Discovering the Other

I think more than anything else this class has impressed upon me the difficulty of truly discovering the other. Todorov’s Conquest of America has captured this theme, which prevails throughout the books we have read. Discovering the other is not merely meeting face to face, it is really getting under the others’ skin and understanding their own distinct logic and perspective. As Jackie writes, for true discovery there must be that “unique ability of both characters to see things from a different perspective… (and) maybe they can never completely relate to the practices of the aliens, but they have an understanding of why things are done that way.”

What appears to us as irrational behavior actually follows its own logic, it just may come from a place so different from our own cultural standpoint. There are so many opportunities for miscommunication and failure to understand. In each of the books we have read the characters in some manner fall prey to these misunderstandings.

At the end of his book, Todorov suggests that the ability to “get into someone else’s head” to grasp the others’ distinct logic and cultural experience is a form of maturity and evolutionary growth. He writes, “for the newborn child his world is the world, and growth is an apprenticeship in exteriority and sociality,” (247). He mourns the fact that it is possible to “live our lives without ever achieving a full discovery of the other” (247) since identification of the other moves from seeing the “other-as-subject,” such as Marjorie viewing the Foxen as animals, “to the other as subject, equal to the I but different from it,” as Marjorie eventually observes the Foxen as equal yet different intelligent life (247).

Each of the characters in the books we read has gone through or is stuck in this process. Those that never come to an understanding of the other as equal yet different were not able to lose their own cultural framework for however brief a moment and step into the others’, thus perpetually “Misreading the facts” (247) as a result of their cultural biases.

Montezuma’s Paralysis

The Conquest of America is a superb scholarly analysis of the Native American - European encounter. Honestly, it is rare to find a book that will make you rethink “established history,” the narrative you are told from grade school. In my mind, the conquest of America had merely been a matter of greater weaponry, the gun is more powerful than the bow and arrow. I had also considered that since most natives did not have a concept of ownership they did not understand how land could be taken from them, since it was forever a public entity, the philosophy being they belonged to the land rather than vice versa.

Never before have I seen such an analysis that takes both the natives and Europeans’ contexts of experiencing reality into account, and compares and contrasts them. I particularly enjoyed the characterization of the Aztecs’ communication as man to world. They were awfully skilled at this form, sensitive to signs and symbols, omens and prophecies. Yet this also leads to their unskilled man to man communication.

Montezuma followed a strict code for man to man communication, while Cortez prided himself on adaptability to ever-changing circumstances. The most revealing nuance or suggestion revealed in this book was that Montezuma and the Aztecs had perhaps surrendered even before the battles had begun. Montezuma’s “paralysis does not merely weaken the gathering of information; it already symbolized defeat since the Aztec sovereign is above all a master of speech…and since the renunciation of language is the admission of failure” (71). Examining the Native – European encounter in this light, I would agree with Todorov that the conquest of America was more a matter of signs than superior weaponry.

Seeing Through the Other's Eyes

To be honest, while I enjoyed the inclusion of a Star Trek episode and I find the debate over what constitutes understanding to be fairly interesting, today's class felt, to me, a little like beating a dead horse. For the first part of class we simply went back and forth trying to determine what communication really means and what real understanding is. It was repeatedly said that one can never achieve true understanding with any other individual. I think that this is a little silly. Of course we can never completely know what's going on inside someone's head (unless we're talking about a Vulcan mind meld). To me, it's kind of a moot point since complete and utter understanding, by definition of the word "complete," would require the ability to both read minds and have the exact same frame of reference of the other individual. Complete understanding is not even possible in a society where everyone speaks the same language. A PBS guide to cross-cultural communication gives an excellent example: "even in countries that share the English language, the meaning of 'yes' varies from 'maybe, I'll consider it' to 'definitely so,' with many shades in between." We touched on such issues of underlying meaning in class and, certainly, the inferences we make about communicated messages everyday may be wrong in some situations.

During the second part of class, we moved past this definition of true understanding to try to place the interactions between different humans and "others" from the books we've read this semester onto a scale of greater or lesser understanding. I appreciated this more concrete look at understanding because it gave us an idea of what promotes more in-depth understanding between cultures or species. Some of the indicators we came up with were: 1) one or both sides are able to "get out of their own head" and see the other's perspective; 2) the communication causes a change in the other's behavior; 3) one or both sides view the other as an equal. Someone also mentioned that, in many of the examples we looked at, a low level of understanding often meant the presence of violence.

For me personally, I feel that the first indicator is the most accurate because of the examples that I see as being more indicative of understanding, such as Ender and the piggies in Speaker for the Dead and Marjorie and the foxen in Grass. These examples exhibit more understanding between the main characters and the alien species because of the unique ability of both characters to see things from a different perspective; maybe they can never completely relate to the practices of the aliens, but they have an understanding of why things are done that way. In this instance, I have a quote that fits quite nicely. Gavin Sanderson writes in his article "Existentialism, Globalisation and the Cultural Other" that, "if it is popularly held that there is nothing that can be learned from the Cultural Other, what possibilities are there for transformative encounters to open our identities to change? To also see the world through their eyes and in doing so, become something more than we presently are (Marginson 1999-2000, p.5), whether at the level of an individual, an institution, a nation, or a civilisation." The only way to have encounters that change one's self (presumably arising from a new understanding of the universe or some small piece of it) is to open one's mind to another perspective.

Conflicting Moralities Continued

It was pretty clear from the beginning of Todorov's The Conquest of America that the book was going to have a lot of connections to what we took away from The Sparrow. On the very first page, Todorov writes that his subject is "the discovery self makes of the other." While he is talking about separate human cultures that come into contact with one another, it doesn't take much of a leap to reframe his arguments in terms of alien species. And, as I wrote about in my last blog post, at the time of the "discovery" of the American continent, the Indians and the Europeans were about as alien to each other as you could get. In this light, their encounters offer an interesting comparison for The Sparrow and the other first encounter books we've read so far.

A topic that I found to be really interesting in Todorov's book is his discussion of the difficulties that the Europeans have in seeing the Indians as both different and human; in many cases different means inhuman or bad. This has serious implications when it comes to our discussion of imposing morality upon the Jana'ata. The relevance of Todorov is abundantly clear. He writes, "...admitting that one is to impose 'the good' on others, who...decides what is barbarity or savagery and what is civilization?" (150). He continues with this line of thought, writing that the theory behind the actions of the Europeans was that "one has the right or even the duty to impose the good on others...without concern as to whether or not this is also the good from the other's point of view" (154). This is exactly what I argued against in my last blog post. It is impossible to say that our moral view is superior over the "other's" because, as mginsberg wrote in his last post, each side comes from different reality with different norms. His post presents an interesting debate about cultural relativism and how that plays into human/other interactions (even if the other is another human culture).

Mginsberg makes the important point that since we cannot choose which system of morality (or lack thereof) is "correct," the way forward is difficult to determine. So, although I believe that we can't impose our own ways on the other, I, like mginsberg, do not have an answer for how to approach such a situation. Cultural clashes continue to confound scholars and world travelers alike. And simply taking a Cross-cultural Communications class does not make such questions any easier to answer.

Did It Have to be That Way?

Somehow I missed Sunday's post. So for all you faithful blog-followers out there in internet-land, this is going to be part 1 of a two-installment attempt to catch up with my post-count, as well as discuss our class on Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and examine that thought alongside Todorov's The Conquest of America.

One of the topics that kept coming up in our discussion on Thursday was the question of whether humans have the right to impose their values on an alien culture. During that discussion, I kept slipping into a familiar (Schmitt) mind-set that when two societies meet each other, the more technologically powerful society will naturally impose its beliefs and morals on the other society. I wanted to argue that in this situation, the humans should not give way to Jana'ata morals, since human practices and thoughts have already changed life on Rakhat forever. They should merely try to escape alive, cutting their own losses from the inevitable exploitation of the Runa and Jana'ata. Thinking like Schmitt is sort of a scary label to apply to yourself, so I want to re-evaluate my original position.

On Thursday someone brought up the fact that the humans in The Sparrow, while scientists, do not handle the situation scientifically. They fall in love with Rakhat, a planet that is so similar to Earth they forget that it is an entirely alien world, ecosystem, and culture, with entirely different values. A more rigorous scientific mindset would have helped their contact with Rakhat. The Jesuit mission to Rakhat often suffers from errors resultant from impatience or non-rigorous scientific standards. Marc and Sofia, forgetting to check the fuel in the lander, maroon the mission on Rakhat. Anne, an anthropologist, somehow fails to even recognize the significance of "giving agriculture" to a society. With almost no knowledge of Jana'ata culture or language, they decide to go to the city. Here the problem is "they should have sent a scientist," or at least someone willing to put up safeguards against cultural contamination, a la Speaker for the Dead. Setting up a separate camp or settlement, taking time to understand Jana'ata society, learning the language, listening to some of the radio signals after learning Jana'ata language; all would have been improvements.

Even abandoning the "us or them" line of thought leaves the truth we discussed in class that an unknown party should be assumed hostile until more knowledge is obtained. Even the seemingly friendly Runa should have been kept at a distance. Once the humans become stranded on Rakhat, they make almost no attempt to keep their technology or even their way of life away from the Runa.

What is most at issue here is the intersection of cultures. The humans seem intent on avoiding war or conflict with the Rakhati, but they overlook the fact that cataclysm might arise from the meeting of two cultures whether or not ill intent is involved. It seems, in The Sparrow, that the largest error was the human attempt to contact the society first, without studying it from a distance, studying the planet on a larger scale. Remote observation from orbit around Rakhat would certainly have been possible. Their underestimation of the volatility of alien culture is the flaw that destroyed them.

Cultural Relativism and the Other

The question of cultural relativity was central to last week’s class discussion. The essential question was: can there be two systems without one being wrong and the other right? One advanced and the other primitive? The idea of cultural relativism is in and of itself tricky. It is the principle that an individual’s beliefs and activities should be understood in terms of his or her own culture. The implication behind the premise is that every behavior can be rationally explained, since each culture has different logical imperatives. On a basic level it is an acknowledgement that everyone is not the same and just because there are differences it does not mean they should be subjected to a moral hierarchy. It is like Thoreau wrote, “if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

The reason I write that cultural relativism is a tricky concept is because of what happens when two cultures interact with one another. When two individuals form different cultural backgrounds come into contact with one another, as Emilio and Supaari did, two different realities also come into contact with one another. Both realities have norms, and since a norm always claims itself as the highest authority, the two norms find themselves in a battle over the moral high ground. Essentially, Emilio and our human European cultural framework dictates that rape is evil, pushing Supaari and the Jana’ata’s reality necessarily lower on the moral totem pole than our own. In our mind, Emilio’ framework is morally correct while the Jana’ata’s is mislead and downright immoral.

The clash can be seen in our own human history. Anthony Pagden in the foreword to The Conquest of America writes the European-Native American encounter was “an encounter between two ways of interpreting the world, between two systems of signs.”

I wonder what should be done about this fight for moral supremacy. Atrocities have been committed under both the European and Jana’ata’s cultural frameworks. Can we justify our actions through our beliefs and cultural logic, as is perhaps implied by the concept of cultural relativism? Or should our beliefs and logic conform to whatever the moral standard of the time or place may be? Should we do as the Jana'ata when in Rakhat?

Imposing Morality

Our entire class discussion basically revolved around the question of whether humans can, or should, impose their system of morality on another species. For that matter, can one society of humans impose its morals on another society of humans. We've seen it all through history...anyone heard of colonialism? (It seems like every book we read brings me back to colonialism. Maybe it's because I'm an SIS major. Or maybe it's because the West's first interactions with indigenous cultures are seen as the closest thing to an alien encounter for many people.) The colonial rulers sometimes allowed a semblance of the indigenous people's traditional ways to remain, as in the British practice of indirect rule where a traditional system of rule was left in place, but the colonists still dictated who was in power and the laws they implemented. Basically, a small piece of the traditional culture was preserved, but colonial ideas and rules still held the power. Despite this sticky history, the debate over whether it is appropriate to intervene on a moral basis is not cut-and-dry.

While many people agree that a society's culture is their own and generally shouldn't be intervened with, when practices exist that threaten a group's health and safety, the line becomes blurred. This is the case today with traditional practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM). We had a discussion about this very dilemma in my International Development class. Our determination was that the cultures practicing this should be informed as to the damage and possible complications that can result, but we cannot force them to change their ways. When it comes down to it, we decided that it is not right, or even possible in many cases, to force a society to change its way of life even if it includes very harmful practices. However, even when harmful practices aren't involved, the West often tries to intervene with what the non-Western countries are doing. Although this is more often in the form of economic or political actions rather than military ones. For a look at how economic sanctions can be a form of "moral colonialism" check out Tomas Larsson's article here.

Of course, involving a society that consists of another species entirely complicates the question further. As someone pointed out in class, the humans and the aliens in The Sparrow don't even have the same frame of reference; their worlds are completely different and developed in complete isolation and ignorance of each other. This means that they are unlikely to be able to understand where we are coming from in saying that it is wrong to eat Runa children, just as we wouldn't understand if they told us it was wrong for us to catch fish (or something like that). For this reason, I believe it is fairly inappropriate to try to dictate what they should or shouldn't be doing. It may seem cold-hearted to observe their society without doing anything to appease our morals, but we've all seen how well colonialism turned out. It's like Tim said in class, humans want to "love God's other children," but only once we've made them into something we can love.