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Seeing Ukraine Through Others’ Eyes:
Cognitive Approach to National
Identity Studies
Natalia Chaban
The dissolution of the Soviet Union triggered a reshaping of the political space and a reforging of collective identities within the boundaries of the new successor states. In the views of Anthony Smith, this was inevitable: “The rediscovery of the national self is not an academic matter, it is a pressing practical issue, vexed and contentious, which spells life or death for the nationalist project of creating a nation” (Smith 1986, 148). Consequently, identity, embracing the notion of the nation’s origin, nature and destiny, has become the subject for intense debates in a modern Ukrainian society. There are various traditions of theorizing where subjecthood and selfhood come from. The construction of national identity supposedly functions on several levels — in opinion of Kataryna Wolzuk (Wolczuk, 2000, 676-677), the narrative of identity, which is being constructed in present day Ukraine, articulates the following questions: Who are “we,” the people? What binds us together into a “nation?” How and why did the polity come into existence? In what ways is the new state different from its neighbors, and most importantly, the old state from which the new state broke away? However, the wider international context of national identification is still ignored (UCEPS Analytical Report 2000). And yet, this dimension cannot be left out of the analysis. The changing profile of Ukrainian society, the presumed weakening of traditional ties to Russia, as well as Ukraine’s discussion of its European identity and of its aspired integration into the community of Western nations, all serve to underline the necessity of empirical analysis of contemporary perceptions of Ukraine by significant Others. Since identities are not just perceptions which the Self possess, but also the representations imposed on the Self by the Others, the narrative of identity supposedly includes the questions: Who are the Others against whom we define the Self? and How are we viewed by those significant Others? Subsequently, this paper will seek to find out some powerful external representations of Ukraine that shape the image of the country on the international arena, as well as influence the formation of national identity from within. The image of Ukraine has been traced through 2,612 news items located in the New York Times (NYT) from 1992 to 2002. All texts reference Ukraine. The Other in national identification auto- and heteroimages in national identity construction According to much of the relevant research, the Self is conscious of itself for Others, with Others and because of Others. In the opinion of Mark Turner (1994), the mental binary opposition ‘I vs. the Other’ derives from “distinguishing between the interior and the exterior of one’s body, with the skin as boundary one of human system.” According to Claude Lévi- Strauss (1962), the opposition ‘I vs. the Other’ have been observed in the archaic picture of the world of our ancestors together with other oppositions, such as ‘far and close’, ‘up and down,’ ‘objects and actions,’ etc. This system served human beings to survive and to attribute meaning directly susceptible to pressures of fitness (Turner 1994). Later, those basic oppositions were projected onto the abstract invisible worlds, identifying their categorization (Zilbert 1986; Megentesov 1993), identity, political and media discourses being among those worlds. The Self inevitably faces the necessity to present itself to the Other credibly. Reflective compositioning of self, also referred as “double consciousness,” “ideologies of otherness,” “talk to ourselves in the mirror,” is reported to be an important part of co-constructing the identity (see Carbaugh 1996; Kaplan-Weigner 2001; Turner and Fauconnier 2002). According to B. West (2000, 50), the members of any given nation see themselves as somehow similar to each other and different from everyone else in the world; without this conception nations would not exist. Intuitively, a nation identifies a complex nature of its identity – how a nation sees itself, how other nations see it, and how it sees itself being seen by other nations. These different angles of perception could be labeled as ‘auto-’ and ‘hetero-images:’ the former considering the attitudes one has towards its own cultural values, and the latter considering the attitudes towards the other (Leerssen 1998). We theorize that these foci can be analyzed in terms of the “semiotic square” model (Greimas & Courtes 1986; Gandelman 1988): the meanings ‘We about Ourselves,’ ‘They about Themselves in regard to Us,’ ‘We about Them,’ and ‘They about Us’ constitutes the apexes of the semiotic model pertinent to our study (Picture 1). Picture 1.
Picture 1. It seems appropriate to ascertain that this model provides a frame of thinking about identity construction — we postulate that in order to approach the full understanding of identity representation, all the perspectives should be investigated in depth (Sachno 1991; Chaban 1997 (1), 1997(3)). An auto-image perspective, or ‘We about Ourselves’ focus, is a popular topic for research in national image studies within Ukraine. For example, Ukraine’s self-image, as reflected in Ukrainian media debate in 1997, invokes the notions of beauty, space, freedom, patience, generosity, and femininity. It is also strongly connected to the image of village (Chaban 1997(2)). In contrast, the auto-image2 perspective ‘They about Themselves in regard to Us’ and hetero-image foci ‘They about Us’ and ‘Us about Them,’ are still not well researched (UCEPS analytical report 2000). The analysis points out that only some Others are useful when it comes to imagining the national self, either in opposition or in alliance (West 2000, 52). Since countries’ identities are “affirmed, contested and intersected by local, national, and transnational contexts and affiliations” (Boer 2000), at this particular historical moment, Ukraine chooses only several significant Others against whom it is trying to define the Self. The Ukrainian set of Others supposedly includes Russia, ex-Soviet Union, other ex-Soviet countries, Eastern and Central European neighbours, the Balkans, the EU, and the USA. We may imply that there is a degree of Otherness (the sense of the Other which generally intensifies as linguistic, cultural and racial differences increase (Prizel 1998, 8)), and it would be worth an effort to model the hierarchy of Others for Ukraine in the further research. The modern political reality is that the USA, the only world’s ‘superpower,’ is a significant Other for many nations in the world. It is, therefore, no surprise that Ukrainian decision-makers have to consider the US opinions while implementing domestic and international policies. Given the complexity and controversy of the US - Ukraine interactions, this particular investigation purports to research the American attitudes and perceptions towards Ukraine. The role of media in national identity representation The analysis of the theoretical aspects of identity formation also embraces the study of representational processes and their role in the construction of identities. Identities can be seen as functioning in interaction with the representations of identity. Surrounded by and immersed in a thoroughly textualized and visually oriented society, identities are produced and reproduced in variously mediated forms (Boer 2000). According to Rosemary Righter (USIA Publication), very often the identities of diasporic communities are based on information and representations given about these communities by the international media. When developing countries seek to establish their national identity, they are increasingly focusing on the role of international media while they base their claims to international respect. Consequently, several respected international media sources have been considered for the analysis of Ukraine’s external image. The choice of the NYT for this particular investigation was conditioned by several factors. First, the NYT boasts the reputation of one the most popular and very important for the whole nation daily newspaper. It claims a growing circulation, publishes several editions and zone-targeted inserts, and exists in printed and online versions (Cohen 1983; CMRI Highlight Article 2001). In addition, the NYT is also seen is a “prestigious” newspaper that wants to be a player in national policy debate (Bennet 1990). It voices the nation’s elite’s point of view — a semi-official perspective which approximates the government’s position on different questions. “Prestigious” paper is read by public leaders, policy-makers, and opinionformers who take into account the newspaper’s views while realizing and presenting the political activity in the country (de Sola Pool 1952). Finally, the NYT is a unanimously recognized authority in the coverage of international affairs. It is one of the main sources of foreign news for the American audience, as well as for other domestic and international media outlets. Identity Representations as Social-and Individual-Level Categorizations Identity representations (external and internal) could be recapped from social and individual levels of categorization. Social representations, or “aggregate” (Babrow 1993, 113), or the “macro-level phenomena” (Lau, Chiu, and Lee 2001, 352), are produced and distributed through mass media. Individual representations, or “micro-level” of shared knowledge (Ibid.), occur when individuals represent their personal evaluative beliefs, e.g. about specific events, in their models while building the shared reality between themselves. In the next two sections of this paper we will seek to explicate by what means particular macro- and micro-level categorizations of Ukraine took place in the US print media discourse. Macro-level representations From the onset of this study we posit that the image of independent Ukraine is a new political concept which is being introduced by the US media, and, supposedly, recognized and distinguished by the general audience. Sofia Brostrom in her work The Role of Metaphor in Cognitive Semantics (1994) mentions that categorization of any concept, expressed via cognitive processes of recognition and distinguishing, is unavoidable. Categorization provides a handy means of structuring information, of achieving precision, and of directing our own or other people’s thoughts in ways useful for different purposes (ideology, propaganda, and public opinion formation among others — ours). It also provides a means of discovering, investigating, and re-categorizing properties of the categorand – in our case, the image of Ukraine. National images, both auto and hetero ones, being a special form of mental representations, are a presumably accessible shared knowledge. Their acquisition, usages and functions are social, and their expression often discursive. Their knowledge needs to be used by group members in different situations. They are, for instance, about what ‘We’ think about ‘Them,’ or ‘They’ about ‘Us’ in general, and not what ‘You’ and ‘I’ now think about some specific person (van Dijk 1996, 2001). Accordingly, we assume that the image of Ukraine is collectively maintained by the US media audience due its recurrent reproduction in the news media. Moreover, supposedly, there are certain cognitive mechanisms that help to increase the ease with which those shared representations can be accessed. The working assumption of this paper is that macrolevel categorization of national images endorsed through mass media accounts for several specific features, i.e., complexity, rigidity to change, speedy and powerful introduction, and heavy reliance on the metaphoric representations. 1. Cognitive complexity of the national images The concept of national identity is not exactly precise, although it does exist in the human mind. Its imprecision seems to result from its complexity: the concept somehow integrates national history, material, social and cultural factors, as well as the subconscious national “mythology.” These factors surface in respective discourses and thus, hopefully, can be exposed. Being extremely rich and cohesive units of information, which convey all their information at once and which are not easily taken apart, images related to national identity, both auto and hetero ones, are complex memory structures (see Brostrom, 1994, 38; Teresa Garcia-Marques, 2001, 10). They include implicit use of stereotypes, schemas, and established attitudes, which are reflected in judgments heteroimages related to national identification is reinforced (in case of the US news consumers) by the fact that American cultural community on the average has a very vague idea of what is going on in international arena (Popkin and Dimmock, 1997). There is an opinion (Brostrom, 1994, 37) that vague complex concepts trigger the greater effect of initial categorization – the vaguer the initial understanding of a situation, the greater the effect of whatever categorization has been endorsed firstly, and the more difficult it is to reject. For example, the initial categorizations about the USSR (Russia) (‘Russia’ was frequently interchangeable with ‘the USSR’ in the US political and media discourse on the former Soviet Union) contributed certain content and predominantly negative evaluations to the American public discourse. Moreover, those categorizations were supported by US opinion-formers and decision-makers for a long term. To exacerbate, there often seemed to be little freedom to step away from those predominantly negative and well-established categorizations. Inevitably, properties that were central to the USSR (Russia) image (e.g., the embodiment of ‘Cold War’ and/or ‘Evil Empire’) were profiled in American individuals’ representations of the constituent parts of the empire (e.g., Ukraine) – a pivotal feature of the categorization of complex concepts. 2. Re-categorization encounters resistance With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, important new information and facts about Ukraine have surfaced subjecting initial stereotypical categorizations to the process of re-categorization. We theorize that this process is slow due to the reported by many cognitive researchers individuals’ limited capacity to processes a sufficient amount of new complex information (Miller 1956, Hirst & Kalmar 1987, Zhu 1992; Shaw & Martin 1992, Brosius and Kepplinger 1992, Geiger 1993). According to Sofia Broström (1994, 19), the incorporation of new information triggers an additional set of mental operations when the new and pre-existing information has to be resorted into new frames bringing forward, or profiling, new representations of the concept which are becoming central to the category, whereas other parts (both new and pre-existing) will have to become peripheral. If the category includes new knowledge that is compatible with the categorand, but which is not, as yet, a part of its representation, this knowledge will be incorporated into the inner representation of the categorand, but a new content will stay on the periphery of the category for a while. Consequently, the more specific categorization of a re-categorized concept will be severely limited for a substantial period of time. There is an evidence (Ibid.) that categories may be modified by the discovery of similar new concepts (consider the introduction of information in the US media on other post-Soviet, or Central and Eastern European countries going through similar to Ukraine political and economic evolutions), as well as by the discovery of new properties of ‘old’ concepts (consider a present day non-hostile, non-nuclear, non-militant Ukraine performing democratic reforms and striving to join the EU vs. militant aggressive separatist image of USSR/Russia in the past). Evidently, a new content, different and often contradictory to the old one, very slowly influences the categorization. Eventually, this knowledge will be incorporated into the inner representation of the concept together with the change in the category, on the premises that the media audience will be extensively and regularly exposed to the information that enhances new categorizations. 3. Categorization introduced through the mass media means is fast and powerful Today’s media has an ultimate power of reaching millions of recipients in a short time. Many media studies address media major influences on social representations and key agenda issues for public debate. According to Weaver, Zhu and Willnat (1992, 861), research examining the agenda setting function of the mass media has consistently found that differing amount of emphasis and coverage of issues by the mass media lead over time to the public regarding these issues to be of differing levels of importance (see also McCombs and Shaw 1972, McLeod, Becker and Byrnes 1974, Shaw and McCombs 1977, Weaver, Graber and Eyel 1981, Weaver 1984, Rogers and Dearing 1988, Brosius and Kepplinger 1990). 4. Metaphorical categorization as a leading one in national images representations By George Lakoff’s observation in his Internet publication Metaphor in Politics (1991), metaphorical thought is most commonly used by the general public in comprehending international politics. Metaphors’ ability is particular compelling in cases where recipients of information do not have strong opinions beforehand (Broström, 1994, 38). No doubt that mass media uses different types of categorizations, but categorization by means of metaphor seems to be the most powerful one. Sofia Broström (Ibid. 32) asserts that categorization is always a structuring device, highlighting some things while excluding others. Metaphorical categorization let us focus on some properties of categorand to the exclusion of others by using a category which brings precisely those properties together, in compact cognitive form, in other words, this particular categorizations highlight some properties, downplay some and hide yet others. This seems to be a perfect support for stereotypes and conventional beliefs. Micro-level representations In the above section, we discussed specific features of the social-level of representations of the national identity images. In the coming section, we will probe to investigate “micro-level” of shared knowledge — the models that are routinely constructed by individuals to understand events in Ukraine, or political discourses about these events. Those models supposedly have a “strategically applicable schematic form” (van Dijk, 1996). However, the construction of those representations, being a routine mental process, is not reserved for special purposes, and it escapes controlled and deliberate analysis by an average news consumer. Prototype Effect Based on the propositions found out in 2,612 of the NYT publications, our past research has revealed that the image of sovereign Ukraine could be regarded as a political concept based on the knowledge representation structure. It was established that political discourse stereotypes result from processing the information of two kinds, the first one being related to ontological facts (the real life situations relevant for political discourse), and the second one being related to axiology (the assessment of facts that conditions the political discourse illocution). The net models proposed to structure the ontological information within the four conceptual fields: Politics, Economics, Culture, and People of Ukraine. The axiological (pragmatic) facets of the fields considered have been determined by evaluation attached to the metaphorical categorization specific for every conceptual field. The ultimate model that includes both the arrangement of facts and their assessment was regarded as an ideological script, which prescribes the perception of sovereign Ukraine image to the American reader (Chaban 1997 (1)). Given that a high frequency ontological information accounts for the “prototype effect” of any concept (Gardenfors, 1998, 25), the prototype zones for the Ukraine’s image representation have been established. The previous studies indicated that the majority of the NYT publications about Ukraine present it through the information input Ukraine in Politics (57% of all propositions found). In those publications Ukraine’s identity is often indexed through Ukraine’s relations with Russia (20% of all propositions found in the conceptual field Ukraine in Politics) (Chaban 1997 (1)). The axiological plane of these prototypical representations of Ukraine is established mainly through the metaphorical categorizations (Chaban 1995, 1999). The analysis of the news texts explicated some of the rich examples of a definitely prevailing conceptual metaphor – ‘partners in marriage.’ This particular example of metaphorical categorization will be investigated in a detail in this paper. ‘Partners in Marriage’ One of the most traditional for Western thought is the conceptual metaphor ‘state is a person’. According to Raymond Gozzi (1999) and George Lakoff (1991), states are seen as having inherent dispositions and this leads to the description of states as friendly, hostile, healthy, generous, heroic, peaceful, aggressive, responsible, irresponsible, industrious or lazy, and so on. Consequently, a state conceptualized as a person is engaged in social relations within a world community –- it lives in a neighborhood, and has neighbors, friends and enemies, etc. Marital relation metaphors in regard to Ukraine’s representation is something which is continuous, permanent, coherent, typical, and distinguishly different from the metaphors used to characterized Russia’s relationships with other post-Soviet countries in the NYT publications For example, news texts on Russia - Georgia, or Russia - the Baltic states relations did not reveal the same prevailing metaphor (the choice of those newly independent countries for a comparative analysis was conditioned by their reported high level of national self-consciousness similar to Ukraine’s one). This metaphor also doesn’t seem to be too productive for representation of other international disputes; however, this study could not possibly trace the metaphor usage in all the NYT news texts covering foreign affairs. We are presenting the readers with a selection of findings from the news texts that referenced Ukraine: Russia and Ukraine, once together, ‘broke their union’ in 1991:
(5/3/92). ‘Divorce’ was nerve taking, loud and scandalous, especially when it came to the division of the once ‘common possessions’:(5/3/92).
Ukraine starts a ‘new relationship:’
But it is difficult for Russia to loose its ‘partner’ and, moreover, to observe the former ‘spouse’ flirting with the third party:
Ukraine and Russia are warming their ‘relationship’ again, now with the US ‘blessing:’
Blending A study of the data suggests that metaphorical categorization ‘partners in marriage’ perpetuates stereotypical image of Ukraine as a dependent partner. We also theorize that although the images and stereotypes are unique, the principles of their construing seem to be limited and linked to the cognitive (“back stage cognition”) operations. To trace this stereotype formation as a part of national image representation, the theoretical framework of blending proposed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier was used (Turner 1996(1), 1996(2), 1998; Turner and Fauconnier 1995, 1997, 1998, 2002). As Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier put on the web site on conceptual integration networks (www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html) “conceptual blends arise from conceptual integration. Conceptual integration is an indispensable general cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing. It serves a variety of cognitive purposes. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and grammar. It often performs new work on its previously entrenched products. For the most part, conceptual integration is a routine, workaday process that escapes detection except on technical analysis. It is not reserved for special purposes, and is not costly. Blending occurs during on-line dynamic construction of full meaning. Blends recruit from entrenched structures and local context. In blending, structure from input mental spaces is projected to a separate, “blended” mental space. The central inference is constructed in the blend. The projection is selective. Through completion and elaboration, the blend develops structure not provided by the inputs. Inferences, arguments, and ideas developed in the blend can have effect in cognition, leading us to modify the initial inputs and to change our view of the corresponding situations. Blending operates according to a set of uniform structural and dynamic principles. It additionally takes place under competing optimality constraints. There is a model of conceptual integration and a taxonomy of conceptual integration networks” (Graph 1).
Our analysis echoes Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier’s theory. We posit that metaphorical categorization is mostly a blended construal, and also suggest that the construal of ‘states as partners in marriage’ metaphor results from the compression of the vital relations of identity, change and uniqueness (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). With these relations being further compressed and decompressed, the integration single-scope network (one of four in the taxonomy of conceptual integration networks) is produced. We theorize that the single-scope network is common to the political and media discourse. It has two input spaces with different organizing frames, one of which is projected to organize the blend. Its defining property is that the organizing frame of the blend is an extension of the organizing frame of one of the inputs but not the other – the projection is highly asymmetrical one. These single-scope networks are the prototype of highly conventional source-target metaphors. The input that provides the organizing frame to the blend, the framing input, is what has been called the ‘source.’ The input that is the focus of understanding, the focus input, is what has been called the ‘target’ (Ibid.). Fauconnier and Turner (Ibid.) assert that the compression in single-scope network is the use of pre-existing compressions from the framing input. A principal job of the network is to project structure of the focus input into the compressions that have been projected to the blend from the framing input. The plethora of ‘partners in marriage’ metaphors that index Russia-Ukraine relations shows a distinguished media trend. An analysis of one typical example in a much closer detail might help us to reveal the underlying implications of this particular metaphoric pattern (Graph 2). Despite its flirtation with Washington, Ukraine, which proclaimed its independence in 1991, remains very much married to Russia in everything but name (11/5/95).
Despite the manifested clashes between the framing input and focus input (diffuse vs. tight compression), and the fact that the full frames do not match, they still contain topologies that can be partially matched without clash. The topologies of two spaces are preserved in cross-space mapping: cause–effect relations, agent-action relations, temporal ordering, change, and so on, are aligned in the two spaces as far as the cross-space mapping goes. The integrity in the framing input is projected to the blend so that this array of events in the focus input acquires, in the blend, a conceptual integration of its events into a unit (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002). Consequently, the structure of the framing input ‘Marital Relations’ with tight pre-existing compressions is projected on the focus input ‘Countries/ States’ and also is projected to the blend. We suggest that the generic space that connects two inputs is ‘Relations between Organisms’ (consider another typical for Western thought basic notion of the society, nation or state existing and acting like an organic whole that integrates and transcends its parts). It important to remember that generic space is not an organizing frame. We suggest that there are two possible versions of a resulting blend:
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