On Indigeneity

This week we are examining Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart's Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics. Partly because all members of our class are reading the Introduction (while the other reading is dependent on personal choice) and partly because of my fascination with definitions, I'd like to begin by asking this question: What does the word "Indigenous" mean?

Steward and Wilson first use the word in reference to the Sundance Film Festival's support of "Indigenous independent filmmaking," and in this context, it applies to "eighteen eager Native American writers, directors, and actors" (1). But it's clear that this is not the book's working definition. On page 12, the editors discuss Indigenism as a "call for 'globalization from below.'" They go on to discuss how very idea of indigeniety is contested in some countries, particularly in the People's Republic of China, which claims that it does not have indigenous people or indigenous issues (13). The editors finally put forth four "general guidelines" for determining who is indigenous (14). Indigeneity involves:

1) a claim to a particular geographic place
2) identification with a particular ethnicity
3) self-identification
4) experience of colonization

I still struggle with this definition, and I think I almost prefer the simpler "submerged nations" suggested a little later on the same page. This is another term I'll have to keep working on.

A little later in the introduction, the editors note that they do not have any case studies from China in this book. I was disappointed at this, because my course project will revolve around Chinese culture (I know, it's not a monolith, but humor me for now) and its appropriation of reproductive technology, perhaps as compared to parallel phenomena in the United States. (I will post my project proposal here later this week.) I was encouraged, though, by the short discussion of minority status in China and the "recognized fifty-six minzu" which are indicated on "an individuals' passports, identification cards, and all official documents" (17).

For the purpose of collecting more material for my course project, I picked the article I found most interesting in this collection and began an unabashed mission to poach passages that will also apply to my work. The article I chose was Kathleen Buddle's "Transistor Resistors: Native Women's Radio in Canada and the Social Organization of Political Space from Below." In the paragraphs that follow, I will take quotations from her work, which deals with Aboriginal women using technology to reinvent themselves, and apply those bits of information to the work I plan to do in my project for this course.

Early on, Buddle addresses how "popular constructions of Native women structure their capacities for sociability at work, on the street, and at home" (129). This bit also applies to colonized peoples in general, including the mostly female demographic my work focuses on. People are always limited by the popular constructions of their own abilities.

At the bottom of the same page, Buddle refers to the lack of a gap between makers and consumers, which certainly has interesting echoes in terms of the study of the fetal ultrasound/sonogram, since most sonographers in the U.S. are female and thus are both makers and consumers of this particular medical technology. A little later, she talked about "the feminization of public political space," which rings of the debate surrounding the ethic of care (130). The public political space surrounding fetal ultrasound is sharply divided, with certain uses being rationalized according to the ethic of care (getting to "know" the fetus, assuring oneself that all is well) and certain uses being rationalized according to a more patriarchal ethic (laws forcing a woman to view an ultrasound prior to abortion, laws which ultimately cause sex-selective abortion).

One of my favorite parts of Buddle's piece is in the section "Hearth Space for Smoke Signals." "By engaging in certain activities and not others, Aboriginal women collectively reconfigure the symbolic repertoires through which Aboriginality and womanhood can be thought and formulated--shaped by discourses on duty, family, and tradition" (132). They learn to act in non-traditional ways, and in so doing, "they challenge the grounds on which their authority is disqualified" and "they broaden the scope of possible roles for Aboriginal women" (133). This is precisely the model by which other colonized populations--in my studies, for example, those who believe they must use medical technologies in particular ways--can begin to work toward new possibilities.

Although it may or may not tie to my work, I was also interested that Buddle's acquaintances would not self-identify as feminists. The stigma surrounding that term continues to both hinder and fascinate me, because I once fell into the category of people who would have denied being a feminist based on the idea that feminists are too radical.

Buddle also employs de Certeau's notion of "pedestrian speech acts" to demonstrate that "reserves in the popular imagination are bastions of Aboriginal tradition" (135). This quote could certainly provide a sound theoretical point for many arguments about social construction and determinism if only the application to Aboriginal women alone is expanded.

I also think I may have found another space in which de Certeau's theories can be very helpful to me by paying attention to Buddle's claim that "women's everyday engagements ... are socioculturally embedded and are conceived in specific locales" (141). It does seem to me that everyday rebellions are those that are most marked. Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat--a fairly everyday sort of action--sparked (arguably) an entire movement, whereas more grand gestures of rebellion are tossed aside as displays by radicals. Perhaps this is exactly why the term "feminist" has such trouble sticking. I wonder how the everyday rebellion plays out in Chinese culture.

Finally, Buddle tells us that her study speaks "to the need for a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the linkages between cultural expression, gender issues, and political practice." Culture, gender, and politics--and race--are certainly intertwined, and I can't imagine that anything but good will come from a better understanding of the relationship between these terms.


Work Cited

Wilson, Pamela and Michelle Stewart, eds. Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics. London: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.

Culture, technology and globalization

According to Thatcher, there are four levels of cultural and rhetorical patterns that determine how a new technology will be assimilated into a culture. These include the broader cultural context, the local/regional context, the specific organizational culture, and the personalities of those within the organization (385).

I like this framework in the sense that it can give the author of a study like Thatcher's a way to organize his or her findings. However, I also think this discrete four-category system is a little too neat to take as reality. Thatcher gives a nod to the fact that the last factor, individual personalities, are influenced by all the others. I would argue that all four categories are influenced by all four other categories. Further, I think it's very difficult to take any cultural artifact and place it in one category because, besides the fact that all are intertwined, culture is ever-changing. But, I think these four categories can still be useful so long as we recognize their limitations. (The same applies, I think, to Appadurai's scapes, which are mentioned in the Slack and Wise chapter on globalization.)

In the culture present in the Mexican maquilas, legitimization of processes was an important purpose--arguably the most important purpose--of the technical document. The technical document is not there to actually relate the process, but rather to reinscribe power. The process, then, is "taught through oral and hierarchical methods" (402). The author seems somewhat critical of this approach; I don't see an inherent problem in it. The power-establishing purpose of the technical document is somewhat more problematic; I'll discuss that in a moment.

Thatcher also discusses another characteristic of the culture of the maquilas that he seems critical of. He gets at this point by drawing on Hofstede's conception of power distance, which refers to the "ability of two people with different power and authority to influence each other" (387). A broad cross-section of Mexican culture (though, obviously, Mexican culture is not a monolith) apparently placed the country among the highest in terms of having a high power-distance socialization. "Rarely were subordinates in positions to influence training" (396). This is related to the fact that technical documents are encoded as objects of institutional power rather than as objects intended for the sharing of knowledge. Thatcher suggests that Mexico's high ranking in terms of collective values contributes to this hierarchical approach. I'd be particularly interested to hear more on the research he discusses about collectivist-type cultures being different, because it seems to me that collectivity as a value would precipitate access to information for all. This is obviously not the case.

This is the point at which Thatcher's observations become problematic for me. I resist making value judgments about a culture that is not my own. I don't want to say that the Mexican maquila workers and writers need to alter their relationship and use technical documents to help disseminate knowledge. From my perspective, this is a catch-22. By dictating that the Mexican technical communicators should be more democratic, I am assuming the same sort of dictatorial authority that they have assumed in order to create documents that reinscribe power. (Actually, I think my action would be even more colonizing, as I would be intruding into a society I do not understand.)

So far as taking action in a case like this, I suppose I ascribe to the notion of the global referred to by Slack and Wise, which demands that we "critically engage the workings of a complex global technological assemblage" (189). We need to do a lot more learning before we do anything else. It was interesting to me--and it certainly rang true--that Slack and Wise see antiglobalization movements de-emphasizing their use of and connection to technology. It seems that what we (in the Western sense) define as technology is equivalent to the forces driving "evil" globalization. Thus, a resistance to learning this new strategy allows activists to resist.

In an interesting connection to Slack and Wise's note that the global affects the local and vice versa, Sun's article on user localization shows how the local affects the global and also how personalities can move straight to the top of Thatcher's food chain to influence the broader social dimensions of how a technology is applied. I recently had my students in English 249 read parts of this article, and they keyed in on how the technology (texting) was used differently to make meaning in different locales. In the Western case study, the participant used texting as a comfort (relating it to chocolate, a "comfort food") while the Eastern case study participant used texting to convey messages with deep societal meaning. (Here is the page with responses from my students to this article. You have to scroll to the bottom to see responses from Sept. 17-18.)

I'm struggling to place these case studies over the framework de Certeau gives us in terms of production. He argues for two productions: the first being equivalent to creation and the second being consumption, a sort of re-creation. By poaching a product and re-creating it in one's own context, othered communities find a tactic (as opposed to a strategy) to gain power. "Many everyday practices are tactical in character" (xix). I suppose what we see in these case studies is grounded in the original production of the technology. Each participant then uses a different tactic in her consumption of the technology, and those tactics reinforce the power of the culture she is working within.

I also thought the juxtaposition of de Certeau's Expert and Philosopher was highly interesting. "In the Expert, competence is transmitted into social authority; in the Philosopher, ordinary questions become a skeptical principle in a technical field" (7). I think this situation really resonates within English Studies. We often find ourselves wanting to be expert (or maybe I'm speaking for myself), only to rediscover again and again that I am "walking on air ... far from the scientific ground" (8). Being a philosopher, a questioner, is an easier claim to make (like that of the generalist), if not an easier job to do. But is it as valuable? Or, as de Certeau suggests (and critiques) on page 9, is it possible to be the Philosopher as Expert? And if so, what does this mean?

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Works referenced above include:

• Michel de Certeau's "The Practice of Everyday Life"
• "Intercultural Rhetoric, Technology Transfer, and Writing in U.S.-Mexico Border Maquilas" in TCQ by Barry Thatcher
• Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. MacGregor Wise's "Culture+Technology"
• "The Triumph of Users: Achieving Cultural Usability Goals with Localization" in TCQ by Huatong Sun