The Outsiders (That's Right, Ponyboy!)

I played football in high school. Yes, I was an athlete in a former life. Form whatever assumptions you want about me; many of my friends certainly did. One buddy of mine (the same fellow that ended up being the best man at my wedding) told me once that all football players are arrogant pricks that only join the team to get popular and get unearned scholarships to big universities. I knew my friend’s assumptions regarding the football team were founded mostly on the actions of 5 or 6 guys that I tended to avoid at practice; and I know that my buddy didn’t intend to include me in his insulting remarks, but he ultimately did (I never got a scholarship for athletics, but a TAship is way better!). I told him that his blanket statement didn’t hold up because he didn’t know what it was like to be on the football team—not everyone is like that. Regardless, he didn’t budge: to him, football players are all bastards. It’s funny, I still run into instructors that have carried a similar animosity into their adulthood and feel that student athletes in their classes are all arrogant jerks.

Though athletic communities in a specifically American context are only microcosmic examples of cultural differences, I can’t help but realize in the above situation that my friend was an outsider whose assumptions of an insider culture were stereotypical and simplistic while attempting to exert a certain intellectual superiority over the insider group. In the readings this week, I was brought back to the same observation. All of these pieces were written by academics looking in on cultures in which they are situated as an outsider or an ‘informant.’ For me, this brings into question whether the academic is really equipped to observe culture. It seems like a fine line that academics walk between essentialism and non-essentialism, and just a slight bend in their focus can produce what I believe to be a detrimental and essentialist piece (which sadly tend to have good intentions).

Take for instance Bliss’ work, “Rhetorical Structures for multilingual and Multicultural Students.” Although Bliss recognizes that multilingual and multicultural students often conflict with traditional western academic rhetorical patterns in writing, her good intention of trying to assist these students in navigating academic discourse ends up being an allegiance towards essentialism and patronizing to multilingual and multicultural students. What begins as a kind (yet patronizing) attempt to bestow “some extra tricks and some different structures” (16) to negioate academic discourse digresses into a critique of the logical structures or ordering in different cultural rhetorics (see pages 23-24). In this, Bliss demonstrates the academic inclination to ‘help’ students by westernizing them—any reference to other contrastive rhetorics seems to be a nod with the intent to eventually kill off that portion of the student’s identity and replace it with a crisp, thesis-driven western academic profile.

Speaking of killing one’s identity off, I was particularly struck by Ribeyro’s excerpt in Intercultural Communication. The narrative describing Lopez’s desire to distance himself from Peruvian culture demonstrated a certain dialectic in action; however, this dialectic didn’t involve a dialectic fusion of culture but a dialectical opposition resulting in one culture trying to extinguish the other within an individual. I wonder: is this the academic tendency? With good intentions, are academics (and I should start using ‘we’ here, because I ain’t divorced from this criticism) with trying to kill off the culture that doesn’t seem to fit the western academic structures.

Let’s step back for a moment. What am I really trying to say here with this critique of the academic? In Martin and Nakayama’s piece, we see three different approaches taken to the studying of intercultural communication (Social Science, Interpretive, and Critical). I hate to dwell on the negative here, but I saw substantial problems with each of these views. The similarity in these problems seemed to be that any outside group is going to have a flawed or skewed view of an another cultural simply because whether an etic or an emic approach is employed, one is still an outsider. Though an etic approach can produce bigotry, the emic approach doesn’t seem to produce an authentic understanding of culture either. I believe the emic approach falls apart because many cultures (if not all to a certain extent) want to preserve their culture from exploitation by being exclusive.

A case in point is the Weider and Pratt piece. What I find odd and a bit disturbing is that the article highlights the great exclusivity of Native American culture, and yet the article itself seeks to unveil this exclusivity. Pratt is even dubbed an “informant” (48). What is the benefit of these non- real Indians writing to other non-real Indians about a culture that seeks to distance itself from the dominant culture. I had the same thoughts about the Lareau article because the observers took an emic approach which they admit “changed the dynamics” of the families being studied (9). Lareau seeks to acknowledge that cultural lens are a skewing factor in all studies (see pages 10-11) and the American family would be more accommodating to an American scholar in their home (I wonder if a researcher from an institute in China would be as welcomed in as an observer), but the underlying factor in this type of study is that cultures are rightfully exclusive and outside observation can often lead to inaccurate depictions of a culture. In fact, I would venture to say that no outside perspective of a culture is ever accurate. This makes me wonder, as an academic, when am I butting in too much for the sake of ‘research.’

So, (prepare yourself—this is where I bring it all back around) as I sat there eating lunch and listening to my friend rant about how football players are total jerks, I felt that dialectic reinvention that Bakhtin discusses revolve within me. At first, I wanted to either choose whether I was a football player or not; disown myself from a community/culture or own up to it, stating that ‘yes, I am a jock.’ But it is much more complex than that. Here I discussed in terms of insider and outsider, but dialectics don’t allow for such clear distinctions. We are all insiders and outsiders, and we have inaccurate depictions of ourselves. Ugh. . .my brain hurts. It was much easier focusing on sacking the quarterback.

The Essential Call to Oppose Essentialism

In reading Pratt’s article, I was taken back to my youth. In some distant time, I too was a big baseball card collector. A collecting phenomenon typically engrosses the collector in a discourse community that maintains a healthy form of exclusive (to preserve the community) and inclusive (to broaden the community) behavior. My favorite team was the Chicago Cubs and I bought several books on Cub lore and Chicago history. The Windy City would have never caught my attention otherwise. I yearned to incorporate this knowledge I was acquiring of not only trading and stats but history into my writing as an elementary and junior high student. And I too was disappointed when the educational system separated baseball card collecting from reading, writing and arithmetic. Card collecting was a hobby—it was play time; and when the bell rings those two shall divorce. I can still hear the teacher say: “don’t bring those baseball cards to class. If you do, I will put them in my desk drawer until June.”

In the American-Western culture that I am accustomed to, it doesn’t seem like contact zones want to be tolerated. We want to segregate and let few voices speak. Let’s taxonomize and then make sure that these zones don’t touch. Yet, contact zones seem unavoidable. There is such a natural tendency to nurture “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” in educational systems, though the scientific method has taught us to dissect instead of teaching dialectics (Pratt 2). We have seen countless examples, including Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle, of cultures and languages evolving, meshing, melding. Contact zones are inescapable, and seem foolish to resist. I guess this resistance proves the existence of hegemony. Hegemony isn’t just some ethereal theory that conveniently works into Marxist thought; it is prevalent in squelching what occurs natural in communities and language. I would assume many Structuralists would understand English-only legislation as hegemony manufacturing a certain status quo that opposes what naturally occurs in language. I mean, no language is isolated: English is not a pure bred language by any means. But many insist that we take the ‘easy’ way of creating one national language as an attempt to phase out other languages in education. Good luck.

Such a resistance of contact zones exists to the point where essentialism is embraced. Much of what Holliday, Hyde and Kullman discuss in Intercultural Communication is resisting an ‘easy’ approach to communication, one that assumes that everyone communicates the same way. Of course, this essentialist attitude encrypts what is really going on in this mentality: a imperialistic view that everyone should think the way a dominant culture thinks. Ultimately, essentialism saddens me because it is an attempt to not only segregate and squelch community but it blatantly contests any notions of individual identity. I like the way Holliday, Hyde and Kullman discuss it: “we are all, as individuals, members of a vast number of different cultural groups [. . .], and hence have multiplicity of identities” (17). This gets back to how contact zones are unavoidable—involvement in several communities is inevitable (unless you choose to obtain from communities), and this involvement molds ones identity.

Contrastive Rhetoric comes into the picture when these varied identities, communities, and cultures need to be recognized instead of essentialized. Panetta notes in her article within Contrastive Rhetoric Revisited and Redefined that it is a daunting task to understand all of the varied forms contrastive rhetoric (in fact, I would say it is impossible). The point, however, is not to understand every contrastive rhetoric; the point is to recognize that the dominant discourse is not the only discourse.

Gotta Blog!

While I recieved my BA from Cal State University Long Beach in English Literature, my tastes have drifted away from Ralph Waldo Emerson and moved more towards Richard Lanham and Susanne Langer. My true obsession with rhetorical analysis and investigations into how the mind composes in different platforms began when I started working at the WSU writing center in Spring 2003 (which provoked me to apply to the Rhet/Comp graduate program here at WSU). Working with so many different students at the writing center who had such diverse composing and (ineffective and effective) rhetorical strategies cultivated a fascination for composition pedagogy and rhetorical research.

Nonetheless, I have found it difficult to focus my interests. I tend to be most preoccupied with the relationships between digital technology and rhetoric. My masters project was devote to digital composing communities, specifically regarding ipod playlists and the writing portfolios. I am attracted mainly to what Susanne Langer considers 'non-discursive' modes of communication; and I love contrasting the discursive and the non-discursive. Hence, I wish to expand my previous research to investigate the internet and video games as sites where communities non-discursively and discursively interact.

That brings me to this class: I am generally and specifically interested in this course because it contrasts non-dominant zones with EuroAmerican zones that dominate technological interfaces (Microsoft, macintosh, myspace, etc.). I mean, I really want to address the question of how contrastive rhetorics influence digital technologies. Bring it On!