Posted on 09/10/2002 5:51:08 PM PDT by BlackIce
"In the modern planetary situation, Eastern and Western ‘cultures’ can no longer meet one another as equal partners. They meet in a westernized world, under conditions shaped by western ways of thinking." --- W. Halbfass[i]
This essay argues that intellectual svaraj (self-rule) is as fundamental to the long term success of a civilization as is svaraj in the political and financial areas. Therefore, it is important to ask: whose way of representing knowledge will be in control? It is the representation system that defines the metaphors and terminology, interprets what they mean in various situations, influences what issues are selected to focus on, and, most importantly, grants privileges by determining who is to control this marketplace of ideas.
As an implicit body of standards, a representation system disguises a meta-ideology – the substratum of contexts on which specific ideologies emerge and interact. It includes the language used and the unstated frames of reference, and acts as the subliminal filter through which positions are constructed and their fate negotiated.
A people without their own representation system, in a worst case scenario, get reduced to being intellectual consumers looking up to the dominant culture. In the best case scenario, they could become intellectual producers, but only within the representation system as defined and controlled by the dominant culture, such as has happened recently with many Indian writers in English.
Ashis Nandy summarizes how this mental colonialism was brought about:
“This colonialism colonises minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all…. Particularly, once the British rulers and the exposed sections of Indians internalized the colonial role definitions….the battle for the minds of men was to a great extent won by the Raj.”[ii]
The repetitious use of a given representation system eventually leads to a widely accepted set of “essences,” as stated by Friedreich Nietzsche:
“The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for -- originally almost always wrong and arbitrary -- grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be a part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such.”
Therefore, control over the representation of knowledge is analogous to control over the operating system of computers: representation systems are to competing ideas what operating systems are to computer applications. Control over this platform, especially its invisible standards and rules, is of strategic consequence.
The structure of the essay is as follows: (1) Explaining the origins of neocolonialism. (2) Showing that many Indians are themselves perpetuating neocolonialism today. (3) Linking this with Western control from above the glass ceiling.
(Excerpt) Read more at sulekha.com ...
It doesn't make a damn bit of sense.
So, even though it may be "nice" to spend the time to get an advanced degree in one of those subjects, I bet there is but one job for every thousand or so graduates. Nice to do it for personal reasons, but its no way to make a living.
Egads, the United States has a monopoly on knowledge in the same way that Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Methinks, the Islamists are in deep doo doo.
The difficulties in finding translational equivalencies that work across cultures are not a sign of any sort of "colonialism," intellectual or otherwise, they're innate in the very act of translation. Of course "tantra" isn't merely "sex," to use one of his examples, nor do I think any serious student past high school considers it so. Neither, by the way, does "chi" equate to "life force," but it's about as good as something as flat as word-by-word translation can do between English and Chinese, and it is certainly not inaccurate by virtue of intellectual "colonialism." I'm thinking the author's doing a bit of special pleading here...
On the whole it's a fine read if you can get past the deconstructionist claptrap - it would have been a better essay without the author trying to make it sound like something out of a brain-dead U.S. sociology department's summer compendia. If he is correct (and I wouldn't doubt it for a minute) then it isn't the West that's going to have to do a better job of understanding his culture, it's his culture that's going to have to do a better job of presenting itself to the West. To impute intellecutal imperialism goes too far - it may be ignorance but it is at least honest ignorance. If he wants us to understand, let him teach.
1% - it's good teach Indian children Indian classics and history. That's nice.
4% - griping about Indians or Indianism lost to the West, pretending that it's a force from the west causing this, the usual "neocolonial" deflection invoking forceful cause from the outside, rather than individual choices of the Indians themselves or domestic forces. This is a Western mode of thought.
95% - standard deconstructionist/post-modernist obscurantism, obfuscation and hyper-over-determinism, proffering an authorial self-(re)presentation of erudition within Western academic contexts of common community in pursuit of and controlling disbursement of academic interest/power/money among that community, and omitting/suppressing ideologies not in concord, an economically interested ideology usually presented as "academic freedom." --- All of which is really funny because the guy's point about Indianess and Indian knowledge system are belied by the fact that he wholeheartedly embraces Western-French academic knowledge structures/strictures. Is this a hoax?
Two words, says it all much shorter than I!
That's a Grand Slam, good buddy. Excellent.
I know this passage...
Bullsh*t with a hindu bureacratic accent.
This one should be cut up and chewed in small bites.
The truly amazing thing is that anybody believes this garbage.
Does terminology condition our understanding of a given concept? Yes, but is does not immediately follow that the concept described by that terminology is without intrinsic value, irrespective of cultural and political context. To a deconstructionist, of course, words are no more than words, and we can make of them what we will.
I'll buy that.
I think the guy's point is not to let outsiders define your own tradition and culture, and that is what has been happening. The "white" Hindus have bought and sold it because it's the hip thing to do these days, and because they haven't been taught what they sell is garbage.
What's wrong with US Hindus keeping a wall between their faith and the US society.
Nothing...
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