https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeYUp5wqCYE
The video above "explores" the ephemeral investments and assumptions that those who cannot call a culture their own internalize and externalize when wandering and wondering upon the hues and hows of e-stranged "sounds" and "colors." Below I have provided two excerpts from Don Kulick's (1992) Language Shift & Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, & Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village which critically illuminate what it is that is latent and lurking within the congealing colors and sounds of moribund collective cultural (un)consciousness-(es). The macro-sociological binary distinction between hed and save provides a grounded framework in which the dark sides of tourism, I would further claim, are inherently rooted in vicarious interests that exploit and incite hed and consequently crush the realization of mutual save. This broad binary schemata functions within the over-arching and congealing reification (thing-ification, objectification) of what, where, why, and how tourism de-voices the sources, poises, and guises of choice as exchange values between a villagers' hed & save and a tourists' hed & (lackthereof) save:
"One of the most important cultural transformations that has occurred in Gapun since the arrival of white people in their country at the beginning of the twentieth century has been a change in how the villagers view and express the self... two highly salient aspects of self receive a tremendous amount of elaboration in Gapun. The first of these is what the villagers call hed (lit. head). This is the dimension of self which is individualistic, irascible, selfish, unbending, haughty, and proud...In each individual, however, hed is felt to coexist with another aspect of self that is named by the villagers. This second aspect of self is save, which means "knowledge." Save is the sociable, cooperative side of a person... Although the display of hed, of personal autonomy, is considered necessary and uncontestable in certain social situations, it is admonished and devalued in village rhetoric. A man or woman who behaves in too bikhed (big-headed, willful) a manner is decried" (Kulick 19)
"The argument that will be made in [Language Shift & Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, & Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village by Don Kulick] is that while the villagers [of Gapun & PNG overall] continue in their socialization practices and in their interactions with one another, to reproduce and elaborate these two basic aspects of self, the introduction of Tok Pisin & Christianity into their society has thrown up a dramatic new series of oppositions such as Christian: Pagan and Modern: Backward, that have affected the way in which villagers view and express the self. What was once a dual concept of personhood subsumed under one language has become a duality split among linguistic lines. Hed has become linked to the vernacular, which in turn has associations with women, the ancestors, and the past. Save, on the other hand, has come to be expressed through and by Tok Pisin, which in turn is strongly associated with men, the Catholic church, and modernity" (Kulick 20)
Pre-Christian Concept Present Concept
Self Self
/ \ / \
Hed Save Hed Save
| | | |
Individualism Collectivism Individualism Collectivism
Femininity Masculinity Femininity Masculinity
Child Adult Child Adult
Bad Good Bad Good
\ / | |
Taiap Taiap Tok Pisin
"In Antingua, not only is the event turned into everyday but the everyday is turned into an event. (Here is this: On a Saturday, at market, two people who, as far as they know, have never met before, collide by accident; this accidental collision leads to an enormous quarrel- a drama, really- in which these two people stand at opposite ends of a street and shout insults at each other at the top of their lungs. This event soon becomes everyday, for every time these two people meet each other again, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design, the shouting and the insults begin.) But the event turned into everyday and everyday turned into event do not remain event and everyday, in a fixed state. They go back and forth, exchanging places, and their status from day to day depends on all sorts of internal shadings and internal colorings, and the forces that manipulate these internal shadings and internal colorings are kept deliberately mysterious and unknown. And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live and in the place they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead these people to a new relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship in which they are not victims all the time of every bad ideas that flits across the mind of the world" (Kincaid 56-7)
Central to Kincaid's passage above is what the Russian Literary scholar M.M Bakhtin centrifugally defines and extensively theorizes in his Dialogic Imagination (1981) as heteroglossia: "raznorecie, raznorecivost (heteroglossia) is the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions- social, historical, meteorological, physiological- that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are funtions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that a systematic linguistics must always suppress" (Bakhtin 428).
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