research sources: October 2007 Archives

I will have to engage Briankle again. He was so intense about my stance in favor of "dialogue" against "dialectic" during my comps defense. At the time I had no one to back up my perception of the ways I had heard/read the term "dialectic" in use. Now I discover that none other than Raymond Williams articulates my point:

the ordinary version of ‘the dialectic’, which can so easily be abstracted as features of a theoretically isolated (determining) situation or movement…” (Marxism and Literature, p. 88).

It may well be that my learning of the concept of "dialectic" from exposure to its use in contemporary academic discourse within the discipline of communication has limited my own comprehension, with "meaning" gleaned from situations and contexts that may left gaps in any ideal or intended definition. I also may have misheard, misread, and misunderstood the nuances that gave me the overwhelming sense of cop-out: "dialectic" as a reference to things in relation always leading to a variant of the same ol' outcomes, a way to acknowledge the-impossible-way-things-are-and-we-can-do-nothing-about-it. I recognized this attitude overtly in Williams' description of "the ordinary version of 'the dialectic,'" as a "retreat to an indifferent emphasis on the complexity of cultural activity" (119), the "(resigned) recognition of the inevitable and the necessary" (118) that Williams' defines as "the true condition of hegemony...effective self-identification with the hegemonic forms" (emphasis in original, 118).

While Briankle defended the originary and ideal sense of "dialectic," I was critiquing a contemporary formation. "Formations," says Williams, "...are most recognizable as conscious movements and tendencies (literary, artistic, philosophical or scientific) which can usually be readily discerned after their formative productions" (119), and "...formations; those effective movements and tendencies, in intellectual and artistic life, which have significant and sometimes decisive influence on the active development of a culture, and which have a variable and often oblique relation to formal institutions" (117).

I assume he was aware of this distinction in our frames of reference and was pushing me to recognize and say it. Maybe he thought I was just somewhat off my rocker. It would surely not be the first time my angle was skewed!

U professor watched as Germany reunified

When I read her book on Kella, Germany - "Where the World Ended" - a few years ago, I was inspired by Daphne Berdahl's ethnography of borderlands. She had a tangible, physical boundary but focused on people's orientations to the border as well as their adaptations when the border changed. Her notions apply to the work I hope to do at "the border" of languages, a borderland occupied (physically,materially) by simultaneous interpretation.

I need to read the essays in this book now, Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, which she co-edited.

I'm stunned at her age - roughly mine. So much accomplished: not just the academic contributions, but goodwill in the world. A worthy life, albeit all too short.

Learned via an H-Net List for the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet.

Anne Fadiman. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.
1997. (Preface, p. viii.)

The Review linked above does criticize Fadiman for overromanticizing some aspects of Hmong culture, history, and customs; what reviewer Mai Na M. Lee calls "the bigger issues." In particular, she criticizes Fadiman's conclusion that Hmong are "differently ethical." The phrasing itself is curious, requiring some serious parsing. The way I read the phrase, Fadiman is asserting that ethics are as foundational and valued among the Hmong as within any people. The use of "differently" (instead of the starker label of "different") - refers to the ethics being performed or based "in a different manner." It seems to me this opens up comparision on the basis of more, rather then less, similarity. Dr. Lee did not read the phrase this way, interpreting its meaning as more distancing (differencing?) than joining.

Dr. Lee has the benefit of context; I have not yet read that far. There is a Bakhtinian movement discernable here: the counterplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces in the utterances of Fadiman's book and Dr. Lee's review.