[Xmca-l] Re: The illusion of cultural authenticity

[larry smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com>]

Message from Francine Smolucha:
Paul,
Is not kreyol itself derived from 18th century French?Doesn't this make the kreyol language and concepts expressed by means of it,a hybrid of European, West African, and Taino cultures?
It would also be worthwhile for XMCARS following this thread to look at JuliusWilson's 2009 book More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City which examines the interaction of both social structure and culture.  It would bea misinterpretation of Julius Wilson's work to claim it attributes the economic disparities exclusively to the class divisions of capitalist society (social relations of production).
I also think that a self-enclosed system of activity and ideology can be terminated because of its own internal flaws and does not require external catastrophic collapse. For example,an economic model based on exploitation of natural and/or human resources could in no short time exhaust natural resources like timber, coal, and oil. Pollution would poison the air and water. The exploited workers would become sickly and the stagnant social structure would provide no incentives for creating new inventions in technology, science, and medicine. There are several examples of both non-European and European (agricultural and capitalist) societies that brought about their own demise.For example, the disappearance of the ancestral Anasazi people of Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico is thought to be the result of deforestration.

> Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2013 23:09:59 -0500
> From: pmocombe@mocombeian.com
> To: ablunden@mira.net; xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The illusion of cultural authenticity
> 
> Andy,
> 
> You address the points perfectly.  I would like to add that in the case of haiti...the culture is a kreyol one that incorporated all the elements of the African tribes and the native tainoes into its conceptualization.  This is why Dessalines called the island ayiti, its original taino name.  This postmodern initiative of the maroon communities, newly arrived slaves, and field slaves was juxtaposed against the bourgeois eurocentric culture of the Affranchis, petit bourgeois blacks, house slaves, and mulatto elites who would seek to dominate the island with the assassination of dessalines on october 17th, 1806.  It is within this cultural dialectical context that haiti must be understood.  The vodou culture and kreyol of the masses juxtaposed against the french and eurocentric culture of the minority.  In the case of black america, it is a class dialectical structure as william julius wilson points out (1978).  As such, the black academic achievement gap is an epiphenomenon of this class division and the social relations of production not culture.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my Sprint tablet
> 
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> 
> Date:11/07/2013  10:25 PM  (GMT-05:00) 
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu> 
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The illusion of cultural authenticity 
> 
> Francine,
> I don't think Paul's point is about "ethnic" differences, but so much as 
> about utilising forms of interaction which express fundamental relations 
> of the society of which they are a part, e.g., theories of education 
> which mirror theories of the organisation of production. But Paul will 
> correct me if I am wrong there.
> And if there is a theory about exacerbating and polarising social 
> antagonisms in order to facilitate revolution, it may well be European 
> in origin, but it certainly did not originate from Hegel. And I don't 
> think it is Paul's point either. But Paul will correct me if I am wrong 
> here, too. It is more that only an extrernal catastrophic collapse can 
> terminate an otherwise self-enclosed system of activity and ideology.
> 
> Andy
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> 
> 
> larry smolucha wrote:
> > Message from Francine:
> > I have been following the discussion of 'black underachievement'and have a few thoughts to share. 
> > (1) The overgeneralization inherent in the vary term 'black underachievement'is dismissive of black academic achievement. I would prefer to use the termblack academic achievement gap. 
> > (2) Polarizing the discussion into black vs. white, people of color vs. whites, colonialism vs. indigenous, capitalism vs. the oppressed, only exasperates antagonisms. [If one's agenda is to promote open conflict to achieve revolutionthat is one thing, and any discourse is actually a diatribe]
> > Polarized thinking can help to define the thesis and anti-thesisin a dialectic but it will not in and of itself lead to any synthesis or emergent conceptual framework. Of course,  the dialectical model I refer to is the Eurocentric, 19th Century thought of Hegel so it can be dissed on that basis.
> > (3)The movement to identify the roots of indigenous non-Western cultures andbuild new emergent cultural frameworks to replace Western capitalism, colonialism,and all vestiges of any European culture is based on an illusion. It assumesthat indigenous culture has some ahistorical defining characteristics, andthat one can identify these if one goes back to the precolonial roots of the 'indigenous culture'.
> > I think XMCA had brief discussion some time ago about the creation of nationalidentity or ethnic identity. This is such an emotionally charged topic for somepeople, that the very suggestion that cultures evolve is threatening.For example, the black population of Haiti is not the indigenous population ofHaiti and while most African slaves  may have come from a specific part ofAfrica, they surely represented several different African tribal cultures.
> > (4) Contemporary academic achievement require a specific skill set consisting of reading and writing literacy, basic to higher level math skills, computer literacy,basic to higher level scientific reasoning, and some knowledge of world history and humanities. What does this mean for indigenous people who did not have a writtenlanguage prior to contact with literate cultures (perhaps European, Arabic, Persian, Chinese)? 
> > For example, the Russians had no written language until the Byzantine missionaries,Saints Cyril and Methodius, formulated the Cyrillic alphabet for them. And, the Russiansof Eastern Europe where not one indigenous people but the Rus (the Norsemen fromScandanvia, i.e., Vikings) and the more indigenous Slavic populations.To be accuratethe Norsemen did use the Runes as script. [Oh, by the way the word slave derives from Slav because they were so frequently enslaved en masse during Turkish and TarTar invasions.]
> >
> > (5) My work on Cultural Synergy from a Vygotskian Perspective is ongoing.
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