"Civilization": Metaphor & Marker

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!

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.

Welcome to the Geography of the Other!!

Dear Engineering Honors Students,

I wanted to welcome you officially to our new blogsite, from where we will launch our commentaries on class and reading and to exchange our ideas about the history of theoretical curiosity and wanderlust. You have your first assignment, which I sent to you via email (reading a passage in Clifford Geertz, and investigating the online resources for the meaning of "other" and "alterity"--a fancier word for the same thing).

Once you log on to this blogsite, I want you to begin some reflection on a small matter that will occupy us off and on for the first month or so. I would like you to consider the familiar culture of our present day. Specifically examine our sedentary existence (the fact that we live in homes, in neighborhoods and communities within cities and suburbs, travel out of leisure rather than economic necessity, and rely upon other enterprises to produce our sustenance) and do so in light of the longer history of human habitation of the globe during which we were nomadic (wandering on foot in occasional alliance with animals living off what the land would yield). Now take some time between now and next Tuesday to jot down some thoughts about this rather significant transformation.

Here are some thoughts/questions to guide your reflections: What are the advantages of nomadic life? What are the advantages of sedentary life? How was this grand transformation effected so thoroughly that we have gone from hunter gatherers to city dwellers with scarcely a memory of the history that brought us here? Does it matter?


Here are a few quotes to addle your thinking apparatus:


Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death. (Blaise Pascal, Pensees)


The founders of monastic rule were forever devising techniques for quelling wanderlust in their novices. "A monk out of his cell," said St. Anthony, "is like a fish out of water." Yet, Christ and the Apostles _walked_ their journeys through the hill of Palestine. (Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)


Life is a bridge; cross over it but build no house on it. (Indian Proverb)


The Desert People (the Bedouin) are closer to being good than settled peoples because they are closer to the First State and are more removed from all the evil habits that have infected the hearts of settlers. (Ib'n Khaldun, Muqaddimah)


Useless to ask a wandering man advice on the construction of a house. The work will never come to completion. (Book of Odes)


He who does not travel does not know the value of men. (Moorish proverb)


In _The Descent of Man_ Darwin notes that in certain birds the migratory impulse is stronger than the maternal. A mother will abandon her fledglings in the nest rather than miss her appointment for the long journey south. (Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)


I urge you to mull these questions over in light of these quotations and mix in your own sense of the history and lets see what comes out of the effort. Please bring your reflections to class on a sheet of paper with your name and please make certain that they are printed (by means of a computer and a printer) and NOT handwritten.

It will be a pleasure to meet you and to get to work with you over the next two semesters in a course of study that will
take us down a complex path of investigation in arts, anthropology, history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion.

Thanks a lot. I'll see you very soon.

Dr. J.