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What Is the Middle Ground, Anyway?
Philip J. Deloria
| IN 1992 I took almost a full week—and I mean several hours each day—to read Richard White's The Middle Ground. I remember being awed by the depth of the book's historical research, thrilled by its conceptual power, pulled in by its writing. And since I was at that very moment on something like draft ten of the first chapter of my dissertation, I also remember being very, very depressed. There was no way I could ever come close to matching up with this kind of work. How was I to achieve such richness, nuance, and subtlety, such a level of detail and mastery? I took solace only in the fact that some of my friends let it slip that the book had left them in similar despair. |
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But an odd thing happened over the next few years. Though I was not really aware of it, I started to lose track of the subtleties and specificities of the argument and began to wield "middle ground" as a kind of all-purpose tool for thinking about white-Indian interactions on the terrain of culture. Nor was I alone in this unconscious simplification. The shift was crystallized for me in a conversation with a mutual friend, during which The Middle Ground came up. "Richard seems a little down," she said. "People are starting to take the middle ground as a general metaphor, a kind of watered down idea about the mechanisms of compromise in all kinds of social and political situations. Everything is starting to turn into a middle ground." |
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"Uh, oh," I thought. "I'll bet that I've been guilty of that myself." I returned to The Middle Ground then, and I would like to think that I have been more attentive to its issues of power, perception, and cultural production ever since. But I might, in some subsequent instances, have been crude and unsubtle in my use of the middle ground, despite my best intentions. I suspect that in this failure, too, I am not alone. And I would like to use this problematic—that is, the possibility of misreadings by the well intentioned—as a way of reflecting back on the book. |
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First, it is worth noting that White anticipated this problem and tried repeatedly to bind up this thing called the middle ground. It is not acculturation, he insisted. It is not compromise. On the middle ground, as he argued in the introduction, "diverse peoples adjust their differences through what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient, misunderstandings. People try to persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and the practices of those others. They often misinterpret and distort both the values and practices of those they deal with, but from these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them new practices."1 This definition remains, to my mind, one of the best articulations of the practice of new cultural production in cross-social and cross-political contexts. It highlights, above all, the adaptation and creation of culture. Persuasion, perception, misperception, misinterpretation: these are actions that live primarily in the cultural realm of meaning-making, performance, and communicative practice. In this sense the middle ground looks like a particularly dialogic process of cultural production. |
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