Our Desk | We need more ‘third-instructed’ people

Renato Marques

A couple of weeks ago a newsroom co-worker expressed her feelings in this very column, talking about what she (forever) termed the “local sore losers.”

Although I am risking my neck by proposing to return to the topic today, I want to do so in a different way (please lay down your pitchforks).

In fact, the topic has been rolling around in my mind for several years, almost since I arrived in Macau. I can even say that my feeling over it has suffered several changes during all this time, taking me back to the roots of my thoughts on it. In this case, the roots lie somewhere 20 years ago, when in an ancient room of an ancient building located right next to the Castle of Leiria, a city in central Portugal, a Professor by the name of Ricardo Vieira started teaching a subject titled Anthropology of Education to a group of “wild” students who wanted pretty much anything else rather than to be seated in that room for three straight hours.

At that time, I confess, I questioned about a zillion times the utility of such knowledge or why I would need it. Today, 20 years on, I am happy that I did sit in the room for long hours discussing topics that we simply did not know that we would someday need.

To cut a long story short, one of the major topics of those classes regarded “identity” and “multiculturalism” or “mixed cultures,” a topic always trending when you talk about education and schools, because that is always what you will find in schools, no matter if you are talking about Portugal, Macau or New Zealand.

It was then that I learned for the first time the names of Pedro D’ Orey da Cunha, Michel Serres and of Professor Vieira himself, as experts in the field.

To understand this issue of identity, according to them all, you need to understand three basic concepts: “Oblat,” “Transfuga” and the “Third-instructed.” In a simple and “non-academic” manner these can be interpreted as the person who comes from a certain culture, keeping firm hold of his ideas, convictions and cultural roots as dominant and correct; the person that comes from a certain cultural background “abandoning” his background and embracing a new culture in a new place as dominant; and the person that, coming from a certain culture, manages to keep his mind open to merge several cultures and integrate different knowledge and different concepts into a “mixed system.”

I am sure that by this time, you already adding faces and names to these three  “identities” or personas.

In Macau, as a small “village” in size but a large city in population, where people from very different cultures and cultural backgrounds share (virtually) the same space, this confrontation between different identity personalities is somehow obvious and clear. We all have that neighbor who comes from a different country but lives in Macau as though he never left his original city and looks at everything he sees with his “oblat” eyes.

The same way, we all know a few people who come from the American or European continents, yet are far more “Chinese” than many of the local people in Macau of Chinese ancestry and cultural backgrounds. However, what I really mean to say is that, above all, what we need in Macau is more “third-instructed” people. They are the ones hard to find and, ultimately, they are the ones who will keep Macau in the “special place” that it has always been; at the “Crossroads of Identity” as Professor Vieira likes to call them.

Renato Marques