Hybridity

Hybridity is a hybrid of two previously separate systems. The term originally comes from agriculture, but developed into an academic in different disciplines, especially in sociolinguistics and in the context of post-colonialism, used technical term.

Sociolinguistics

Languages ​​develop a hybrid form of two or more different origin languages, such as Creoles and pidgin.

In the area of individual multilingualism hybrid forms of language can arise when some speakers to use with a migration background elements of both the original language and the language of the host society in a mixed language code. The way the language mixing can take many different forms, such as can be " built into" the other or sets the language to be changed only individual word parts ( suffixes ), or single words from one language. Comments can be used from another language or are generally " mixed " spoken, eg in the form of " Denglish ", a mixture of German and English.

Even in the social sciences, the term is increasingly used.

The phenomenon of hybrid identity in people with a Muslim immigrant background is studied at Humboldt University in Berlin under the project name HEYMAT. Also in the science of history, the concept attracted increasing attention and there describes the phenomenon of cultural dynamics through culture contact. At the Humboldt University in Berlin and at the Ruprecht -Karls- University of Heidelberg, a DFG research program is currently located, are explored in the cultural hybridizations in Medieval Europe.

The concept of hybridity is in the tradition of political theory a very new concept ( used since the 1990s ), but has nevertheless the potential to make it appear theory historical connection lines of the political (see Political Philosophy ) in a new light.

One of the first who used this concept, is the literary theorist Homi K. Bhabha. In his book The Location of Culture, he refers to the post-colonial discourse on the (mostly Anglo-American ) tradition of the political and develops the figure of thought of the third space, whose focal point is the notion of hybridity. Hybridity means the rejection of a nomothetic or essentialist discourse of politics for Bhabha. Bhabha shows that the rational management of the Indian Subkontinentents that of John Stuart Mill as the first administration with a "complete recording system " ( Bhabha 2000:138 ) was praised, should be interpreted differently in postcolonial reading. Due to the spatial and cultural separation of power control ( in the UK) and the exercise of power ( in India), it will come to a " shift " to an unreflective difference with negative effects on both political spaces:

"The political moment of cultural difference comes within the problematic of colonial government conception ( governmentality ) to light and overshadowed the transparency between readability and legitimate government. "

This semantics of a third space as an intermediate space is indicative of a tradition of politics that does not want the political determine the nature of a thing, but by an adverbial placement. Many examples here offer themselves: the difference between a ( transcendental ) idea and practice, which can be only akzidentiell relate to this idea ( as in Plato, but also in Kant or Hegel), the difference between the divine ( absolute ) law and the right of the people or for the German doctrine of constitutional law, the difference between the legality and legitimacy of the state, as discussed by Carl Schmitt.

The third area of constitutional law would be ( in this tradition ) the general human rights, which are dependent on the one hand on the state as the ( police ) guarantors of human rights and on the other hand to the people who need to make and enforce their rights. If people do not exercise their rights, these human rights are only a general form, a proclamation with no real content, as was the case in many countries around the globe and is. On the other hand, human rights can not go out alone on a cooperation of people to enforce their rights, it at least requires a general idea ( with Jean -Jacques Rousseau: volonté generale ), in the tradition of the theory of the state as those that the state (if necessary) the rights of minorities against the majority interspersed. The hybrid or the hybridity of this political discourse is that two semantics ( the semantics of the state and human rights ) are indeed related to one another conceptually, but without these semantics merge into a new entity, a new uniform discourse.