Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone"



Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone"

Mary Louise Pratt begins her "Arts of the Contact Zone", by starting her definition of what she means by the "contact zone". She does this with an example, in which she describes how her young son connected to the adult world through baseball. In her first page, Pratt describes how her six year old son learned all about math, science, language, and history through baseball cards. Pratt finally called this knowledge of baseball Sam's (her son) "point of contact" with adults. After talking about her son, Pratt makes a quick change to another example. This example was the Incan The First New Chronicle and Good Government, written by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (who she simplifies as Guaman Poma). Pratt opens the argument over Guaman Poma's letter, by discussing what it was, where it originated from, where it was written, and who it was written to. Pratt follows this idea by stating that "contact zones" are areas of conflict and interaction between different cultures. Following the preivous statement, Pratt continues discussing Guaman Poma's letter, which was written in a mix of Spanish and Quechua, and was divided into two parts. The first part was the "New Chronicle", in which Guaman Poma rewrote many Christian stories with an Incan narative. Pratt calls the "New Chronicle" an "autoethnographic" text, in which the people describe themselves and discuss the descriptions that others give them. Pratt finishes on the "New Chronicle" by discussing how Guaman Poma ended it. Guaman Poma ended his "New Chronicle" by criticizing the Spanish Conquest stating that the Spanish and Incans should have lived as equals in peace, but instead the Spanish were filled with greed. Finishing his commentary on the "New Chronicle", Pratt makes a quick statement about the "contact zone", stating that its art (usually made by the oppressed) usually shows an image of the other people (oppressors) from the view of the first (oppressed) people. The second section of Guaman Poma's letter is called "Good Government and Justice", in which Guaman describes and criticizes the Spanish oppresion of the Incans. According to Pratt, Guaman Poma's letter never reached its  intended audience of the Spanish King Philip III. Following his diccussion of "Good Government and Justice", Pratt states a second action of the "contact zone". This second action he calls "transculturation" in which an oppressed people regulate what they accept from the oppressive cuture and mix that with their own ideas to create a new culture. Pratt gives and example of tranculturation through Guaman Poma's letter, stating that it maintains Christian ideas, while also adding Incan culture and symbolism. Pratt finishes her discussion on Guaman Poma by discussing how Guaman Poma's writing is an embodiment of the contact zone, in which it speaks to both Incans and Spanards differently.

Pratt continues writing about the contact zone itself, stating that contrasts and idea of unity. Pratt then discusses the writings of Benedict Anderson, who wrote that communities are only what they think they are. Therefore people differ by how they are thought of. Pratt continues by stating how writing and language made the Europeans distinctly better. According to Pratt, common language unifies people together. Pratt then returns to another example with her son. Pratt describes how her son turned in a paper which related reflected the teacher's greater authority and also refered to those with authority over him (the son). Pratt states that under oppression her son reacts in a similar way as Guaman Poma, where both try to resist or work around authority. Pratt finishes her argument by discussing an experiment in which she taught a course which was based upon the contact zone, which studied all cultures. According to Pratt this course brought both joy and pain to all students through learning. Pratt finally closes by stating that the contact zone should be taught about and better studied so as to bring diverse people into closer unity.

Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone" seems to give many similar ideas as Berger's "Ways of Seeing". Both Burger and Pratt discuss different points of view. Berger looks closer describing specifically the perspective of individuals, while Pratt discusses the overall view of different cultures. Just as Berger describes that two people cannot have the same perspective, two cultures also cannot have the same perspective. Cultures and people will usually give different representations of themselves. Finally just as Berger speaks about the problem of mystification, where people work to oppress each other's perspective, Pratt says that cultures also try to oppress each other. Both also expand on this idea, where both the people and the cultures can choose what they accept and what they do not accept. The people/culture cannot control what other people believe, but they can control what they believe.

In response to Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone", one could ask: Would not a class structured to examine the cultures of the world have an oppressive nature and try to force its students into creating their own new culture?

T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

In his "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot writes, in response to Wordsworth and Aristotle, about poetry and art. Eliot begins his argument by talking about tradition. Eliot begins by stating that the word "tradition", with the exception of archaeology, is an unusable word in English writing because of its negative feeling. Eliot continues his argument disussing how people judge each other and states that criticism is inherent to human society and cannot be stopped. Criticism will always happen. Eliot continues by stating that the value of a poet's work is in how different it is from other works. Eliot then goes back to tradition sating that if people did folow tradition they should not follow tradition through repeating what happened but must use reason to detemine what should be done about it. According to Eliot, when looking at the past, poets should look at the past from the present and not from the past. Eliot then goes back to his idea of criticism and states that artists are valued not only by their own works, but instead, they are judged by how they compare with other previous artists. According to Eliot, art is valued by how it differs from other preivous art. The more similar it is to other pieces of art, the less value of it is as art, and the more diverse it is from other pieces of art, then more value it has as art. Eliot continues his argument toward why poets should write about the past form the present, by stating that now in the present we know more than preivous people did, therefore because of that greater knowledge we should look at the past from the present. Eliot ends his first section by stating that the act of poetry is to lose personality. Poetry is not suppose to show the personality of anyone. Eliot begins his sceond section by giving an analogy which states that the mind of a poet is like a catalyst which causes change to everything around it except itself. Eliot finishes his second section by discussing emotions and how the poet's emotions should not dirrectly pass through his poetry but instead the poetry should show a strong sense of emotion that is not personal to the poet. These emotions must express a new emotion without actually creating that new emotion. The final tension that Eliot leave the reader in this section is the tension that poetry is the act of "escaping" emotion and personality not finding it.

In his "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot seems to be looking in much of the opposite dirrection of the romanicism writers (and Aristotle). As Aristotle and Eliot both seem to want to explain what makes good poetry, Aristotle and Eliot both claim that an expression of emotion in poetry is good and also claim that poetry should look toward future events (within the same poetry), but as Aristotle states that poetry should have a future reasoning sense in which it looks toward what could happen, Eliot states that poetry should look to the past in comparision and reason with the past and should bring this reasoning into the present for better understanding. Eliot also opposes Wordsworth, who claims that good poetry is made by good poets who only write their feelings, by stating that good poetry in fact can come from anyone but it must avoid personal emotions and must relieve the reader of "personality and emotion".

After reading "Tradition and the Individual Talent", and also while considering romanicism writers one could ask the question: Why should poetry look to the past and present and no the future? Could it be because the future is uncertain and undefined or does Eliot include include any ideas of the future as present reason because it is a sense of current hope for what may happen?