This portfolio provides a critical approach to demonstrating the study of cultural forms and social processes which are part of my own ontology and part of the work that I have done while in the Cultural Studies (CS) program. As an accumulative process that consisted of many readings, reflections, classes, workshops, postings, and lectures, the portfolio is an expression of the coming together of different developments and practices. These include the following: looking at relationships that are directly or indirectly linked, as with my involvement in open and engaging conversations that were inclusive of different fields; untwisting or unraveling the way things are organized; following or finding tracks in the production, distribution, and consumption of artifacts; understanding aesthetic, ethical, political, and economic implications of cultural work; reading collective customs; revealing interpretations, explanations, and methodological assumptions; situating traditional notions of "culture" and "text"; and trying to deal with faults, deficiencies, shortcomings, fallings, and deceptions of culture.
Growing up in different countries and with different national identities (Brazilian, American, Canadian) caused me to gravitate towards Cultural Studies because I sensed my cultural identities were paradoxical in nature sometimes. These feelings became an important factor in my efforts to untwist and unravel the way cultural formations were organized because I was already expecting ambivalences and ambiguities in collective customs. My own life had been formed on the basis of various ambivalences and ambiguities, and my preferences and allegiances had changed constantly as I was growing up. For example, I always wondered what it would have been like if I could have worked for the CIA like my American cousin, but being Brazilian meant I also felt committed to protecting Brazilian wellbeing. If I worked for the CIA, I might be asked to do something that I would consider unethical. Brazil, on the other hand, does not have a CIA, but, even if they did, I would find it just as uncomfortable to be in a position that might require spying on Americans.
Consequently, totalizing definitions of culture are disrupted for me on a daily basis. The idea of having a national culture is complicated by the simple fact that my inheritance is multinational to begin with, and if it is multinational, it can’t be national in the sense of belonging to one nation or one country. This comes close to living in a parallel world. Living on the edge of different cultural assemblages and engaging with Americans, Brazilians, and Canadians makes even small everyday practices sometimes difficult to navigate. For example, a cup of coffee does not mean the same thing to me as it does to an American or Brazilian since I have experienced what a cup of coffee is in Brazil and what a cup of coffee is in the U.S. I have experienced the sharing of space and the feeling of belonging in a Starbucks knowing simultaneously and firsthand the full extent of the cost of that cup of coffee because I have seen the laborers with their cracked hands and faces burnt from the sun working sunup to sundown making a penny a day.
I have had to acknowledge various contradictions as I was growing up, and the struggle with my own dislocation and the questions of identity have been a constant. Creative writing and reading theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha have both played a large part in my understanding and recognizing of potential benefits that exist within interstitial spaces, spaces that have been shaped by the ambiguities and ambivalences of culture. The cost of these spaces only being known to people that have experienced conflicted identities. By having to use multiple language systems and cultural codes, I have personally gone through stages where language and culture both enabled communication and blocked communication. This made it possible for me to recognize interstitial spaces as a place for paradox. A place where the seduction of culture can be viewed and identified.
Engaging on a daily basis within interstitial spaces and outside of normal boundaries – at least from the perspective of being a “local” -- has made it apparent to me that culture and identity are processes that sometimes contradict each other, creating a complex web within and amongst societies with ambiguous and ambivalent breaks. For example, the American culture I was raised with sometimes contradicts my Canadian identity; for example, as a Canadian, I consider myself a socialist, yet socialism not only is viewed negatively in the U.S., but the word itself has a completely different connotation and historical-cultural background in the two countries.
The tentative direction my experiences, choices, and work have taken are that of refocusing sights outside of my own orbit to help build a new intellectual genealogy that can potentially nourish the goal of promoting practices that empower marginalized peoples. The need to de-hegemonize my position, question cultural practices, and open up a discursive space for mongrel or hybrid texts has been a concern that developed over the course of the CS program. My own dislocation and questions of identity have initiated the process, but recognizing the potential benefits that exist within interstitial spaces has taken this further. Identifying the location of entanglement in cultural and theoretical contradictions, reflecting on implications regarding perceptions, and interpreting frameworks has forced me, in a beneficial way, to question where I stand within the circles that engage the politics of knowledge and how I have myself been seduced by the promises offered in my cultural surroundings.
The decision to write about Hakani came from several angles at once but included two of the aspects previously mentioned: the idea of cultural complexity and the feeling that there existed a relationship between Hakani and its use as a source of status quo revival. My familiarity with Brazil and its peoples was obviously a factor in the decision-making process, but the study followed two separate concerns: first, that of intertextuality and critical engagement with the text and second, that of unmasking Hakani’s discourses located in a seductive space engaged with meaning -- an ideal location for altering structures of recognizability. Both concerns relate to the creation of cultural artifacts, in this case Hakani, and to the tracks that are left behind from the processes of production, dissemination, and consumption.
It was from this frame of reference that I completed the Hakani study. Through Hakani, the implications regarding the perceptions people have of each other, and the questions regarding where one stands within the circles that engage the politics of knowledge, especially knowledge of the “other,” came to the surface as I reached a deeper understanding of the film. For example, in Hakani, the filmmaker alters the place of the Zuruwaha people and puts them in the position of the negative “other,” culturally and ideologically, demonizing Indigenous peoples by opposing them to the film's heroes -- the missionaries -- and by mis-representing Indigenous peoples as potentially more violent. He “positions the protagonists as ill-fated victims throughout the film and uses the Indigenous people as a backdrop to show the redemptive qualities of Western culture” (Hemmons-Ferreira, "Recontextualizing Hakani" 15). What this means is that we must recognize how complex, entangled, and constructed culture is, how it seduces us, and we must accept that we must always try to understand our own positioning -- our own cultural constitution, and where we stand within it.
In Hakani, the cultural-historical contradictions surrounding the case demonstrate how missionaries (the filmmaker being one of the missionaries) are usually burdened with inherited prejudices and condescending attitudes, depicting Indigenous peoples as primitive and savage. Additionally, missionaries have been known for intolerance toward Indigenous cultures and consider Indigenous religions as fetishistic or heathenistic with animistic tendencies. The contradiction, though, lies in the fact that even if missionaries attained a different kind of knowledge of the validity of the Indigenous religion and culture, they would be able to acknowledge it. Missionaries depend on their work for survival, and their work consists of regarding all other religions (including all other forms of Christianity, except their own) as misguided, fit only for eradication. The only true religion as far as they are concerned is their own version of Christianity.
I named the study “Recontextualizing Hakani” because it was a compilation of scholarly essays that provided a historical and critical analysis of the film, thereby offering a context that was lacking in the filmmaker’s original text. Each essay examines a different aspect of the film as a social and cultural phenomenon. Designed for both film viewers and academic readers, the essays are international in scope of subject matter and eclectic in terms of approach and perspective. “Recontextualizing Hakani” was meant to offer a new perspective within the theory and philosophy of cultural studies and visual media. In terms of practice, I was empowered by the way new avenues of deliberation were opened up and by the way the project compelled me to think of interstitial spaces as sources of power. “Recontextualizing Hakani” as a survey of one artifact – the Hakani film – was an informed way to connect to Indigenous peoples in a space that existed between the lines and past the margins. Because I engaged with the text from the perspective of questioning positionality and participation in cultural practices, the study enabled me to view judgments that had been made and then placed as secrets and hidden messages in the text, which were then being transmitted via the social and cultural ideological positioning of the film. For example, “even though Hakani is not part of mainstream cinema, the stereotypes bring into focus American mainstream cinema’s overarching problematic relationship to non-white peoples. The same biases, prejudices, and generalized qualities associated with the “other” are infused throughout the film” (Hemmons-Ferreira, "Recontextualizing Hakani" 12).
In addition, at the beginning of the study, I tried to make sense of the research as it was being developed, trying to format it as a standard academic thesis; however, the more I researched the film, the more I realized I would have to move to a different strategy. Because I wanted to critically engage with the film in a creative way, and because my intention was to extend the breadth and depth of knowledge concerning its situatedness and textuality, I would have to shift to a tentative grounded theory approach, reviewing the literature after the work was conducted. The approach of reading the literature first with the objective of identifying gaps and relevant theories was opposite to the role that the literature would play in the Hakani study. By adopting a grounded theory approach, I was committing to a constant revision of the materials and methods I was engaging in, which in the end was very time consuming but worth the effort.
Because I began the project with limited knowledge of the film, I found it impossible to plan all the phases of the investigation exactly. Using an intensive investigative approach allowed me to become well-acquainted with Hakani as it involved breaking down the film into second-by-second frames. Before beginning this process, it was difficult to decide which facts were to be collected, so I decided to map the relationships and concepts surrounding the film (this was a suggestion made by my capstone advisor Ron Krabill). The methodological approach for the mapping exercise I used was a strand of the Actor-Network theory or “material-semiotic” method -- mapping the relations between things and between concepts and relating different elements together into a network.
(Appendix A)
Another fundamental concept for the project arose from a creative writing class taught by my portfolio advisor Jeanne Heuving. During the course of the class, she talked about the process of creating a deeper understanding by way of a step-by-step process, like a spiral. I used this process in Hakani by studying the film from several different viewpoints, established first from a practical point of view, but later connected to scientific methods used by other scholars. The process thus resembled a spiral, which gradually led me to develop my own view regarding Hakani’s situatedness and textuality.
(Recontextualizing Hakani)
In addition to these approaches, I used a dialectical-relational approach integrated with intertextual analysis (Appendix B and C in “Recontextualizing Hakani”), which stresses the semiotic notions and interconnected relations in texts. This approach enabled me to connect Hakani’s filmmaker to the viewer and connect the film to other texts and make a correlation between colonial era texts, specifically Charles Hegel’s “The Philosophy of History,” and the genre of documentary, specifically “Nanook of the North.” Both texts were used to identify relationships that are directly or indirectly attached to the interpretations, explanations, and assumptions of Hakani, which helped me recognize cultural deficiencies and deceptions. More important, however, was my engagement with three post-colonial theorists -- Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha -- that concluded the study. Engaging with the theories that came out of the Hakani study was mostly to tackle difficult questions that had emerged while dialoguing with G.W.F. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History and the work of Robert Flaherty by way of William Rothman’s The Filmmaker as Hunter.
Another important factor I needed to address was how to present the work. Having already made the decision to find a place online to situate the text in order to move it from text to context and make it findable via a simple Google search, I researched the way social networking functions on the worldwide web. Various sites that talk about social networking pointed to the blog as the foundation for social networks. The blog could then be connected to Facebook and Twitter as well as other sites. To make it possible for people to access the work whenever they wanted, the blog would be the best fit because it did not require any intervention on my part and also because -- apart from Twitter which limits text to 140 characters per entry, making it untenable for my project -- it receives the highest amount of traffic.
(Commonly Used Social Media Tools).
The final outcome was that of a creative, intensive, investigative blog where hypertext was used as a tool for exploration and relationship building, moving the writing from text to context. The ultimate goal was to recontextualize the film by disclosing its rhetoric and form of implementation, building on intertextuality and relations as well as conceptual mapping. The aim was to touch on the cultural, socio-political, and historical contexts of the film through a detailed analysis of discourse and text, filling the gaps of narrative that were initially avoided by the filmmaker.
Homi Bhabha states, in “The Locations of Culture,” that the "interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy" (Bhabha 4). The liminal is important because liminality and hybridity go hand in hand. What this means is that we should consider culture as a form of engagement inside and outside of circles or fields of human interaction – business, government, education, media, arts and entertainment, and family. This is relevant in the case of Hakani because the only space to talk about the sacred and the profane of various cultures, while recognizing marginalization, is in a transcultural and transgeographical space. Bhabha states, "the importance of the liminal for post-colonial theory is precisely its usefulness for describing an 'in-between' space in which cultural change may occur: the strategies for personal or communal self-hood may be elaborated, a region in which there is a continual process of movement and interchange between different states” (Bhabha 2). These factors were a driving force in the making of both the “MACS Lemon Meringue Pie” and Hakani and stemmed from concerns about disentangling, reading, and revealing the production of artifacts/texts, including the different processes, interpretations, and shortcomings connected to them.
As part of my own development, I opted to deliberately and explicitly collaborate in projects outside of my normal inclination since, in my view, the collaborative process is one of the determinants of one's ability to uncover one's own interpretations (we tend to have blind spots when it comes to our own work). Consequently, my participation in the collaborative projects was a key element in the de-hegemonization of my own experiences. Collaboration with other individuals tended to help stimulate my thought processes and helped elucidate certain undercurrents in my own objectives. For example, the fact that I grew up as a missionary kid and experienced pressure from my fundamentalist parents contributed to my overall cynicism toward religion. Participating in collaborative projects helped me realize not everyone had the same experience; hence, not everyone felt the same way about religion.
The bulk of the collaborative work focused on results and contributions made by each one of us in the “MACS Lemon Meringue Recipe” group. As an example of how collaboration can be a space for alternative forms of analysis as well as the co-production of theory, the “MACS Lemon Meringue Pie Recipe” was constructed as an agenda outside the academic orbit. It was created through collaboration aimed at discovering why there was a moral and ethical necessity to question our own methodologies and activism when doing CS work. We discussed the ethical issues that arose when studying the producers and audiences of texts as well as the need to reflect and to disclose discrete bits of knowledge about various aspects of the political, economic, and cultural issues that form the basis of our own judgments of others.
As Antonio Gramsci asserts, in his “Prison Notebooks,” we need to reflect on the connections with the political realities of the society in which the work occurs, going past the limits of text, context, society, nation or state. We need to create “a space where individuals can give voice to read, engage, elevate, and explicate narrative … a place for dialoguing about the institutions of power through the theoretical lens of white privilege, an ongoing need for dialogue to fill the void created by the silence about race” (Hemmons-Ferreira, Nelson, and Simonelli 3).
We find fault, we censure, and judge each other on the basis of our own ethos – mores, customs, morals. Political language, speech acts, written communication, paintings, photographs, and electronic media, churches, courthouses, monuments, memorials, stadiums, shopping centers, highways, gated communities are some of the “sites of linguistic and visual representation, sites of institutional positions, and built environments [that] are vested with power by virtue of the meanings associated with particular places and vested in power that circulate through articulations and practices” (Hemmons-Ferreira, Nelson, and Simonelli 7). These considerations are important factors to keep in mind since they place theorists, practitioners, and experts, who control and authorize the meaning of texts, in the position of stakeholders. CS thus extends beyond self-analysis, and depends upon an analytical understanding of political, economic, and cultural processes to understand their implications. Gayatri Spivak, in one of her interviews, contends, "What we are asking is that the holders of the hegemonic discourse should de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other rather than simply say, 'OK, sorry, we are just very good white people, therefore we do not speak for the blacks'" (p. ?).
As another example of the subtle relationships within interstitial spaces, I would like to share something I wrote during one of the creative writing classes I took while in the CS program. Having picked a sentence as an epigraph from one of the stories I wrote regarding my travels as a missionary kid in Brazil, I endeavored to write without thought, letting the words flow by focusing on the etymology and my own interpretation of the chosen epigraph.
Like the “MACS Lemon Meringue Pie Recipe” and Hakani, “The Hundred Times We Were Commended to God” arose from the unraveling of my own interpretation of assumptions handed down to me via culture. The text is an example of how we can use these interstitial spaces to reshape our writing as well as other activities, for the space from which the text was written carried the mark of a mongrel space – part heresy and part sacred -- where traditional, secular, religious, cultural, gender, sexual, Western, post-colonial and ethnic relationships engaged in understated ways. As the child of Christian missionaries, I was obligated to do God's work of “saving the world,” which is supposedly a sacred task, but because I was a child, this could have been considered forced child labor, a heresy. “We were cursed. We were bound, restricted, enclosed, and preserved for a higher power. We were presented, placed before, shown, exhibited for God and to God. We were appointed to God’s ministry” (Hemmons-Ferreira, "The Hundred Times" 1).
In choosing a framework to address issues situated within my own interpretation of the world I grew up in, relevant and meaningful dialogue emerged between myself and the memories of a missionary kid; memories bound in identity crisis, cultural crisis, and power struggles. For example, when I was commended to God by my parents, I was placed in a site of dispute because they were giving me up to God in exchange for God’s favor, but I was never consulted and even if I have been consulted, I was but a child and could not make that kind of decision. I became, then, a child sacrifice, something looked upon as profoundly immoral. “Martyrdom had befallen us because we were to be commended to God by way of the sacred” (Hemmons-Ferreira, "The Hundred Times" 2).
In “Orientalism,” Edward Said argues that "all knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place" (Said 134). The issue of interpretation or translation is a fundamental concern when dealing with texts situated in liminal spaces. In my own view, having been a child sacrifice, I’ve known the harmful side of Christianity, even though Christianity has condemned other cultures for doing the same. Granted that literal sacrifice is much worse, but it doesn’t lighten the burden for those of us that have been “cut, sheared, and then put together” so as to fit the idea of a “thing devoted” (Hemmons-Ferreira, "The Hundred Times" 3).
Through creative writing, I was able to see how political, economic, and cultural issues are situated within a place of knowledge and a place of personal interpretation. Attempting to view things with a different lens helped me obtain a space for dialogue about issues usually pushed to the margin and helped undo perspectives that have shaped me over time. While I was growing up, I could never shake off the feeling of being an outsider, of somehow not belonging. When writing, things seemed to come together; I understood why I always felt like an alien. Because I had constantly been placed in God’s care rather than care of people, I had been alienated from the feeling of belonging. “We belonged to God now, we were aliens… Wherever God was invoked we had to follow. We were the witnesses limited to God’s cause” (Hemmons-Ferreira, "The Hundred Times" 3).
This change in perspective helped me unveil or unfold certain concepts and memories that had previously grounded my identity. The experience was powerful and empowering. It was a grounding factor for my future endeavors, helping me see the need for tools to build vital frameworks capable of empowering and helping people define issues and identify problems that arise when creating room for multiple voices, conversations, and perspectives. To be empowered is to be able or capable. When one is commended to God, you are disempowered by being disembodied. Since you are a sacrificial subject and have no right over your body, including the things that are done with it or come out of it or are made by it, you are disempowered. You become a business transaction between your missionary parents and God. You are given to God in exchange for insurance for the after-life. “We became the bodies sent to a foreign land on political business, the messengers” (Hemmons-Ferreira, "The Hundred Times" 3).
In “Orientalism,” Edward Said elucidates how power operates, stating that in knowledge production, the process by which the "Other" is known has been a way of exerting power over the "Other." The empowering process, then, entails counteracting hegemonic ideological discourse. Gramsci explains that hegemony is a complex relationship in which subordinate classes are persuaded to and consent to hold views and values favorable to the continued economic and social dominance of the ruling class. In all three of the theoretical works examined, we are seen to be lacking in-between spaces where various ethos can meet and dialogue, and we are urged to de-hegemonize our dualistic positions in order to create these types of spaces. “One thing that seems to be lacking … is a space for individuals to talk openly on the subject,” of concessions made and advantages given toward certain groups, in order to understand the placement of privilege and access within our daily lives (Hemmons-Ferreira, Nelson, and Simonelli 3). In all of the studies I undertook, a key goal was to establish a place for dialoguing about the institutions of power through the theoretical lens of white privilege or non-white underprivilege since there is a current void in analytical methods and in political and cultural critiques.
What this means is that we should aim for moral and ideological reform in our practices in order to change (or remove) the biases of the existing hegemony. We should open up spaces to talk about various ethos and not be blinded by dualistic frameworks. These frameworks are often shaped by colonialist and Orientalist dualistic conceptions of the world – us versus them, civilized versus uncivilized, white versus non-whites, western versus non-western peoples. Because texts are artifacts located in the world, not just structures divorced of their cultural production, texts conceal the relationships of power within which they were produced. Jean Baudrillard argued that the purpose of textual analysis was to problematize the traditional concept of what is "real." This highly appealed to me because of the different realities I had already lived in. In thinking about the work that I have chosen to add to this portfolio I have decided to add the work that speaks to my own personal experiences as well as the thoughts that have developed over the course of the program. The need to understand the past has driven me up until now, but, in trying to overcome the past I have found that it is a matter of matter of interpretation and perception. While situating myself when doing the work notions of "culture" and "text" have helped me deal with the faults, deficiencies, shortcomings, fallings, and deceptions that have affected me in a negative way. This has give me a new hope for looking at future and at relationships that could evolve out of the work and out of future practices.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 139-70.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International Publishers, New York, 1971. Quaderni dal Carcere, Einaudi, Torino, 1975.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History. 1837. Print.
Hemmons-Ferreira, Ann, Christine Nelson, and Faith Simonelli. "MACS Lemon Meringue Pie." 28 04 2010. Web. 5 Jun 2010. Found at http://annscsportfolio.blogspot.com/p/macs-lemon-meringue-pie.html.
Hemmons-Ferreira, Ann. "Recontextualizing Hakani: Filling in the Gaps of Narrative." 28 04 2010. Web. 5 Jun 2010. http://culturecoldwar.blogspot.com/p/fixed-memories.html.
Hemmons-Ferreira, Ann. "The Hundred Times We Were Commended to God." Ann's Cultural Studies Portfolio. blogspot, 28 04 2010. Web. 5 Jun 2010. Found at http://annscsportfolio.blogspot.com/p/hundred-times-we-were-commended-to-god.html.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Sara Danius; Stefan Jonsson; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. boundary 2, vol. 20, No. 2. 1993, pp. 24-50.
Said, Edward, Orientalism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
Images
"Appendix A." Recontextualizing Hakani: Filling in the Gaps of Narrative. Web. 8 Jun 2010. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTlJ5X9rHEH2hAjElzFheqXnOQUn8RHMpDGQ3M56uePgzSWyxz12KGAT4WBTjllyYjjaGgdiqkKIcXWJQl0bKzzQ8K_FdIsy5lGdV_UlFeUEG0OSMv1kxSPtl77DeQ9hTqjoC7e9JOs5k/s1600/image001.gif.
"Commonly Used Social Media Tools." Online Publishing. Web. 8 Jun 2010. http://jorispeters.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/commonly-used-social-media-tools1.png?w=486&h=286.
Recontextualizing Hakani: Filling in the Gaps of Narrative. Web. 8 Jun 2010. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5_jWdok0EqEIc3PoFANyJjgl5JRR6DoJtNKXYql-luUxIYbRRHtB-b1aDxfqp5139F9DFY-CrhMDuh7gupQvoSiQr-4fg43YgzO2OIZedzJbrQAmJcyNW6hmrh6edJiAJzQBgs9462tQ/s1600/espiral0.gif.
