The image one inadvertently has of a ‘stereotype’ is
definitely not positive. If stereotype is understood as a clichéd view of something,
or simply as a fixed simplified notion, then stereotypes are something that one
would want to avoid in our thinking about anything, be it – a person, vocation, culture
or even about abstract concepts. At first glance, yes, we must fight
stereotypes! But let’s pause and ask why? What advantage is there in fighting
stereotypes? We want to get at the truth, we claim – we want to know what is
behind the stereotype, to know what it is, we reply. But then what guarantee is
there that what one gets behind today’s stereotypes, that ‘true’ view which our
struggles ultimately succeed in getting will not succumb to the same process of
stereotyping in time and produce a stereotype soon after? In other words, can
we escape stereotyping at all? On one hand, stereotypes are the dominant views
that have survived time even if as a parody or a bad representation. They have
survived and thus are given to us – similar to the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’
in terms of ideas. On the other hand, our daily living and experience
challenges these ‘fittest’ stereotypes at every point and every moment,
challenging precisely their claim to be the fittest representations of what
they seek to represent. In turn we produce new views, new ‘truth’, often
unaware that these too have the full potential of becoming stereotypes given
time, when something ‘more truer’ will replace them. Is this not the history of
knowledge? If there is anything that the philosophy of science has taught us,
it is precisely this – the changing paradigms of knowledge. If all the three
ingredients that constitute a stereotype – language, the subject who
stereotypes, the object being stereotyped – are constantly undergoing change
then although we inherit stereotypes from a past time, they will necessarily be
altered in time to produce new stereotypes that too will be altered in time, and this process goes on ad infinitum. Thus it appears that it is
the stereotyped notion of a stereotype, that stereotypes are 'fixed notions' that needs to be challenged. We will just
have to live by negotiating the stereotypes our age has bequeathed upon us even
as we create our own stereotypes for posterity, although, we would never, even
in our humblest of moments, term our findings as stereotypes.
