Identity and the Other – Synopsis

Here the (current) Synopsis for my next film Identity and the Other:

 

How Swiss are Muslims living in Switzerland, how Swiss do they want to be and who decides if they are Swiss enough?

 

Identity and the Other explores the lives of several 2^nd generation, millennial, Muslim immigrants, which represent a section of a culturally, religiously and ethnically diverse Switzerland many Swiss feel uneasy about.

Megatrends

I came across megatrends repeatedly doing research for my next documentary Identity and the Other and decided to do a bit of further digging. I found different definitions for different countries and cultures, no surprise there. The following seemed the most comprehensive. 

 

Megatrends are defined as forces (i.e. trends) affecting all aspects of our lives over a long period of time. Factors are:

Happy Birthday America

This is my first Independence Day as an American citizen. I have lived half my life in Switzerland and the other half in the US, or more precisely in New York, which by all accounts is not like the rest of the country. At my swearing-in ceremony a few months back quite a few people asked me how I felt as an American: I feel like a New Yorker and always have. Being an American is something I have to get used to.

New York was love at first sight. As any true love we’ve had quarrels, made up and deepened our relationship. 9/11 wounded New York deeply but also sealed my commitment to this city as a place to thrive, live, learn and love. I love New York for its energy, its grit, its people. New York passes no judgment. All nations, colors, levels of madness, cultures, religions, fads and neuroses live here in an unbelievable hodge-podge. Everybody is ‘other’. Every ‘other’ is the ‘normal’. What is there not to love?

Now that I’ve officially upgraded from New Yorker to American I can vote, I moved from “you” to “we”. I’m not an outsider looking in, commenting, I’m now on the inside and I can say “we” when I have an opinion. I can also apply for grants I previously did not qualify for… Most likely I will be called for jury duty the moment I register to vote.

Happy Birthday, America. My wish for you is to leave your teenage years behind and grow up to be a fiscally and politically responsible country, one that values educating future generations and goes out into the world to be a nurturer and not an oppressor. I’ll be watching closely and participating in my civic duties.

Culture Identity

As a transplant from Switzerland to the US I have spent half of my life on each continent. When I moved to the US in 1989, I would never have considered myself European: I was Swiss. I had not learned to grow my identity beyond my horizons, which were squarely in Switzerland. When the first person in New York asked me if I was European I actually said ‘no’ as a first impulse. I had to learn to see myself as European… and as white, and so on. It was a transforming and liberating experience.

Not only does learning a new culture give you insight into more ‘truths’ you also learn so much about yourself. About how you see yourself and how the outside world sees you. Most importantly I think you learn to not take yourself for granted – or: you learn not to take yourself too seriously. It’s a great exercise in humility.

Learning a Culture

‘Culture Learning’ is a topic that will hold my interest endlessly; not only because linguistics and how we communicate fascinate me, but also because I am a cultural transplant myself. When I talk about culture I mean language, conventions, traditions and rituals, as well as the sub textual behaviors of a civilization: communication in its broadest sense.

The popular philosopher and critical theorist Slavoy Zizek talks about how we are embedded in ideology and defines identity as follows: “Identity lives in the space between invention and reality.” (Slavoy Zizek, “How are we Embedded in Ideology”, Prague 2007).

What is reality, or said differently, what is truth? Truth is the sum of a society’s conventions. There are rules and meta-rules, which are unknown knowns, call them habits or unspoken conventions that set the parameters for moving flawlessly through a society. It is a social network of implicit rules that tell you how to deal with the explicit rules.

Immigrants come into a new set of rules that are the makeup of their host society. Some rules are obvious, some are not. Assimilation and integration starts with learning of the explicit rules. But the meta-rules or implicit rules we only learn over time by trial and error, by using our intuition and assessing situations and reactions to us.

When too many people do not know the implicit rules of a society, the context for these rules weakens. Once the rules lose their context, they collapse. That is what ‘fear of the Other’ really is – a fear of losing one’s own truth.

Truth - Part 2

“Identity lives in the space between invention and reality.”

What is truth? Truth is the sum of a society’s conventions. There are rules and meta-rules, which are unknown knowns, call them habits or unspoken conventions that set the parameters for moving flawlessly through a society. It is a social network of implicit rules that tell you how to deal with the explicit rules.

Immigrants come into a new set of rules that are the makeup of their host society. Some rules are obvious, some are not. Assimilation and integration starts with learning of the explicit rules. But the meta-rules or implicit rules we only learn over time by trial and error, by using our intuition and assessing situations and reactions to us.

When too many people do not know the implicit rules of a society, the context for these rules weakens. Once the rules lose their context, they collapse. That is what ‘fear of the Other’ really is – a fear of losing one’s own truth.

[Watch 90 absolutely fascinating minutes of Slavoy Zizek’s discourse in Prague (2007) on “How are we Embedded in Ideology”.]

Identity and the Other ll

As I’ve been digging a bit deeper into “Identity and the Other” (ITO) I have come across some interesting, thought provoking and then hair-raising theories.
Eugenics for one – [from Wikipedia: Eugenics is the "applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population," usually referring to human populations.] It seems beyond preposterous and you might have guessed right, after WWll the whole idea of Eugenics much supported by the Nazis found a well-deserved and immediate death knell.
But think about where in your life you have witnessed or been involved with the ‘thought value’ of Eugenics. Has your best friend been in an interracial relationship to the horror of her family? In theory we are all very open minded and very generous with whom we befriend – how open are we when it comes to inviting an “Other” into our families and have them be part of our off-spring? What if your daughter showed up with a young man (or woman for that matter) of a totally different background – culturally, ethnically, socially?