The contact zone
Originally uploaded by waffler.
Via Barbara Ganley, fell upon an informative speech by Mary Louise Pratt, also published in Ways of Reading, 5th edition, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petroksky (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999). Professor Pratt is a linguist and cultural anthropologist who studies the interface of cultures, which she calls the contact zone. She has helped me understand the value of autoethnography as a qualitative research method. Whether considering the Australian indigenous story, the hegemony of institutionalised learning or the persistent divide between individualists and collectivists in most societies, her critical lens seems to have great application. I'll come back to this.
We are looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone. These will include, we are sure, exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others; experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique, parody, and comparison (including unseemly comparisons between elite and vernacular cultural forms); the redemption of the oral; ways for people to engage with suppressed aspects of history (including their own histories), ways to move into and out of rhetorics of authenticity; ground rules for communication across lines of difference and hierarchy that go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect; a systematic approach to the all-important concept of cultural mediation.
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