Todd May
Pratt Summary
Page 1
In the essay Arts of the Contact Zone by Mary Louise Pratt she discusses how
communities interact with each other. She believes there are a bunch of “imaginative
communities” which are their own separate communities with their own rules and ways of doing
things. Each person has several different “imaginative communities” in which they interact at
different times such as at school and at home. These communities will eventually end up
overlapping where they interact or have common ideas and this is what Mary calls the contact
zone.
The essay opens with a story about Mary’s son collecting baseball cards. In the story she
describes how her son learned about phonetics, countries, architecture, light and other things
because of his hobby of collecting baseball cards. From this knowledge he gained he was able to
talk confidently about baseball with adults even though they were much older than he was.
The second example Pratt gives is about a twelve hundred page letter written to a king.
The letter which had eight hundred pages of text and four hundred pages of illustrations was
written by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and was found sitting in a library. The letter had never
made it to the king because people did not understand it. The problem was that the letter was
written in two languages: Quechua and ungrammatical Spanish. The community where the letter
had been written in had a hard time writing in a way that a different community could
understand. After three and a half centuries the letter was finally deciphered. Mary shows
through this example that depending on what languages or concepts you know you can get
different meanings from the same document.
The last example Pratt gives to illustrate the contact zone is about a paragraph her son has
to write for school. The class is assigned to write a paragraph on what they would invent. The
papers the students wrote served as a contact zone between the students and the teacher since it
Todd May
Pratt Summary
Page 2
was something all of them could relate to and understand. Throughout the essay Mary’s main
point was how different communities interact or communicate with each other which can be
difficult or cause problems at times.