returned from field research. To my mind, this must be a straightforward condition. I am me and I am different from my research context. I love the context and I love its people. Everything about them fascinates me, and emulating the local people, I wish I could truly be one of them. But I remain me, and they remain them, and the dilemma of localitis is that the twain cannot meet.

What happens when you look like the locals, sound like them, have a name that passes for local, share religious and cultural traits with them? And yet, you are nothing like each other, eat extremely different food, barely understand each other’s languages and inherit entirely different worldviews. You are an insider and you are an outsider, both at the same time, playing both roles in dizzying succession in every interaction. You enter effortlessly into the drama of people’s lives, but like Alice in Wonderland any response or attempted intervention on your part is a gauche intrusion. You are mistaken often for a local, and you come to mistake yourself for one. But you are not. And sometimes, when the identification goes on for a while, a part of you recoils and you retreat into your other-ness. And when you leave, you enter a lifelong exercise of trying to understand what just happened to you.

Confusing as this is at the level of interpersonal interactions, it has important consequences for one’s research and one’s politics.

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"As we South Asians know, the world of international politics does not allow such unilateral acts."

"You Indians, you think that you can dictate to us what you think and because you are so much bigger, we will listen to you."

"We are different from you. We don’t take ourselves as seriously as Indians do."

"Everything from India, including Bombay onions, came to be hated during the IPKF days."

"India after all has got this language business right."

"What you don’t understand because you are from Bombay, is that these Tamils are always seeking a Tamil country of their own. Just read their statements."

"You will not accept this because you are a Tamil, after all, but you had better believe me."

"Tamils from India like yourself are not really Tamils. You don’t even speak the language correctly. We always tell people who come here—let us teach you how to speak."

"What people, here and in India, need to understand is that Tamil is an ancient language and has its own rich culture. Don’t you think so as a Tamil?"

"Unlike Tamil society in India, we have no Brahmins here—are you a Brahmin?—it is much more egalitarian."

"As Tamils, our traditions and social structures are more like each other than they are like the Sinhalese or the Gujaratis."

"You Tamils will all stick together."

"What do you know about any of this? You have come from America."

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Dizzy from the identities I chose in these conversations and the identities that were assigned to me by the people with whom I spoke, inevitably I took their words to heart. Hearing the things that were not being said, there was no distancing myself from the stories they told me, nor from the grief or anger expressed around me. Who I was, who people took me for, became part of what I heard and what I felt compelled to write. I wanted every word I wrote in my dissertation to echo these things. I wanted to tell these stories correctly. I wanted to let these voices speak through the text of my writing. "Write from your heart," someone said to me, and that is what I tried to do.

Now, the dissertation is done. In the conversations I have on the phone or the letters and email messages I receive, these stories continue. Now voices that were once optimistic and confident sound quieter, more hopeless. There is a despair where there was righteous indignation. No one hears what is going on, so the things they imagine are worse than ever. There can be no good outcome to the conditions they imagine.

I hear these feelings as an insider, but standing outside, I cannot reach out and really help. I cannot promise them a happy ending. I cannot go in and make things better. Insider and outsider, my punishment is to hear and to care, but not have the right to act or to express my feelings. To love, but not to mourn. To be furious, but impotent in this context. To empathize with the pain, but to be excluded from the healing. As an outsider, my hearing takes on the quality of eavesdropping. I have caught something that was not meant for my ears. Any outward response to it only shows me in poor light. I must consider the ethics of profiting from this accidental learning. And yet, because I hear, I cannot ignore. In this indeterminate zone that I occupy, I have neither the legitimacy of the detached, obviously foreign outsider, nor the credibility of the local who is both affected and engaged with this situation.

But the things about which we feel passionately are bigger than the petty limits of our location and identity. Historically, insider/outsider persons have acted as interpreters, mediators and liaisons. In contexts like the ones I have described, there is little need of interpretation, mediation or liaising between those on the inside and those on the outside. The real divisions are internal to the insiders and there is no room, really, to poke one’s nose in there. To find a role beyond these requires imagination and enterprise. The indeterminacy of the gray areas yields greater possibilities than the absolute hues of black and white. The challenge of the insider/outsider must be to define those possibilities and to capitalize on her unusual position to act. After all, the divide between inside and outside is a threshold, and thresholds are points of departure not dead-ends.

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Post-script (July 7, 2000)

There are limits to one's "insider-ness." These are marked by the moments at which one fails to get angry. Like a visitor to any household, I have trained my judgementalism and quick temper to better adjust to my context. Non-negotiable issues of value and even, turf, over which I might fight endlessly with my siblings, I shrug off philosophically. To myself, I justify not caring enough by claiming generosity of spirit. But you see, at the end of the day, this is not my country, not my battle and not my business.

So to walk the insider-outsider tightrope is not merely to capitalize on the times one is inside but to remain alert to how being on the outside might desensitize one. Or, if that latter is what passes for detachment, then the important task may be learning how to harness that detachment to serve the purposes to which one is attached. And equally, perhaps, it is to learn to turn the same tolerance and detachment inward to one's own context, and to re-evaluate what one considers non-negotiable issues. Starting, sustaining and honestly recording the dialogue and the bargaining within may in fact be the insider/outsider's most useful undertaking.

Swarna Rajagopalan
May 31, 2000