Take some time this weekend to reflect on the dialectic of identity and difference as displayed in the Relacion of Cabeza de Vaca. How does a presumption of civilization or of being a Christian generate tension at the point of encounter?
To this juncture, we have a grasp on the conceptual limitations of the concept, that is, that civilization is an historical invention of recent origin that carries an implicit judgmental valence and so has been used to discriminate between peoples. This valence is also evident in the manner in which the globe has been sectioned and represented accordiing to the rules of a tendentious western-bound geography. Civilization comes with a view--"things seen are things as seen"--and so it is that the geography of first, second, and third world peoples repeats the larger conceptual dialectic of "civilized" and "primitive."
This week we have taken up two new readings: Henri Baudet's Paradise on Earth and Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America. The latter work is challenging, but should seem vaguely familiar, given that it is, like the Relacion, about the encounter of Europeans with the indigenous peoples of "the new world." It will be our task to try to re-examine the conjuncture of these cultures with an eye to understanding why the encounter turned violent. We will benefit in this context from the partial quote from Clifford Geertz that I have mentioned a few times in class so far: "Foreignness begins at the skin's edge, not the water's."
A worthy question in this context of the doubt occasioned by the early encounters is: How does civilization, as a mechanism of judgment of the other, shield us from the experience of what is different? In other words, what does civilization deny the civilized who act in its name? Another is: How does the affirmation of one's identity in the sovereignty of one's name protect us from the threat of our own inner impulses of otherness?
Let these questions act as a guide for your reflections for this weekend. Happy writing!
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Metageography and the Real
The first two weeks of our reading and discussion have introduced us to the nomadic urgency of the human spirit (Chatwin), a three-fold typology of human development (Gellner),necessity of alterity in the constitution of identity (Wikipedia and "The Secret Sharer"), as well as the problematic unrepresentativeness of our presumed geopolitical understanding of the Earth. Our classroom experience of ostranie is underway and it is in the spirit of this strangeness that we take up our next writing task.
Our queries this week grow from our reading in The Myth of Continents: What is the politics of our mistaken metageography? How does its correction by Lewis and Wigen affect our understanding of the "real" world? To help you with your thinking and writing on these questions I offer the following historical comment by David Hooson from a review of Lewis and Wigen:
Geography's primary quest, ever since it was given intellectual coherence by the Greeks, has simply been for an accurate and meaningful understanding of our world and the diversity of its parts. As the known world was gradually extended from the Mediterranean and then rapidly yet tentatively reshaped following the discoveries, to be finally rounded out scientifically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the regional divisions grew to reflect the inexorable dominance of Europe. These divisions, primarily the perceived "continents" along with such value-laden concepts like West and East or Eurocentric labels like the Far East, have stuck. In the period following World War II, with the onset of the cold war and the dismantling of the colonial empires, East and West acquired a fresh ideological twist. A newly discovered Third World appeared, leading to another economically based macrodichotomy, the North-South divide. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union these categories have perforce had to be revised or retired, as increasing anomalies make the generalizations less true and useful. Clearly, it has become more urgent and necessary to reconfigure the many faces of our world "for the Millennium" and to change our geographical mind-sets to cope with new situations and rapidly emerging predicaments on the global scene.
OK. Go to it. I look forward to your posts.
Our queries this week grow from our reading in The Myth of Continents: What is the politics of our mistaken metageography? How does its correction by Lewis and Wigen affect our understanding of the "real" world? To help you with your thinking and writing on these questions I offer the following historical comment by David Hooson from a review of Lewis and Wigen:
Geography's primary quest, ever since it was given intellectual coherence by the Greeks, has simply been for an accurate and meaningful understanding of our world and the diversity of its parts. As the known world was gradually extended from the Mediterranean and then rapidly yet tentatively reshaped following the discoveries, to be finally rounded out scientifically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the regional divisions grew to reflect the inexorable dominance of Europe. These divisions, primarily the perceived "continents" along with such value-laden concepts like West and East or Eurocentric labels like the Far East, have stuck. In the period following World War II, with the onset of the cold war and the dismantling of the colonial empires, East and West acquired a fresh ideological twist. A newly discovered Third World appeared, leading to another economically based macrodichotomy, the North-South divide. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union these categories have perforce had to be revised or retired, as increasing anomalies make the generalizations less true and useful. Clearly, it has become more urgent and necessary to reconfigure the many faces of our world "for the Millennium" and to change our geographical mind-sets to cope with new situations and rapidly emerging predicaments on the global scene.
OK. Go to it. I look forward to your posts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)