I guess it started with a remark I made in an article I wrote, which
Kerry originally quoted from Thu, 27 Feb 1992 23:31:00 GMT ("Recovery").
The remarks he attributes (correctly) to me were:
We can really never know what the other person intends to express,
we have only our own projections...
Can we not investigate our differences in a spirit of wonder, trying
to comprehend why we think something fundamental is at stake when we
defend (or criticize) "our own kind" as distinct from "the other?"
by which I way trying to inquire about why perceived differences between
"self" and "other" become sources of friction and hostility. Yes, it
might seem like a deliberately naive question, and I know a lot of ink
has been spilled on the subject, to which I might be referred for an
answer to my question, but I meant it in a directly personal sense.
I got some new "grist for the mill" by means of a delightful piece I
picked up in an Amnesty International workshop on issues of indigenous
peoples this past weekend. It was something of a lampoon of what might
be a typical anthropological field notes type of description of the
rites of an unfamiliar culture. The article provides a lot of "food for
thought," and I'm thinking it might be worthwhile posting at some point.
In any case, I think this is an important discussion, even if it seems
to take us rather far afield from our main subject. I think the partic-
ular relevance of this investigation may lie in its attempting to under-
stand the historical and ongoing relations among representatives of
various cultures, which we all are, that have resulted in further mis-
understanding and mistrust. Maybe it's not worth spending too much time
and energy on this subject, but I'd like to at least encourage that we
generate a list of readings on the subject. If anyone has suggestions,
please feel free to post them as a response to this article.
--Gary ]
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Roberta Astroff said,
> Words have power. I am sure that is not a startling
statement to anyone on this list. Words -- or rather language --
is not outside of power relations. To assume that you can change
power relations (within anthropology, the university, education
in general, religion, etc) in a congenial way, by using less
aggressive language, and without people getting passionate,
upset, angry, frightened, denies the notion and reality of
change.
Words have only the power that we give them. Words are definitely part
of human power relations, but being "not outside" is not the same as
being primary. It seems to me - not as a professor but as a dedicated
amateur, a field researcher, perhaps, in communication - words *seem*
to have power precisely because the power to objectify is one of human
relations. To accept power as something intrinsic to a word is to
accept the process of objectification that some existing power-
relation has defined; ie, giving power-over, in Starhawk's phrase.
Thus we form camps: if I say workers (meaning ordinary folks
like me), and you say working-class (meaning the oppressed proles who
are ignorant of their rights), we're not likely to understand each
other, regardless of who harangues the longer or more vehemently.
Certainly, adopting one term instead of the other is not a
solution to anything - but if we are serious in searching for ways
to integrate our respective values, they are there to be found. As I
said, that usually requires going *outside of* dialogue, but being
open to experiencing (experimenting with) language helps.
RA> we need to find ways to speak so that people will listen...
Indeed, but we - the people in question - rarely learn to listen, when
all the social cues encourage us only to react.
RA> there is no shared meaning, shared understanding, or shared
language that has not been negotiated, or rather, struggled over
(another one of the words that elicits emotional responses) in
the process of which some people's understandings and meanings
get put aside.
I would like to agree, but I think there is room for clarification.
Is "sharing" really the outcome of "struggle"? Are people's
understandings different from individuals'? When you, yourself, have
successfully negotiated a meaning (with someone else), do you feel
that one of your meanings has been "put aside," or has it been
assimilated?
I suggest, if something has to be put aside, perhaps it isn't so
much a "meaning" as a confusion or conflation of other, peripheral
(not to say irrelevant), experiences/ contexts/ reactions. This is
what I took Gary to be saying; that we only come to know what we mean
by a continuous - and shared - process of comparison and adjustment -
not by having some sort of confrontation between terminologies.
|{hm kerry miller <ASTINGSH@KSUVM.KSU.EDU>
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[ I would certainly agree with Kerry's last statement, and would like to
commend him (yes, folks, Kerry has admitted to being a him :-) on the
article as a whole, which is not to say that I disagree with Roberta's
words which he quotes. In fact, perhaps this fact of being able to see
"truth" not just someplace in between what might seem like two opposing
"positions," but rather all "intertwingled" amongst them lies near the
heart of our subject.
Roberta seems correct in expressing the political reality that motiva-
tion for working on solving problems of understanding often (usually?)
is provided by the working out of feelings of hostility and mistrust,
and that words which engender these feelings might be useful tools in
the process. However, one can still question the outcomes of such
workings out, and compare results that derive from hard-fought battles
from those that come from negotiations conducted in a spirit of desire
for finding positive meaning in unlike, and even radically opposed per-
spectives. My own view tends to be that sometimes the "heat of battle"
is often required to clarify the apparent opposition in views, but that
real shared understandings (which, in my system of values tend to be
the best kind) derive from the subsequent process of sorting out mean-
ings and feelings - so maybe even here it's not so much an "either/or"
situation as it is a "both/and."
BTW, one book that comes to mind is Roger Fisher and William Ury's
classic _Getting_to_Yes_: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
(Houghton Mifflin, 1981, ISBN 0-395-31757-6). This book is more about
the practical "how-to" aspects of coming to mutually satisfying agree-
ments than it is with the more abstract (but equally important) under-
lying issues of how misunderstandings arise in the first place, and of
why hostility is so often associated with differences of opinion and
expresses itself through words.
I wonder if we can move this discussion back toward the cultural con-
text, and look more specifically at how these differences manifest
themselves in relations among people of different racial and ethnic
groups, particularly in the case of indigenous versus non-indigenous.
--Gary ]