There were a number of things I really liked in both readings this week. Both articles deal with the concept of points of view and that we can see different things in the same situation simply by shifting our perspective. I was immediately reminded of a couple of readings from a course in ethnography I took a few years ago. Robert Brooke, in an article about an ethnographic study he did, asked, "who would I become, as teacher and writer and member of the classroom community I had been in, if I explained what I had seen one way rather than another?" Similarly, in her essay, Ethnography and the Problem of the "Other," Patricia Sullivan asks, "how can we conceive and reflect the "other," the not-us, in the process of inquiry such that we convey otherness in its own terms?" We have to learn about these other cultures in order to start to see from their perspectives. I think Swearingen's and Mao's article nicely summed up traditional Western issues with Chinese (and Asian) rhetoric, although I'm not sure if they really stated flat-out (pun intended) that all the allusions made in Chinese rhetoric are the writers displaying their knowledge of the subject, and since there is no private ownership of material, there is no plagiarism, so using direct quotes without citations is standard practice. Imagine how difficult it must be for Chinese American students to have to learn our academic English, when their culture talks "around" a subject rather than addressing it directly.
What I really liked about the interview with Gloria Anzaldua was her focus on identity and that there are many different traditions within each of us. "I cannot disown the white tradition, the Euro-American tradition, any more than I can disown the Mexican, the Latino or the Native, because they are all in me" (52). Perhaps this comment resonates with me because in a mere two generations, my family went from being American Indian to being white; of course, as the colonized people, assimilation was far more likely to guarantee survival than trying to retain the old traditions. And the desire to fit in is certainly seductive (I love her use of that term), but I really like that she emphasizes that we can't ever disown parts of our cultures because they are a part of ourselves.
I think Anzaldua's focus on changing and shaping our identities is a key point to discuss with our students. The realization that, oh, this isn't the only way to write and the person I've always been can change, that "if you see that shed and that sky and that sea and all that happens in it from this other angle, then you will see something else. You can recreate reality" (67) is a very powerful one for students (and everyone else). It is also why I love Ursula LeGuin's work so much, because it is always dealing with issues of identity and seeing the same situation from different perspectives. Since I read it in a science fiction literature class my freshman year of college, The Dispossessed has changed my perspective on so many issues. It opens with this description of a wall around a landing platform for space ships:
Like all walls, it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on…[t]he wall shut in… the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
Prior to reading that novel, there were a lot of cultural walls in my life that I had never recognized and therefore never questioned. Now I'm constantly seeing them and (usually) jumping on top of them to see what it looks like from the other side, and doing my best to rewrite the culture surrounding the walls.
Further reading:
Brooke, Robert. “Ethnographic practice as a means of invention” in Voices and
Visions: Refiguring Ethnography in Composition, Cristina Kirklighter, Cloe Vincent, &
Joseph Moxley, Eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997.
Sullivan, Patricia. "Ethnography and the Problem of the 'Other'," Ethics & Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy, Mortensen, P and Kirsch, G Eds. IL: NCTE, 1996.
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