dagblog - Comments for "Tribal Knowledge"

during the past year, I had

Beetlejuice — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 16:56:14 +0000

during the past year, I had the chance to view the BBS documentary ... The Story of India ... and one of the episodes highlighted a city/town in eastern Pakistani in the Indus valley. The inscription on the city walls as you entered was a quote from Jesus ... The Earth is a bridge to heaven. Build no house upon it. However, christians interpret it as ... God ruled that people must use the bridge Jesus built to get to heaven.

odd thing is, Islam acknowledges their God and the christian God are one in the same ... they just disagree Jesus is the Son of God ... he's a prophet of God in their view ... but Mohammed was the true prophet of God who added final corrections. They're just waiting for christians to realize it.

theres' quite a bit of posturing for the same God ... Jew, Islam and Christian ... and none wishes to admit their only difference is tribal.

Lulu, I know you weren't

Doctor Cleveland — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 16:00:28 +0000

In reply to Doc, I posted a reply last

Lulu, I know you weren't saying that no one else

But my post started with people taking the attitude that only Christians are allowed to have an opinion about

No, I am not talking about having experiential knowledge give you a few clues to picture the story better. Never have been.

I'm talking about people saying that no one outside their group can understand a writer the way people inside the group can, that nobody but the members of the group can ever "get it." And that morphs pretty quickly into both unearned back-patting ("I am from England, so I get credit for Shakespeare"), and aggressive turf-policing ("Why should people who aren't from the South get to talk about Faulkner.")

Look, let me repeat something I quoted upthread. Back at Berkeley in the 1960s, a new young English professor, who happened to be Jewish, had one of her senior colleagues tell her:

Jews should not be allowed to teach Renaissance literature, because Renaissance literature is a Christian literature.

If you happen to live in Nantucket, and that makes it easier for you to picture some scenes in Moby Dick, that's great. If you decide that having a house on Nantucket means you know more about Melville than anyone else, that makes you, at best, an enormous jerk.

That is the kind of thing I am talking about.

Thanks. I managed to watch

EmmaZahn — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 15:37:55 +0000

In reply to Robert Wright interviews Reza

Thanks. I managed to watch the whole thing. Okay, my mind did wander away a couple of times.

I just stumbled onto this

A Guy Called LULU — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 15:05:07 +0000

In reply to Doc, I posted a reply last

I just stumbled onto this quote and decided to throw it into the mix.

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” — Henry Adams

Robert Wright interviews Reza

A Guy Called LULU — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 01:11:45 +0000

In reply to Tribal Knowledge

Robert Wright interviews Reza Aslan about the interview and about his book.

http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/20707

Doc, I posted a reply last

A Guy Called LULU — Sat, 03 Aug 2013 17:46:00 +0000

In reply to Well, Lulu, I deliberately

Doc, I posted a reply last night but hadn't remembered to log in and so the spam filter got me. This is a slightly edited version of that comment.
If a moderator notices they could please delete the first one[s] rather than posting them. Apologies to all concerned if multiples show up.

I deliberately chose two examples where the kind of experiential knowledge you're discussing is pretty much a moot point, because nobody has any more experiential knowledge than anyone else. But people will still insist on their special tribal claim anyway.

But the important point regarding what I have said is that they have different experiential knowledge which is often knowledge shared with their tribe and maybe with the creator of the art.

I see your point though. It does make a more aggressive attack on the attitude or belief by the tribalists than I was noticing before. Or maybe you are exaggerating now to stress your point. You did say it was about something annoying.

I, though, was thinking, for example, not of having special knowledge of either Faulkner the man or Faulkner as a body of work, but about the experience of engaging with a work of art as the engagement was taking place. It could be your first and only read of a new author, an author you know nothing about. Everybody that ever read Faulkner had to do it for a first time. Not knowing anything about Faulkner beforehand need not diminish the experience which may have been enhanced by bla bla bla . Not going on to study Faulkner after reading him for the first time does not diminish that first experience, whatever it was.

But being from Mississippi, and having those little bits of experiential knowledge, doesn't mean you should give yourself credit for understanding everything about Faulkner.

Ya see, it would never have occurred to me that anyone would really think like that. About as far as I would go, if I felt some relation to that idea, is to say that I think I know where he's coming from.

But you shouldn't fool yourself into thinking you've got nothing to figure out, or decide that people from say, Seattle, *aren't allowed* to have an opinion about Faulkner.

I agree 100% with that. I promise you I don't think I have it all figured out, but I certainly agree that people from, say Seattle, should absolutely have the right to an opinion on the writings of someone even if they write from a long distance and from a somewhat different culture.
Thanks for the response. This has been interesting.

Reading this nuanced,

acanuck — Sat, 03 Aug 2013 06:14:10 +0000

In reply to Tribal Knowledge

Reading this nuanced, thoughtful thread, a bizarre video image popped into my brain: "Next up, a Fox News special report: Tribal Knowledge -- do ethnicity and/or religious upbringing enhance or impede understanding of complicated issues? Followed by our panel featuring Charles Krauthammer and Ann Coulter, moderated by Reza Aslan." Not only would I make an exception and tune in for that, I'd pop some corn.

Well, Lulu, I deliberately

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 23:49:00 +0000

In reply to I checked Dag this morning

Well, Lulu, I deliberately chose two examples where the kind of experiential knowledge you're discussing is pretty much a moot point, because nobody has any more experiential knowledge than anyone else. But people will still insist on their special tribal claim anyway.

An Irish-American who grew up in (let's say) the Boston area doesn't have any special insight into Irish literature that anyone else doesn't have. They don't have any direct experience of Yeats's or Joyce's world. They don't know anything the rest of us don't, unless they put in the work of learning it. (I say this as an Irish-American from the Boston area. I might have been more *motivated* to read those writers, but I didn't have any privileged understanding of them.) It's even more the case with Shakespeare, since no one's had any experience of the world he inhabited for centuries. The world he lived in is gone. The dialect of English he spoke (and I'm talking about more than the accent) is gone. No one grows up speaking Shakespeare's English. And at this point growing up in Warwickshire doesn't give you any clues to his work that people growing up in Sydney or Delhi or Lagos don't have. In terms of actual knowledge, everyone starts off in the same place there.

(And it should go without saying that no one's life experience is much of a guide to the historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago.)

Now, there IS literature where your life experience is a help, and I wouldn't deny that. (I just left out those examples to keep my original post a few paragraphs shorter.) But there's still a distinction between knowing more about the context a story is set in from your own experience and the kind of tribal possessiveness I'm talking about.

Now, if you're from Mississippi, there are going to be things about Faulkner's writing that are more familiar to you than they'd be if you were, say, an Irish-American Yankee from around Boston. That's definitely true. Experiential knowledge can be a real help there. But being from Mississippi, and having those little bits of experiential knowledge, doesn't mean you should give yourself credit for understanding everything about Faulkner. Those aren't easy books, and it takes a lot of work and patience to get your head around them. If you want to skip that work, and just wear the Faulkner T-shirt out of local pride, that's cool. But you shouldn't fool yourself into thinking you've got nothing to figure out, or decide that people from say, Seattle, *aren't allowed* to have an opinion about Faulkner. (Gabriel Garcia Marques, who really really really ain't from Mississippi, is one of Faulkner's greatest and most thoughtful readers.)

A friend of mine was TA-ing an African-American literature class in graduate school. (She's African-American herself, and was specializing in African-American literature as a Ph.D. student.) And she used to joke about the way some undergraduates would approach her when they didn't do as well as they expected. Basically she translated them as asking, "Wait ... about this grade ... I'm, y'know ... black." (Of course, they surely didn't say that in so many words.) Now, does a black student have helpful experiential knowledge that white kids don't have when they read Toni Morrison? You better believe it. But on the other hand, it's not enough. Morrison isn't an easy writer. Nobody's life experience makes every single thing about The Bluest Eye clear on the first reading. Those students, from my friend's perspective, were trying to coast on their identities, presuming they deserved a good grade because they had some special claim on the work. From my perspective, they should have been thinking about the work's claim on THEM and worked harder.

Like Lulu, I've found myself

Orlando — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 22:19:55 +0000

In reply to Tribal Knowledge

Like Lulu, I've found myself thinking about this yesterday. First, I wish you'd write more about Shakespeare and history and the language but maybe since that's your day job, you're not so interested.

Second, I agree with Lulu in that I think that there can be particular situations that have special resonance with some people because of their tribe but I think your point is that you can't assume that because an individual doesn't belong that the same thing won't be understood in a similar way.

But it goes the other way too. While I usually would argue that study and thoughtful consideration of things is better than a gut response, I think it can go too far. I used to work with an anthropology professor when I was a fundraiser. We used to sometimes have lunch with various officials from consulates and cultural organizations. At this times, I wished the floor would open and swallow me as he would begin to lecture the officials about their own culture in that way some of you professors have.

As with most things, there's surely a happy medium.

I checked Dag this morning

A Guy Called LULU — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 03:54:59 +0000

In reply to Tribal Knowledge

I checked Dag this morning just before leaving the house for some remodel work. Not much I did today required paying close attention and I ended up thinking about Tribal Knowledge off and on quite a bit as I worked. Maybe that is partly because I have mentioned tribalism a number of times as a significant factor in some controversial exchanges here.
If we had been in a live conversation there are a number of places where I would interrupt and say,"But, but, but ...".
I can see how a piece of literature can be studied, its setting can be studied, and the author can be studied. What you say about your knowledge of Shakespeare makes sense to me and I can easily believe you know a hell of a lot about him. I also don't doubt that you can appreciate the experience of his works as much as someone growing up in the same area that Shakespeare lived and worked in. But, Shakespeare lived and wrote a long time ago. Knowledge of him and his works and analysis of both must be somewhat homogenized by now.
More contemporary literature is much different. Years ago I read a few short stories by Bernard Malamud. I just now glanced at Wikipedia and learned a bit about him and if I wanted I suppose I could learn a lot about him and read everything he ever wrote. The thing is, what I recall is that I just could not relate to his stories that I read in the same way that I could others involving people with backgrounds or situations I was at least somewhat familiar with. I realized even then, I think, that I just did not have the adequate background to understand and relate to and appreciate stories about about being Jewish in New York City. I just didn't get it.
I grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and as different as that is from Chicago in the depression, as a teenager I could better relate to Studs Lonigan and his story was much more meaningful to me. I knew people in various stages of life living life as it played out for him. More recently, I think I probably have cultural experiences that make it quite likely that my reading Dear Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant, which describes people I have known and stupid redneck attitudes I have been around, rang true and insightful in ways it probably couldn't to a born and bred New York Jew, for instance. Dispatches, a journalists description of his experiences in Vietnam written by Michael Herr, reads like page after page of flashbacks where so many other stories about the same subject seem like contrived bullshit, even the academic studies. Especially the academic studies. No offense intended and I hope not taken, but academic studies just do not, can not, get to the heart of that experience and therefore, IMO, can never be as valuable in offering special insight. Michael Herr did offer special insight.
One more anecdote. Traveling in Brazil some years ago I hooked up for a couple weeks with a couple English guys who had worked in Australia for a few years and were taking the long way home. One day in a bar we ran into some other English travelers and we all had a good afternoon drinking beer and talking about various things. Later my two buddies were a bit surprised that I hadn't been aware of what to them was an obvious class difference between them and the other two English guys. Nothing was said that I picked up on, that I recognized, and I didn't realize that their accents told so much of a story and marked them as being in the upper class. My buddies said that if they were to run into the same two in London that they would be polite but quickly on their way, there would never be any socializing because of that class difference. I have to believe that those different class distinctions underlie so many stories set in jolly old England and so someone growing up there would have, or at least might have, some special insight that I would completely miss.
So, where you say:

A less toxic but more annoying version of this behavior that I run into a lot is some people's conviction that they have a special insight into certain literature because of their ethnic background.

I would say that people very often do have a special experience of a piece of literature, and sometimes insight derived from it, because of their ethnic, or geographical, or class, or career, ...etc, etc, background.

And when you say:

That sense of privileged understanding comes from one's social identity, not from actual knowledge, and can be actively hostile to such knowledge.

I would say that a person can have actual experiential knowledge about their social identity and about their fellow tribalists which other do not which they can bring to a story involving their tribe and the result can be a special experience or insight.

I do not doubt that Aslam has written a good study of the historical Jesus but your thesis extended to fiction too and that is where I disagree with a lot of what you say.