[Dan to Ant] What possible difference does Marsha's gender make on an intellectual discussion list?
[Arlo] Well, I think if we start from Pirsig's recognition that "our intellectual description of nature is always culturally defined", and realize that the "culture" males and females experience is often quite divergent. The same applies to ethnicity, and this difference is elevated where racism is more prevalent. Although these cultural boundaries tend to be quite fractal (revealing subcultures and narration differences between individuals down to the smallest binary), I think recognizing, at the very least, the larger cultural dissimilarities formed by the enculturation is a worthwhile endeavor. [Dan] If I were a black Asiatic woman living in a Jewish settlement in eastern Siberia and who grew up on the shores of Lake Baikal would that suddenly make my contributions more interesting? Would my intellectual insights become remarkably more profound? [Arlo] Maybe. I don't see Ant privileging the voices of 'non-white, non-males', just recognizing that culture does shape our intellectual patterns. I mean, the entirety of Northrop's "Meeting of East and West" is a recognition that culture influences thought, and that these perspectives can be significant enough to craft extremely different intellectual discourses. As someone who works with international students, from literally every corner of the world (except the poles), my experience is that we often don't even recognize the cultural underpinnings to our intellectual ideas until they are contrasted with intellectual ideas grown in a quite different cultural milieu. So I think the emphasis is on bringing in voices where you suspect enculturation has produced divergent intellectual discourses and see if that's true, and if it is what does it imply. This is, really, how Northrop's entire project could be framed. You won't always find significant differences, but its worth the effort. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
