Re: Re(2): history and cultures-2nd try

From: Paul H.Dillon (illonph@pacbell.net)
Date: Fri Mar 30 2001 - 09:30:19 PST


diane,

this is my second try too because you did make a statement that indicates
your position toward history; i.e., ": history is a particular text that
becomes a cultural narrative." And I guess this is where I find things
becoming muddled for me.

I have a hard time seeing how world war 2's pacific armies sweeping across
polynesia, micronesia, melonesia can be considered a text. I can see how the
engulfed pacific islanders incorporated that historical experience into the
frameworks their culture provided for making sense out of it, but I can't
see it as a text itself. To be even more graphic: I have a hard time seeing
the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or the Holocaust as texts although yes
people have to make sense out of them as they happen and they do this with
reference to their own cultural self-understanding which includes a
historical dimension of origins. But the experienced reality is not a text
(although it very well has an ideal dimension).

That's why I continue to wonder what you mean by history. Is it only
someting that is read? Is lived experience reduced in your perspective to
interaction with a text. It seems that you restrict your use of history to
the remembering of things past (e.g., museums, icons, etc) but I can't see
how this would ever allow one to experience anything that could be
remembered to begin with.

sorry if i'm so obtuse..

Paul H. Dillon

----- Original Message -----
From: Diane Hodges <dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2001 7:31 AM
Subject: Re(2): history and cultures-2nd try

> (oops to my last effort at a response here)
>
> Diane Hodges writes:
> >
> "cultural-historical has always implied a critical-historical, because
> historical perspectives are subsumed within culture,
> but culture needs its own resources for reckoning with history - so each
> particular cultural position is biased with its cultural tools,
> thus positioned to reckon a particular relation to history, one that
> affirms the cultural tool
> in such a way that even a critical perspective can substantiate the
> cultural values embedded in the work of critical analysis. "
>
> pd asks:
> >But what is history for you that it could be independent and therefor
> >subsumable at all in cultural systems of representation and/or discourse?
> > I
> >can't seem to find that in what you've written.
>
> i don't think i imply independence of either, but rather am suggesting a
> different perspective on the ways culture/history are interactive
> responses and perspectives: "historical perspectives are subsumed within
> culture" refers to the ways a particular cultural group believes in heir
> own history, as a relation to culture, as a mode of identifying cultural
> privilege, for example, or cultural oppression: history is a particular
> text that becomes a cultural narrative.
>
> "..but culture needs its own resources for reckoning with history" -
> histories are rich with contradictions, so integrity depends on particular
> tools for making sense of the contradictions, for refining a history that
> can affirm a culture, and not question it - tools for these activities are
> often literacies, artifacts that represent any historical significance,
> museums, religions, icons, canons, and so on.
>
> "...so each
> particular cultural position is biased with its cultural tools,
> thus positioned to reckon a particular relation to history, one that
> affirms the cultural tool
> in such a way that even a critical perspective can substantiate the
> cultural values embedded in the work of critical analysis. "
>
> it's hard to be critical of one's own cultural history, when the dominant
> tools are designed to affirm cultural integrity through historical
> perspectives.
> >
> >And one other point; in what way are Palestine, Servia, Hungaria,
> >Ethiopia,
> >White South
> >Afrikaans, or Black Zimbabwe, etc. cultures at all? Aren't these ethnic
> >and
> >political entities, or do you see an equivalence between ethnicity and
> >culture, nationality and culture?
>
> Palestine and Israel, for example, each depend upon particular
> understandings of their history in order to affirm their cultural
> integrity ... texts, language, re-interpretations of past events,
> affiliations with particular beliefs, all of which affirm a cultural
> perspective that can
> remain consistent with a particular historical experience.
>
> white Afrikaans and black Zimbabwe must, of necessity, enact similar kinds
> of interpretations, reckon a history that will not contradict the cultural
> differences,
> and so on.
>
> this extends to European relations with culture and history, - meaning our
> particular engagements with any text invariably reflect our own need to
> quell contradictions to our own beliefs - this works on an individual
> level, and in wider venues of cultural activity, as in Middle Eastern
> conflicts, or European perspectives on immigration, "who" is a refugee,
> "who" is a native,
> and so on, and as with the Americas and the struggles to assert
> a history that reflects difference,
> while still affirming particular cultural
> realities/legitimacies/dominance, ---- what is the activity, here, is the
> text that
> acts as a representation of culture and history - the work of critical
> analysis then
> depends on something beyond the textual relations that are most familiar.
>
> i'm suggesting we ask something different of ourselves in reading:
> Jennifer and bill are right on track with this idea.
> diane
>
> **********************************************************************
> :point where everything listens.
> and i slow down, learning how to
> enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
>
> (Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
> ***********************************************************************
>
> diane celia hodges
>
> university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
> instruction
> ==================== ==================== =======================
> university of colorado, denver, school of education
>
> Diane_Hodges@ceo.cudenver.edu
>
>
>



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