Reading/Thinking Questions for Pratt, "Arts of the Contact Zone"
The following questions are meant to be used as a guide to reading "Arts
of the Contact Zone"; your observations on the essay and responses to
these questions will guide our discussion. An outline of the essay appears
after the questions.
1. What point(s) does Pratt make by using the example of her son Sam and
the baseball cards?
2. Who is Guaman Poma, where is he from, and what did he write?
3. What does Pratt mean by the term "contact zones"? How is the term
related to her discussion of Guaman Poma?
4. What does Guaman Poma do in the "New Chronicle" portion of his
manuscript? Why is it an example of what Pratt calls an "autoethnographic
text" and what is the relation of that sort of text to an ethnographic text?
What examples of autoethnographic texts in addition do Guaman Poma's
does Pratt give? In what ways does Guaman Poma's text reflect "the
dynamics of language, writing, and representation in contact zones"?
5. What does Guaman Poma do in the "Good Government and Justice"
portion of his manuscript? How is it an example of what anthropologists
call "transculturation"? How do the figures Pratt gives from Guaman
Poma's book provide examples of transculturation?
6. How, then, is "Guaman Poma's text [. . .] truly a product of the contact
zone"? What patterns of thinking lead to one seeing it as "anomalous or
chaotic," and what patterns of thinking lead to one seeing it as "simply
heterogeneous"? Why is Garcilaso de la Vaga's version of the Spanish/
Inca much more readily accepted in Spain and Latin America than
Guaman Poma's version?
7. What, then, are "some of the literate arts of the contact zone" and "some
of the perils of writing in the contact zone"? Why and how are these arts
and perils relevant today?
8. Why is Pratt unhappy with the concept of "speech communities" and
the way it is used in discussing language? How is her idea of "speech
communities" related to Benedict Anderson's idea of "imagined
communities"? How are writing, literacy, and what Anderson calls "print
capitalism" related to this discussion?
9. What model of language is normally assumed? What different theory
does Pratt imagine?
10. What are the assumptions of the analyses of language based on the
"autonomous, fraternal models of community" overlook? Why might this
model not work "when speakers are from different classes or cultures, or
one party is exercising authority and another is submitting to it or
questioning it"? How does Pratt use the two examples involving her son
(Manuel this time) to develop this part of the discussion?
11. Why is this discussion of contact zones important for the United States
in the 1990s (note the date of her essay)? How does she use the experience
of the Stanford course in “Cultures, Ideas, Values” to raise issues
involving "the pedagogical arts of the contact zone"? What examples of
these arts does she give? Why are what she calls "safe houses" and
programs like ethnic and women's studies still needed?
12. Jot down two questions you would ask Pratt after reading her essay.
Outline
I.
Introduction: new visions of literacy
A.
B.
II.
Literacy through baseball cards and baseball: Pratt's son Sam
Schooling gave him the tools but nothing to take him beyond baseball
Phenomena of literacy in the contact zones
A.
B.
Reading an "unreadable" text: Guaman Poma's New Chronicle and
Good Government in the twentieth century
Writing and literacy in the contact zones.
1.
2.
C.
Reading differently in the contact zone.
1.
2.
3.
D.
Guaman Poma's text as autoethnography
Guaman Poma's text as an example of transculturation
Literate bilingual audience in the Andes in the early 1600s
produces Guaman Poma's text
Monolingual colonialist audience in Spain fails to read Guaman
Poma's text but is able to produce and read Garcilaso de la Vega's
Royal Commentaries of the Incas.
Transcultural currents of expression have continued to evolve in
the Andes
Both the literate arts of the contact zone and the perils of writing in the
contact zone are with us in the US today and becoming more visible,
more pressing, and more decipherable.
III. Language in communities and in contact zones
A.
The utopian sense of language in current thinking about speech
communities
1.
Imagined communities (Benedict Anderson)
2.
B.
Normative assumptions of unified and homogeneous speech
communities and so unified and homogeneous social worlds
Imagining a different theory of language situations
1.
2.
A normative situation not of people who all spoke the same
language but of people who spoke two languages and understood a
third and who held only one language in common with any of the
others
Using language to resist or subvert the interests of those in power
and who therefore define what is normative
a.
b.
C.
Pratt's son Manuel reacts to a new school
Manuel resists or subverts school assignments but like
Guaman Poma is not heard
In the US today we see the rise of autonomous social groups disputing
the dominant institutions
1.
2.
3.
Rhetorics of diversity and multiculturalism
The idea of educational democracy
The debate over the Stanford course
IV. Conclusion: Teaching and learning in the contact zone
A.
B.
C.
In the contact zone: teaching the Stanford course
The continuing need for community: safe houses in the Stanford course
Looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone