In Arts of the Contact Zone, Pratt discusses when different cultures meet and the subsequent texts that are produced during the time of the meeting. Throughout the majority of the article, Pratt discusses an essay that was written by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. This document is important to Pratt because it demonstrates how cultures meet, clash, and combine to produce texts that are unique to their time.
In 1613, Guaman (an Incan) wrote a 1200 page essay to the Spanish king. In the essay, he uses the traditional Spanish language, but he also infuses the document with his native language, Quechua. Pratt notes that the document is especially interesting because he uses both the languages to show that he has not fully submitted to the Spanish government. Guaman criticizes the Spanish government, in Spanish, in the essay. However, he also uses native drawings to demonstrate how the Spanish have taken everything by force. Pratt is able to see the symbolism behind the drawings. For example, when Guaman shows how the Spanish overtook his government, he depicts the Spaniard on the right side of the page (which denotes wrong). He also has the Spaniard a little more elevated than the Incan to show domination. Pratt contends that Guaman’s essay is a true example of contact zones. When the Spanish and Incan met, their cultures clashed, and this was the text that was produced.
In studying contact zones, Pratt has also studied the characteristics that make up a “utopian” community. For example, she states that the ideal community shares an identical language and all know how to use it. Also, a utopian community is styled in three different ways: a limited style, sovereign, and fraternal style. According to Pratt, this mirrored the way in which people thought about language and speech community. For example, she gives an example of limited speech community when she described her son’s paragraph. She complained that because the paragraph was littered with grammatical errors, the teacher didn’t see her son’s message. The teacher was only viewing speech through a limited scope; only the teacher’s point of view was taken into consideration.
How then, Pratt wonders, are teachers supposed to view the whole picture? In other words, how is a teacher supposed to not only take in her own point of view, but everybody else’s? Pratt contends that modern teaching has now shifted to combine everyone’s experiences, cultures, and viewpoints to make students feel as though they actually belong. Pratt recalls how the university that she worked at designed a course that included multiple cultures. She states that students felt like they belonged. Everyone participated in that class because everyone felt like they had a voice.
She concludes the essay by suggesting the different ways people can communicate cross-culturally. By listening to different culture’s histories and sharing one’s own history, people can make strides at communicating more effectively. By creating contact zones and creating rules for communicating across different lines of cultures people can really begin to communicate.
After reading both Muckelbauer and Pratt, I believe that there is a connection between the two. It seems like Muckelbauer and Pratt both seem to believe that teachers have the ability to connect students with the world. For example, one of the imitation exercises that Muckelbauer discussed was how the Ancients would make their students study different types of models in order to complete an imitation. By studying the different models, students would absorb many different view points, inevitably developing a broader view of the world. Pratt advocates the study of many different cultures, so students will have a better understanding of the world.
Posted by bvaldez1988 on November 4, 2008
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