Evans Pedagogy of Critical Thinking

Evans Pedagogy of Critical Thinking

Ryan Evans

Professor Douglass Merrell

CHID 497 Pedagogy of Critical Thinking

The goal of this project is to develop and refine my own style of pedagogy for teaching history and critical thinking. The areas in which I want to focus on in creating a teaching method are the following: leading and facilitating discussion sections, lecture, and evaluating and commenting on student work. I have formed my teaching philosophy for critical thinking on the basis of a variety of sources and from first hand experience as a peer facilitator and guest lecturer for CHID 110. Some of the major sources that I used include Neil Postman, Stephen D. Brookfield, and Howard Gardner. I want to build my own philosophy of pedagogy in the area of critical thinking in the three main aspects of teaching: lecture, discussion section, and evaluation.

The lecture is the backbone and structure of a college course in which the discussion sections augments the lecture. According to Stephen Brookfield, (Brookfield p102) the lecture has three characteristics. It makes use of a variety of teaching and communication processes; it is clearly organized so that students can follow the thread of thought, and it models the learning behaviors expected in the course. I have found that delivering a lecture is a vastly different task than facilitating a discussion for a number of reasons. Most important is that the power distribution in a lecture is completely shifted from the students to being weighted on my shoulders. I hold power not only in what information I am conveying but the manner and style in which I deliver it and place emphasis on it. Voice, inflection, and tone are important ways to convey to the students which parts of the information being delivered has the emphasis. I tried to slow down my speech and add emphasis and clarity when dictating the information about which they are to take notes. When I am giving filler and background information, or a connecting narrative I can speed up and dramatize it to make it sound engaging and exciting. Stephen Brookfield has a lot of great advice about delivering interesting lectures. In the process of preparing my lecture, I found that it was similarly structured to an exaggerated form of a formal essay; it has an introduction, several body paragraphs each with different main points that tie to the theme or thesis, and a conclusion that recaps all the points and ends with a final thought. Professor Merrell’s advice of how to structure a lecture is “Tell them what you’re going to cover. Cover each point and show the significance. Tell them why you told them and recap what they learned and what you told them.” I’ve found this organized structure very valuable because it is packaged in such a way that the students are told what they are going to learn both at the beginning and end of the lecture. This prepares their minds to be open and ready to what they are going to learn, and in the end it is all tied together into a recap the cements the knowledge in for them. Ending with a summery of the crucial points and what makes them important let the students know what they should take away from the lecture. This is especially important when teaching critical thinking where the ability to follow my path and train of thought is vital for the students to understand the perspectives being presented on the topic. This is achieved by the structured format of the lecture itself.

There are different methods available for giving lectures such as the medium of PowerPoint. Postman stated how technology may be seen as a blessing, but he also recognizes that it also has negative aspects as well. Lectures should be driven by personality and charisma not by graphics and text on a screen. One of my main goals is to harness my abundance of energy and enthusiasm and channel it into my delivery. “Like all important technologies of the past, they are Faustin bargains, giving and taking away, sometimes in equal measure, sometimes more in one way than the other” (Postman p.41). This can apply to the use of computers in the classroom where PowerPoint has been used sometimes as a crux to drive lectures and to substantiate on visual representation. I can see how PowerPoint is great for certain circumstances and can be great for visual learners, however, the abundance of visuals can take student’s attention away from the material and direct it to the visual slides. As a student, I have missed a lot of learning by being too busy copying down verbatim what was on the PowerPoint slides instead of listening and comprehending the lecture that was being delivered. Lecturing with a simple outline is more effective because it keeps students on track without taking the attention away from the material. I was shocked to find that it took three hours of intense preparation to deliver a one hour lecture. A good lecture should provide an entry point for the students to expand and explore further in their assignments and discussion, and it should raise new questions and ideas about the topic. The lecture should inform the students in a way that allows them to understand the viewpoint and perspective presented with enough clarity to apply it to the themes of the course. Ken Wilber introduces the idea of the process in which students grow in learning critical thinking culminates at a fulcrum which he defines as: “…the momentous process of differentiation and integration as it occurs in human growth and development” (Wilber p.131). This process should be run by the background and structure of the lecture which should give the students the topic from different vantage points. I believe that raising intriguing questions can also be a successful way to push the students to think critically on their own rather than being handed out that information. These questions can spark a starting point for their critical reflection journals, which then carries on to be discussed in section to be analyzed and compared with others. The lectures should be able to bring about these pivotal points of student consciousness and awareness of the material being taught that they develop their conception of the topic. Brookfield has his own approach on how to gauge how the students are learning from the lectures by having the students fill out a quick reflection which he calls the Critical Incident Questionnaire in which they write down what part or concept of the lecture was most clear to them and what they struggled with. (Brookfield p.41) I agree that self reflection is important but too much can be overstraining busywork. Reflection on what they learned or had trouble with can be addressed in sections. While lectures are one of the primary teaching methods, knowing how to engage the students in discussion can usually be even more valuable to the students learning.

The discussion section gives students the chance to tackle issues from both the readings and the lecture so they can analyze them critically. The power in discourse is carried by the students; this is an inverse of power from a lecture. In an ideal situation the power is dispersed among all the students where each one, in an ideal sense, participates equally. Brookfield brought up a concept from Michael Foucault about the unequal power distribution in discussion. “In modern society people learn to internalize norms that serve to keep existing structures inherent”(Brookfield p.16). The problem here is that there is unequal participation in discussion groups. There will always be a few shy students that will always stay silent and there will be a couple of dominant students that overpower over others monopolizing the discussion. The key is to come up with ways to equally engage as much of the class as possible. I have tried various methods ranging from breaking the class up into small or medium sized groups, systematically revolving the focus on each student. Both approaches have different effects. Problems can occur where a majority of students fail to speak up for a number of reasons such as shyness or not knowing what to say or how to contribute. One method I have used to solve this problem is to have everyone write down a discussion question and put them all into a hat. I would select people to draw a question out of the hat. One student would read it and provide insight on it, this would lead to a mini open discussion with the class. I would typically target quiet people to start the discussion, but by the end of the class everyone would get the opportunity to speak. It is important to encourage speaking and to let people who are enthusiastic to say what they want to say, but at the same time must be balanced so the rest of the class gets an opportunity to speak. Brookfield has similar methods which he calls circular voice and circular response on page 144; there is a question posed for the class and they respond around the room, each getting a minute to speak. Postman provides a binary model of role of teachers is perceived. The two pedagogy methods used by teachers are truth revealers versus error detectors with the emphasis on the latter where reducing mistakes of the students is more beneficial to them. This model has several negative connotations, however: If the bar is set too high, (as Postman states it that there is no tolerance for error) this can be the cause for student reluctance to speak in class for fear of making a mistake. Instead, the environment must be a place where students realize there is no wrong answer and that they will not be judged by their views. Views that people don’t agree with will be discussed and analyzed for validity by the group; it actually benefits the group to have a false perception to work out with examples and reasoning to disprove the notion. This process enhances the group’s ability to work through issues using methods of critical thinking. The author makes the point of the importance of critical thinking and questioning the source. “The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong.” (Postman p.128) It is important to develop individual independence to analyze and interpret information and to filter it through ones own reactions and beliefs to the information. Without a firm understanding in one’s own beliefs, it makes it difficult to share and compare those beliefs with others in discussion. It is necessary to have an initial stance or belief so that during the course of the discussion, it is possible to either change and modify your previous beliefs, or strengthen them by what you learned from the discussion, comparison and discourse of the belief, and rationale of your peers.

Students often struggle with looking past the dry facts and dates of history in order to see the flesh and humanity of the people who lived it. “The people (of history) are viewed as generic and remote rather than as particular persons who, like themselves, exhibit an amalgam of sometimes conflicting goals and feelings”. (p.174) Discussion of ideas and themes can be enriched by looking at them through the lenses of Wilber’s three areas of critical thinking: consciousness, morals, and science. (Wilber p.248)

Looking at an issue from the points of view of how it applies or affects truth in different ways. Wilber categorizes truth as subjective, intersubjective, and objective truth generates different ways of looking at it this provides a deeper understanding. Issues such as cloning humans can be seen as morally wrong or right; It can also be seen objectively on what it would mean scientifically, as well as how it can also be seen by what that would mean for our society and how a cloned person would be seen and viewed subjectively. Would they be seen as a person with equal rights or would they be viewed as an imperfect copy? The two major points on the approach to history according to the author are for students to relate history to their own lies and to get past their own assumptions and preconceived attitudes. “Students prove unable to distance texts from their own often-idiosyncratic assumptions about human nature”(p.174).

This presents the question of whether our assumptions and stereotypes are good enough to function in society. I would say no, because uneducated assumptions can lead to intolerance and conflict; if everyone followed their own assumptions it would be hard to have people communicate with each other without some base basis of shared truth.

Evaluating student work of assignments involving critical thinking can be challenging. The focus of the evaluation is the ideas and analysis presented by the student rather than the medium and mechanics of the writing. I found that the things to look for are places where the students make arguments that are biased or written in generalizations. It is also helpful to find places in which they could expand; one can give prompts to nudge them to think critically to expand their thoughts and dig into the issue even deeper. The feedback should be a discourse like a two-way communication where the feedback prompts the students to respond to it, think of the matter even further, and respond to the questions with more specific or expanded thoughts. In Lee’s article, he presents variety of ways to evaluate student work in a constructive way. He thinks it is important to evaluate it by: correcting, emoting, describing, suggesting, and questioning. (Lee p.264) Correcting false generalizations and pointing out biased statements are important to show the student that they could do a better job in those instances of looking critically at the issue and to explore both sides. It is also important to point out any false claims such as wrong dates or false facts that they may have represented in their paper. For example, Bell Hooks is not a man, and the Spanish did not experience first hand the natives being cannibals; that label was created by the rumors and stereotyping by the conquistadors. Praise is also important to include by highlighting and pointing out great points and examples made by the students so that they can feel confident about their work and know their strengths. It is important to also show what emotions you experienced from reading, such as impressions or how certain statements the students made you feel as a reader. This feedback is helpful because it shows the students how their writing comes across. It can be beneficial to suggest examples and ideas that relate to the topics they bring up. You can also help be suggesting how their ideas are related and can be tied together. For example, you could say, “Based on the ideas brought up in the paper, they all seem to describe ways in which religion was tainted. What does this say about religion and why do you think these ideas share this in common. Do you see any other similarities in these ideas that may cause this conclusion?”. Questioning is a very important tool because it can be used to push the students to analyze things further. You can ask questions such as “Why do you feel that way about this?” or “What were the motives behind the conquistadores’ actions?” and “Do you think it would have played out differently if they would have had different motives and background culture, such as being driven by science rather than religious doctrine?”. These questions push the student to think even harder about other possibilities of the events and allow them to dive into the material differently looking at it from other perspectives. Brookfield talks about how important clarity is when responding to student work. “Be clear and transparent as possible in your evaluative judgments. Describe specific actions you find favorable or unfavorable and those which you want students to concentrate” (Brookfield p.183). Learning how to look at material and think critically is an independent process that each student develops in their own unique way. This process can be advanced by specific comments that apply to the individual that push them to expand and look at things openly exploring and acknowledging the multiple perspectives of issues. Postman makes it apparent that the pedagogy model of learning by doing doesn’t work as well as remedial learning. “We learn far more by failing-by the trail and error, by making mistakes, correcting them, making more mistakes, correcting them, and so on. We are all in the need of remedial work well the time.” (p.119) I partially agree with him because we do learn a lot from our mistakes, but the only way that we can learn from our mistakes is if we have the openness and will to learn from them; it also depends on the method in which those mistakes are corrected. It doesn’t work to circle in red saying this is wrong. Teaching critical thinking and providing corrections requires much more, such as providing questions that open up possibilities of other viewpoints and lead the student to pursue other options and see a point in a different way. Teacher’s mistake of looking at something in a judgmental or biased way provides an opportunity to have it pointed out and for their attitude to change by providing questions or comments that lead to another belief.

From the exploration of these three areas of teaching critical thinking I have developed my own way of implementation. For the lecture, I have developed the need to have the ideas structured in such a way as to have the ideas organized to optimize the maximum impact of clarity. This means introducing the outline of the lecture followed by the main points and finishing it with a recap of the material. Covering material from multiple viewpoints and sources shows the multiple paths for that topic. For the discussion section, it is important to come up with ways to ensure the active participation and engagement of all the students. I now notice through my research that the structure of the class CHID 110 The Qustion of Human Nature, its lecture, response paper, and discussion question really live in a symbiotic relationship where they feed on each other develop the students critical thinking. Its effect of destabilizing the student’s current views allows them to see the world from multiple points of view along with knowing that the ideas are complex and change with self reflection tied to those ideas. Wilber wrote about this when he described the role of myth which ties to the myths or ideas brought by the course when he wrote the following two conflicting views on myths. “Myths cause symptoms, expose the myths to evidence, and the symptoms go away. The Idea is think differently, and you will start to feel differently” (Wilber p.168). This idea here is that our teaching exposes students to knowledge and that it is supposed to change their emotional impact or assumptions of that idea. If the right questions are raised the course should set the student beyond this fulcrum where they are thinking about the questions themselves rather than just the dry facts.

“Where concrete operational awareness can operate on the concrete world, formal operational awareness can operate on thought itself. Its not just thinking about the world, it’s thinking about thinking” (Wilber p.169).

Wilber means that sometimes the questions and the process are just as important if not even more so than the ideas; students should not take ideas at face value. Using a mix of approaches such as circular response and breaking the class into smaller groups are good ways to alleviate the problem of participation. Providing an environment for people to share opposing viewpoints and where peers can learn from each other is important, as well as evaluating the students’ work. The emphasis is not just to show what is wrong, but instead to indicate areas in which the students can think about things differently and to provide prompts that allow them to expand on the issue. The comments made are supposed to spur them into a mode where they can dive deeper into critical thought and explore their ideas further. From this they should begin a process they can apply to future papers by giving them the tools to look at things from multiple perspectives, analyze the motives or effects of issues, and to relate the issue with relevant examples. Teaching critically is a method of allowing the students to ask questions about the world and to analyze and realize the multiple points of views and their effects for each idea or history. It is an individual process which through the combination of lecture, discussion, and evaluations each student can grow in this area of critical thinking.

Works Cited

Brookfield Stephen D. The Skillful Teacher on the Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. John Wiely and Sons Inc. Sanfransico, CA 2006.

Gardner, Howard. The Unschooled Mind How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach. Basic Books New York: 2004.

Postman, Neil. The End of Education Redefining the Value of School. Vintage Books. New York: 1995.

Wilber, Ken. A Brief History of Everything. Shambhala Boston Mass: 2000.

Lee Elaine. Evaluating Student Writing.

Evans Teaching Pedagogy

Ryan Evans

12/11/06

CHID 497 Pedagogy

Scope of the project

Why I decided to focus on it

Ways in which I explored methods

What I learned from it

The scope of the project is to cover and analyze the workings of the three areas of teaching a critical thinking course such as CHID 110. These three areas consist of the lecture, discussion, and evaluations. I wanted to look at each area through the methods of various different scholars through the readings of the course plus an additional book I found called The Skillful Teacher on the Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom by Stephen Brookfield. This book in particular broke down different methods to approaching my three target areas of teaching at a collage level. The other readings (Postman, Wilber, and Gardner) were used to anaylize the content of the information taught to the students and how to achive the goal to get them to think critically. From these methods that I learned through my reaserch I paralleled it with my personal experience and tailored what I learned from them to what I felt works well for me to solve the issue of achiving the goals of this course. My aim for this process was for me to develop a greater understanding the role of a teacher and while I lived that out this quarter I wanted to deeply study the reasons behind the methods that seem to work and how I can better myself as a future college teacher. Experiancing the challenges on leading a discussion session and getting the quiet people to be engaged and to provide helpful feedback are some of the major skills I have learned and adopted methods. I set my project up to dive in deeper to discover what experienced professors and scholars say about their own interpretations as a good way to teach and lead discussion with the best effect of people learning and growing in the material. This project allowed me to channel what I learned from all my experiences as a peer facilitator and guest lecturer and apply it in comparison to my findings. I found that methods such as pushing questions to prompt students help them learn more than just giving your own opinion. From reading about formats of constructive criticism it changed the way I did comments

Country Of My Skull

Ryan Evans

5/12/2007

CHID 390

Ethics used to be what should be but that doesn’t work in society for a society can not complete agree on what the perfect solution or what the perfect form or ideal situation would be. Instead the shift of ethics is a state of what can be. The potentiality of the use of power in the structure of a society. Country of My Skull really develops this point when the commissions try to decide how to handle the terror in South Africa and the racial inequalities. Since there are different viewpoints and different standards of values of the ideal state the situation should not be based on an unrealistic unobtainable solution

“The Nuremburg and Tokyo trials could work the way they did only because the guilty lost their political power and their guns. Their defeat was complete and the conquerors need only to wrestle with their own sense of justice. But in Chile, as in South Africa, the overthrown regime is part of the new government and still has enough power to obstruct the inquests into any abuses or to start a new a civil war.”(31)

The position of power is in the hands of the government in order to try to control and restrain the violence of a revolution. When a single group holds a great amount of power but suddenly losses that power and becomes subjected by another group, the reversal causes a mixed definition of their status causing confusion. An example of this is the NAZI party between the late thirties to 1945 when the power was sucked from not only members of NAZI party who were actually responsible for the terror and violence of the holocaust but of all Germans. Sour resentment has come from the families of the key NAZI officials as they move from moving to a stance of heroics to being demonized. This brings up the question of what does it take to bring about justice. “It will sometimes be necessary to choose between truth and justice. We should choose truth, he says. Truth does not bring back the dead, but releases them from silence. A community should not wipe out a part of its past, because it leaves a vacuum that will fill by lies and contradictory, confusing accounts of what happened.” (32) In what way can death, murder, and terror be reconciled. The state can sometimes punish the people responsible; the state can give support to the families of the victims; the state can increase its police force to prevent from more incidents in the future. The state can do all this but the state can never change history or bring the victim back from the dead.

Inequalities in south Africa exist in such a way that it seems that whites are immune to attack for the structure of power in that society remains unbalanced

“No one can destroy whites-they have survival in their bones. But for us, if we don’t stand together no matter what, we’ll be wiped out.” (16)

Black Consciousness is addressed by Krog a lot in chapter 2. The idea that there is a true social inequalities between blacks and whites that exist in society and people are made aware of them.

“The torture of Yengeni continues, with some of us regarding him as a traitor to the case, a sell out, a cheat and, in some stupid twist of faith and fate, his torturer becomes the hero, the revealer, the brave man who informed us about it all.” (p.97)

The use of torture can seem to be an excessive use of power in correctional or investigative based part of society. It is used to disclose information that is useful to the society but sympathy usually is given to the victim. In the case that Krog presents, the sympathy is the opposite of what the mentality of siding with the victim. The torturer is seen as hero because he is upholding the system and withholding and inscribing power over the subjects within the society. By the means of using torture he is in way safeguarding the society by finding out information that can be used to in a sense save lives or to upkeep the system of control keeping the power safely in the hands of the police and society even if the methods may seem unjust or unclean. Torture is stigmatized as a non western method but this is far from the truth. The French practiced torture in Algeria and the United States practices unfair practices in Guantanamo. Even though it is kept quiet and secret it still remains a process that is used to uphold the power by physically forcing people to betray their country men in order to serve the agenda of the state which wishes to keep over the power.

“In all the stories, a landscape is created where the powerful are struggling with the powerless, the armed with the defenseless, and the landscape is filled with misunderstanding” (111). It is interesting here that the opposites are matched up. Who is to decide what makes a person powerful and to what extent does that power compare. Truth holds different weight to different people. How can one measure the level of terror when it all results in death. For some it depends on who is committing the acts and the way they are carried out. Dealing with death and atrocities can be tough and hard to compensate for because there is no way someone can bring a victim back from the dead. Terror also disrupts a societies basic needs of feeling safe. Health and safety are psychological needs on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

“The truth is validated by the majority, they say. Or you bring your own version of the truth to the merciless arena of the past-only in this way does the past become thinkable, the world become habitable” (112). The past is remembered and accepted true only through what is agreed upon by the majority but yet the horrors that happen known by the few are glazed over and not recognized. These events still exist they still truly happened but the power and the emphasis of them happening has been distorted in a way which needed to be illuminated and made known once again by society.

Specters of Society

Ryan Evans

5-27-07

CHID 390

Specters of Society

Jacques Derrida talks about the future of the world through the lens of the remnant specters of Marx and communism. He explores how laws and regulations in society are in relation to the individual what it might mean for the future of the trend of these societal restraints.

“It is this law that dislodges any present out of its contemporaneity with itself. Whether the promise promises this or that, whether it be fulfilled or not, or whether it be unfillable, there is necessarily some promise and therefore some historicity as future-to-come” (Derrida p51).

One of the great messages of the text is that even if a system such as communism failed it still made a meaningful impact and mark on the history and its impact effects the actions of society in a way that plays a small part in shaping our history. It is the notion that we learn from our failures in order to be pointed in the right direction to achieve success. This learning process by learning from the mistakes is a significant part of history and has impact on the outcome of the future. Without making mistakes we would not have known what not to implement and there would not have been engaged as skill set of learning and adapting. He talks of the world being in a sense of debt in certain areas wither it be human rights, politics, economics and the debt of problems hang over unsolvable and carries on from generation to generation. The problems will always be there but it is how each society approaches them to attempt to solve them that determines the outcome of society. The third specter is the status of national sovereignty and how states define themselves in the areas of social, economic, and political realms and how each interpret and interact to present problems. Communism in its pure Marxist idealized state seems to be a failed system in almost every sphere and region it was implemented in when looked

The nature of the intellectual in a world of capitalistic hegemony and the role of the intellectual. It seems that free thinkers of communal living and state power of cooperation have been suppressed and been placed extinct from modern society. This was made especially apparent during the cold war and the Red Scare in America where the thoughts and teachings of communism were all suppressed and replaced by the dominate ideas of communism. This seems to be the case leading to the future even though it has expanded from just a difference in the realm of economics and political structure. With the IMF and the World Bank and the WTO with the idea to unify the entire world less than one unified authority shows to have the same potential problems that are highlighted by the readings this week. According to Gramsci, “Traditional intellectuals functioned as the disseminators of political society’s ideas, introducing them into civil society through education, policy, religion, morality, and everyday institutions. They played an indispensable role in creating and maintaining hegemonic concepts, that is, concepts that became dominate through the creation of consent within civil society.” (Maurice Glasman p18) According to Glasman, the role of the intellectual seems to be very important in driving the pace of the political and structural agenda of the society. It just depends on what those dominate intellectuals believe in that determines what the society will adopt into policy. Under many of the democratic regimes many of the intellectuals of the cabinet put emphasis on social and state sponsored programs to serve the community. The beliefs of the solution of the key intellectuals of power determined and drove the output of what was put into practice into society.

The art of psychoanalysis which has been a discipline by many of the credited scholars has been inherently limited because it had always been a product about the colonized but always told from a European intellectual. One cannot fully analyze a culture that one does not fully identify with and inherent themselves so there is always a slight distancing between the results that they transcribe and that agreed upon universally.

“Psychoanalysis is a colonial discipline. A colonial intellectual formation disciplines a way of being as much as it establishes a form of analysis based in the age of colonialism and constitutive of concepts of the primitive against which the civilizing mission could establish it.” (Glasman p.6) He makes critique of Chakrabarty explaining that he finds that the modern is appropriate in its format of the colonies and that the fact of difference between Europe and the colonies actually renders the colonies to seem primitive. The theme that the colonies themselves are primitive and second rate in comparison to the Europeans is a plagued mentality of orientalsim and became the core of colonialism. After the process of decolonization these issues and this biased way of thinking was never completely resolved and remains a haunting specter that can cause unrest, violence, and conflict in the future. “The national self in Europe is structured in psychoanalysis as a modern counterpart of the primitive colonized. In its profoundly European constitution, it expresses the un-say able: the impossible achievement of selfhood for the colonized, which remain primitive and concealed, and the simultaneous tenuousness of the metropolitan colonizer’s self once decolonization is in place and the strife that sustains the colonized as a primitive is over.”(Glassman p6) The point here is that it has been engrained in the European that the a fixture of ones identity is linked to the structure of society hence someone who is not truly French would be considered inferior such as in the case of the Pied Noir. This idea is still very apparent in modern France. After experiencing the loss of its colony in Algiers France went through some struggles from the haunting mentality of colonialism such as the instances of the Pied Noir and the immigrants from Algeria. These have caused great tension and led to uprisings and riots. The French isolated these people into ghettos.

Worlding is an event through which the participants are brought into temporality and history, or conversely excluded from these and concealed timelessly into the earth…Science in the Althusserian sense is the introduction of a conceptual apparatus into the world rather than an analysis of empirical elements” (Glasman p4)

A look at encounter from the perspective of Marvelous Possessions

Ryan Evans

4/16/2007

CHID 390

Response

A look at encounter from the perspective of Marvelous Possessions

Stephen Greenblatt explores the process in which the European explorers interacted with the natives of the new world and how they oppressively extracted wealth, land, and language. Throughout this processes of acquiring the new wonders of the New World the Europeans affected the natives in both an oppressive and harmful manner. The encounter was treated in a way to gain possession of the wonders and wealth of the new culture by selfish methods. Europeans were so focused on gaining possession of the land and wealth that they failed to respect the native’s culture or take time to learn or preserve the ways and culture of the natives. The Europeans held a biased view of their own superiority backed by a strong religious belief that their backing in their Christian religion was the only divine religion which would label the heathen natives as inferior people who could logistically be oppressed, robbed, or converted. The differing of the approached ideologies of both sides brought about problems that led to the oppression of the natives. Greenbelt highlights this fact when he wrote. “The problem is not simply opposing interests- the natives’ desire to retain possession of their land against the Spanish desire to appropriate it-but incommensurable positions” (p.59) The idea that the interests are not opposed sheds light to that these cultures are so vastly different that they are not opposite stances but entirely different modes of thinking and background culture.

The acquisition of the native language was done through various ways. Greenbelt offers the method of kidnapping and trade as being the predominate method in which the Europeans used to acquire the ability to interact with the native.

The natives were exploited in the realm of trade where the Europeans would make unequal trades. The Europeans deceive the natives when they would give away worthless trinkets for the native’s rare valuables. This was possible due to the gap between cultures and the difference of value, wonder, and appeal of objects. A worthless glass bead held a much greater value to the natives who lacked the means of producing that material and object. These themes of exploitation, dominance, and proliferation ring through encounter. The encounters of the new world are very similar to the encounters depicted in Maria Dora Russell’s book, The Sparrow. In her book Earth makes contact with an alien race and the process of contact turns disastrous for both species as both cultures motivations are extremely different.

Greenbelt brought up the ideas of Justinian Ulpian who described the differenced between possessesing through stealth and acquiring in known knowledge. “We say that a person possesses by stealth that has entered into possession without the knowledge of him who, he suspects, would oppose his taking. No one acquires possession by stealth who takes possession in his important mid century gloss on this passage.” (p.59)

Motivations for possession for the Europeans remained to be gold, wealth, and land. Gold served a very different purpose between the two cultures. Gold was to great value to the Europeans so much value that they would rob and oppress the natives of their existence and rights of their land in order to obtain the wealth that the Europeans felt entitled to due to their cunning technological achievements of exploration and discovery. They saw that they deserved reward for their efforts of exploration for the point of exploration was to acquire wealth and new sources of materials.

Dealing with the marvelous and the attempts the please and meet Spain’s exception rate of return from its invested expenditures of exploration.

Religion held as a solid backing for the motivation for exploration and encounter.

“Wonder however, does not inherently legitimate a claim to possession…He may do so (invoke wonder) because the marvelous is closely linked in classical and Christian rhetoric to heroic enterprise.” (p.74) In summation of Greenbelts arguments on why Columbus invoked wonder is because he needed to make his acquisition of materials from the new world legitimate by associating them in parallel to the marvels acquired in both Christian and Classical stories of importance and with the successful acquisitions in the journeys in the Indies. By comparing the allocation of wonders and marvels of the New World to these historical examples of great success leads the world to believe that it is the morally right course of action to take and it cements the action into a positive light. The explores strived so hard to have their discoveries match the greatness of the older model expectations they sometimes exaggerated the wonder of their discoveries. Talking about Mandeville and the language of possession Greenbelt states that: “the language of the marvelous is part of a renunciation of possession, the critical pathway in a circulation of plagiarized, unstable signifiers through which a crusading drive toward the sacred rocks at the center of the world is transformed into a tolerant perambulation along its rim.”(p.24) Even the earlier forms encounter where the process includes oppression literally walking over the other culture. There are implications that travel is a great wonder in its self and the wonder of the New World blinds Europe of its local conflicts and problem. This societal distraction may be sense escapism from the local unrest and a fixation on the unknown.

French Algeria

The battle for Algerian Independence was from 1954-1962

The barricades were constructed in 1960

The 8 years of war caused 1.5 million deaths.

5,000 died in the café bombings

153,000 rebel insurants were killed by French security sources

Identity

“The Algerians had become just another material source to be exploited along with the minerals and the cows. But colonization had done much more than that; it had also robbed them of their souls, their being. Hence the fight against the colonial system was really a struggle to regain true selfhood.” (p.324)

Discussion Question: Is it possible to have a major revolution without violence? Can violence ever be legitimated or defended as necessary?

Reconciliation

Jacques Berque

-Felt Orientalism was outdated and that the attempts of France to reconcile with Algeria disregarded the ‘soul’ or identity of Algerians

-Like Massignon used genealogy (the shared Hellenistic heritage) the common monotheistic religions of Algerians and Europeans to justify reconciliation

Pierre Bourdieu

-Saw Algerian identity as performative. Individuals put on a ‘stage personage’ and despite own uniqueness joined with larger nationalist cause inspired by sense of communalism.

Nationalism and Culture

Fanon

-Was born in the French controlled colony of Martinique in which his influence of growing up in a colony effected his later thought on the colonized right to achieve a state of nationalism. He believed that the only way for this to happen was through violence. He went to work in Algeria to practice psychiatry. There he learned a lot about the Algerian people.

-defended revolutionary violence (saw similarity with France’s own revolution) and applies the Maoist model of a peasant rebellion

-saw no point in continued ties between Europe and Algeria

-people want to attach to a larger ‘cultural matrix’ even when the only thing linking them together is struggle, cultures are too different to coalesce (African-American and Africans, Ghana and Algeria)

-proposed the idea of a ‘new’ Algerian man who rejected all Western influence

-praised the possibility of a fluidity and openness of culture

-violence is necessary for a cultural clean slate (tabula rasa)

-It was thought that orientlism and violence was actually constructed and fed by the views of intellectuals such as Sahat and Fanon. Violence was necessary to achieve nationalism. Fanon differed from Pierre Bourdieu in the fact that Bourdieus saw Algerians as mixed diverse group of tribes not united while Fanon saw a much stronger association between the Algerians and the capability for them to unify as one body to achieve nationalism.

“Fanon thought that is was possible to erase colonial identity for anti-colonial violence.” (243)

“A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.”

“This is why we arrive at a proposition which at first sight seems paradoxical: the fact that in a colonized country the most elementary, most savage and the most undifferentiated nationalism is the most fervent and efficient means of defending national culture.” (2^nd to last page of Fanon)

*Example: Maoist China

Discussion Question: Do you see a contradiction between Fanon’s idea of cultural fluidity and his desire for “a veritable creation of new men” in Algeria?

French colonization succeeded when France was driven out of Algeries and Algeria became a nation state for that achieved the truly idealized French notion of a nation state.

Pied Noir-The French from Algeria who were kicked out of Algeries and returned back to France were not received well. The resentment still stands in modern times with cultural and racial issues such as the current riots of France

Closing questions

* “What is surprising is that the leaders who had suffered the agony of torture at the hands of a desperate France now practice many of the same ‘antiterrorist’ tactics against the very forces that had been so blindly overlooked in the formulation of the new man” (258)

How does one identity change under colonization? Once it is over do they reclaim the colonial identity or get a new one? Is it possible for the colonized to completely dissolve the influence of colonial culture?