Arabs, Chinese & Frame Semantics

There is nothing new about it; man is the predator of his kind, even if predators do not predate each other. Plot’s theory has been validated; a long time ago unfortunately. However, national and international laws tried to fix the human instinct to destroy the others and slavery was abolished in 1848, colonization was condemned following the Geneve convention of 1949. Finally, the world had to wait until 1956 to see racial discrimination in the US being declared as anti-constitutional; and 1992 to see Apartheid disappearing in South Africa.

There is no reason to be filled with angelism; in one hand, victims were never given these humanitarian improvements by the legislature’s good will but had they to go through fierce resistance. In the other hand, Absolute justice still seems to be an unrealizable dream, today; dictatures, terrorist threats, and police’s overused power are source of pessimism.

The scapegoat obsession

As Rene Girard has explained for long; man’s need to find simple solutions for his pain had led him to keep inventing guilty people whose destruction would be enough to solve the problem. The attitude of some politicians toward Muslims illustrates very well Rene Girard’s view. However, discriminated people are not prevented from discriminating other communities, folks or cultures. There are for instance some LGBT feminists criticizing violently Muslims the same way they are criticized.

Another eloquent example is about the tensions between Arabs and Chinese in France. The first community tend to blame the Chinese one for the case of Uighurs in China. Furthermore, Chinese are likely associated to the raise of the liberticide Communist government and the Covid 19 pandemic. As a matter of fact, Chinese are rather robbed or aggressed usually by some young thugs from suburbs, who define them as being rich.     

Finally, the word “Arab” recalls irremediably the Chinese the violent, and anti-Chinese racist images; while the word “Chinese” recall Arabs Uighurs, communism and of a really powerful community.    

This issue of semantic amalgams is well-describes by Charles Fillmore (1) who developed what’s known as Frame Semantics.

Fillmore’s Frame Semantics

Frame semantics is a concept in which one element of a frame of understanding (or idea) is related to the other in a way that one cannot understand one element without understanding the other. For instance, the word “teacher” implies the understanding of the word “pupil”, “class” etc. Thus, all these elements are part of the same frame. Frame elements are created through people’s personal experience. If someone asks you to imagine a father, you would have these elements in mind: male, adult, in possession of car etc. because this is the image your memory has associated with the word father; thus, we would call this frame “fatherhood” for instance. However, your vision will change in case you encounter a different father.

 Fillmore’s theory is a central theory in Cognitive linguistics. It seeks to give a word an encyclopedic definition rather than a fixed one. From a political point of view, Fillmore’s theory explains some difficulties to appreciate others. Indeed, it happens to the human memory to build one meaning with the wrong elements, which results in the wrong perceptions of things. For example, if someone is supposedly asked to imagine a suburban guy. They will think then of a young smoker who wears a sweat suit, a cap and a woody, why? Because this the exact image they have about suburban guys from their experience and also from the media; even if not all suburban people look like that. Moreover, everyone remembers the beginning of the Covid 19 crisis when some people were wrongly boycotting Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants confusing them with Chinese one. This confusion comes from the fact that all these restaurants come from the same continent, have nearly the same scenery and writing style… without passing by the slanting eyes of the workers.

To conclude, the human memory builds frames of understanding thanks to elements gathered from human’s experience; that is why one experience with somebody or with a community is never enough to depict them as they are truly.

The Psychosis’ Frame

Covid-19 has given a negative image about the Chinese because the word Covid-19 has entered the frame of the word “Chinese”. The importance of the Chinese population is gushing the idea of a possible Chinese invasion of Europe, because “invasion” belongs to the frame of the word “numerous”. The recent issue about “the Chinese seeds”: a strange seed sent from China to Amazon’s customers in the US, Canada, and Europe and which are causing worries to the authorities who recommended to destroy the seed immediately. The seeds are seen as an attempt to spread some pandemic, or even to start an ecological war.

If the word “numerous” had not been a part of “Chinese’s” frame of understanding, nobody would have fallen in this psychotic trap and would have rather understood that it was actually a mere scam commonly known as Brushing which sellers use to heighten artificially their evaluation. (See the press article of Le Monde newspaper)

Similarly, some politicians, journalists and supporters of the French far right movement have included the word “terrorism” into “Muslim’s” or “Arab’s” frame of understanding.

Do you know that Chinese look like Arabs?

This mixture of frame elements explains widely the confrontations between communities; Chinese and Muslims’ ones for instance.

However, if we put away stereotypic images of both communities, we’ll notice tiny differences and huge resemblance between the two.

First of all, Arabs and Chinese are among the numerous communities in France after the Catholics, but the least represented in the sphere of media and politics.

Then, the two communities are similarly suffering from amalgams: Virus, invading number, weird food, and submitted women for the Chinese; Terrorism, clothing, special food, and submitted women for the Arabs.

Beside, the mediatic pamphlet whose Arabic origins are never likely to quiet down the ardent islamophobics, described recently Muslim women as wrongly raised women who wear a mop and the Chinese women as a cat eater.

“We must fight against this current issue” (Ed- The amalgam related to Muslims)- said Jack Lang is his last work: “Arabic, treasure of France” but How?

By exchanges and the fruitful reconciliation between cultures.

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1- Charles J. Fillmore (to not be confused with the American Evangelist mystic Charles Fillmore), was born in August 9th ,1929 and died in February 13th 2014, is an American linguist, great professor of linguistics at Barkley University, California. He has a big influence in the domains of syntax and lexical semantics; was one of the founders of Cognitive Linguistics. He developed the theories of case Grammar in 1968, and Frame semantics in 1976.

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