Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community
- Автор: Fians Guilherme
- Год: 2022
- Язык: русский
- Жанр: Культурология
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The circulation and mobility discussed in the previous chapter give us a clue to understand this. Staying in their home countries would result in Esperantists using Esperanto mostly among their fellow nationals, who are often speakers of the same mother tongue. If Esperanto is presumed to be an international language, what could be better than using it to come into first-hand contact with internationality? This calls into question the ways in which internationality plays out in Esperantujo.
As the congress' opening ceremony showed, inter-nationality here draws on people from different nationalities being brought together. Following the emic perception of nationality at play, one's nationality is conveyed by traditional clothes that identify the person's origin, by the particular accents one displays when speaking Esperanto, or by greeting the congress' participants on behalf of one's country. Hence, the Universal Congress consolidates itself as an international event by gathering several forms of diversity subsumed under the label 'national'. This creates the conditions for the national Other[15]—the individual who embodies 'difference' when measured against others and affirms them- selves as a carrier of alterity in its diverse forms—to emerge as the key figure that renders such settings international. Ultimately, insofar as the countries' salutations that open these congresses highlight the rela- tive differences and particularities between national Others, Esperanto gains prominence as the ingredient bringing national Others together by turning them into fellow Esperantists.
This practice of building internationality from national diversity is also manifest in Esperanto literature. The fact that the developing liter- ature in Esperanto, both original and translated, essentially targets an international readership (Richmond 1993) is in line with the nationally diverse background of Esperanto authors and translators. This results in Esperanto literary traditions being partial outcomes of several national ones, also making national literary traditions available to international publics. One of the ways of doing so is through the national anthologies of poems, novels, short stories and theatre plays that Andrei packed for the Seoul bookshop, such as Antologio de la Moderna Bosnia-Hercegovina
Novelo (Alic 1989), El Japana Literaturo (Miyamoto and Isiguro 1965) and Itala Antologio (Azzi 1987), among others.
This understanding of internationality as a mosaic of nationalities is present in Esperanto literature as much as in music, theatre plays, videos, films and, by the same token, in the community. The percep- tion of nationality conveyed here recalls a Romantic definition of culture that posits culture as a discrete and bounded unity likened to nation. This Herderian archipelago vision (Eriksen 2001: 137), which draws on Herder and the modern origins of both cultural relativism and nation- alism, is in accordance with the political and philosophical programme behind Esperanto. From this, Esperantists derive the conclusion that if nationalities can be used to set peoples apart, internationality could help bring people together.
In discussing the concept of culture, Roy Wagner (1975) argues that, while cultures are said to shape people, people also constantly signify and shape their cultures by creatively engaging with their values and symbols. In Wagner's perspective, anthropologists also participate in the process of shaping cultures by defining them as anthropology's main object of study: 'in the act of inventing another culture, the anthropologist invents his own, and in fact he reinvents the notion of culture itself' (1975: 14).
As cultural relativism and nationalism share analogous historical origins, Wagner's arguments provide solid ground for an analysis of how Esperantists engage with nationalities. In mobilising elements such as clothes, mother tongues, accents, hairstyles and countries of origin as indexes of one's nationality, Esperantists invent Other's nationalities, their own and in fact (re)invent their working notion of nationality itself. Eventually, this rationale gives rise to Esperantos internationality, which is constructed from elements of several nationalities. An 'invented' internationality for an 'invented' language: ironically enough, it sounds appropriate.
As things are translated, resignified and reinvented in Esperanto terms, they become part of the international assemblage that brings the Esperanto community, literature, symbols, anthem and flag, among others, into being. However, this does not apply to everything: there is no traditional Esperanto cuisine (unlike essentialised ideas of traditional Korean or French cuisines, for instance), just as there is no standard etiquette expected from Esperantists at the table or when queueing for a bus. Elements such as these would depend on regular face-to- face coexistence, which is not the case for this community's ephemeral materialisations.
Yet the most striking mechanism that transforms Esperantujo into an imagined community that lasts beyond its pop-up enactments is based on how the political and philosophical programme behind Esperanto deals with nationality.
4.3 Communicating Differences and Resemblances
The political and philosophical programme behind Esperanto encom- passes sets of cosmopolitan principles. In line with practices of diplo- macy, these principles aim to create smooth, non-confrontational communication settings to enable the management of friendly relation- ships between Esperantists from different national backgrounds. Such Esperantists consist of the alilandanoj or eksterlandanoj, the national Others, with whom one may not have much in common—apart from speaking Esperanto. In these relations, what is at stake is ways of dealing with differences and similarities expressed in national form. The Universal Congress provides a setting for Esperantists to express empathy and respect for their national Others, as well as curiosity to learn more about their experiences and background. This approach to national diversity, referred to by Esperantists as malfermeco (openness), is in line with anthropological scholarship on cosmopolitanism.
The cosmopolitan principles that set out the openness of Esperantists delineate an us/them binarism with which anthropologists are acutely familiar. Whereas the emic perception of 'us' refers to fellow Esperantists in general, regardless of nationalities, the 'them' refers to Esperan- tists from nationalities different from ego's: the national Others. This binarism establishes the prevalent framework characterising Universal Congresses, as Esperantists from different nationalities communicate their differences through cosmopolitan sociabilities.
Addressing a particular instance of cosmopolitanism, Schiller, Darieva and Gruner-Domic define cosmopolitan sociability as:
[...] forms of competence and communication skills that are based on the human capacity to create social relations of inclusiveness and openness to the world. As such cosmopolitan sociability is an ability to find aspects of the shared human experience including aspirations for a better world within or despite what would seem to be divides of culture and belief. (2011: 402-403)