Conclusion

The conclusion explains the challenges and opportunities of developing empathy out of the various ways of counting as the same. It explores the pervasive metaphor of citizenship in today’s world and how this has exacerbated our indifference to those we count as other. It argues that we need to free ourselves from any dogmatic insistence on the singular interpretation of our shared life as memory, mimesis, or metaphor. Rather, we must accept the possibility of constant play and movement among all three grounds of sameness. As social beings, we need to remember that counting as the same always includes the possibility that we can count sameness in a new way.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the problem of how human beings craft enduring social groups and long-lasting relationships. Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, it raises the questions, to be answered in subsequent chapters, of why we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us and how we might live in harmony with groups that may not share that sense of common fate. Answers will point to how memory, mimesis, and metaphor create different forms of sameness (and so also of difference), and how they carry with them different possibilities for empathy, for crossing boundaries, and for negotiating the terms of sameness and difference between communities and individuals.

Framing Gifts

This chapter begins by discussing the long social scientific arguments over the nature of the gift. We proceed to analyze several cases of gift-giving to show how understanding the different ways of counting as the same help clarify both the literature and the social worlds created by giving, receiving, and giving again. We argue that gift-giving is not just crucial to the constitution of society but that the ways this is achieved differ when they are grounded as memory, mimesis, or metaphor. The chapter considers different kinds of gifts, from charity to beggars, to handing down family heirlooms, to a range of Chinese practices from drinking to vote-buying.

Mimesis, or “Society Is Imitation”

The heart of mimesis is a set of shared conventions rather than shared beliefs or shared memory. The repetition of mimesis gives it the character of something eternally present. This gives mimesis a much greater potential for openness than memory does. Unlike the past-continuous of memory, mimesis creates a kind of present-continuous. This chapter focuses on conflict around the reading of mimesis as memory or metaphor in different social contexts. These conflicts occur when frames clash, or when one powerful frame creates a double bind and puts people into an impossible situation. The chapter further explores the “imperialist” tendencies of mimesis to rewrite all other frames of meaning.

How Memory Counts as the Same

Memory is one of the most common ways to count as the same. This sameness works over the historical flux of lived time, allowing us to feel that the present connects directly to the past through the unmediated linkage of memory. On the other hand, this chapter also discusses how real memories also create some instabilities—in time (because the present never really is a continuation of the past) and in social identity (because you do not share my memories). These instabilities create the possibility of new readings as mimesis or metaphor, and ultimately of a play among different ways of counting as the same.

What Counts as the Same?

This chapter begins by exploring the multiple forms and analytic purchases carried by memory, mimesis, and metaphor. It asks what we mean when we say that people share a culture. Rather than beginning with the assumption of the unity of culture or the priority of the individual decision maker, we focus on how people come to perceive things as shared. This is just one facet of our basic underlying question: What counts as the same? What lets two people, or two million people, feel that they have the same culture, or for that matter the same class, gender, race, religion, or any other category? This is not actually a question of how much we actually share but how and when we come to perceive that we share; not what is the same, but what counts as the same.

Memory, Metaphor, and a Double Bind

Chapter 6 analyzes the workings of memory and metaphor as Jewish and Christian civilizational tropes. It focuses on the role of blood in both traditions to explicate the different understandings of past, present, and future within Judaism and Christianity. The analysis ranges from ancient to modern times and from religiously constituted communities to membership in the modern nation-state. The chapter ends with an exploration of the particular “double bind” aspect of Judeo-Christian relations that has plagued both right from their inception. This double bind is just one example of a much broader problem of living with differences that cannot be simply reconciled, but which we can learn to accept by recognizing the relevance of the grounds of memory, mimesis, and metaphor.

Sign, Ground, and Interpretant

This chapter begins by elaborating on the relationships among what Peirce called sign, object, and interpretant. It goes on to explore how memory, mimesis, and metaphor form the ground for these relationships, and in the process transform people’s understandings of themselves in the world, sometimes with enormous consequences. The chapter achieves this by analyzing aspects of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, China’s cataclysmic Taiping Rebellion in the nineteenth century, reworked temples to a goddess in contemporary Taiwan and mainland China, and memorials to the Holocaust in Vienna and Jerusalem.

Metaphor

Metaphor brings two hitherto unconnected entities into one frame of reference. A connection is made and communality posited where one had not been seen to exist before. We do not require a shared past (memory) to bring discrete entities or peoples together, nor do we need to share a present practice (mimesis). Rather any living metaphor brings the shock of the new, which can lead us to dismantle our old categories of sameness and difference and to make connections we never made before. In doing so, at least potentially, the entire world can change. Even when metaphors are successful, however, there is an instability in relationship between its two referents, which creates an impulse toward memory or mimesis.