Hi Jinan,
As long as the non-western countries are living on 'western knowledge'
which we consume right from our nursery talk of culture for these
nations are meaningless. The whole educational paradigm is based on western content and pedagogy.
I can see you point, and at the same time, I hope that you’ll forgive me for more speculation—decidedly Western (specifically Irish, German, Welsh, Bohemian, Czech American).
I’m no scholar on globalization. I’ve read a little. But the personal seems more relevant here, so I’ll start with that. As an outsider to the cultures that I teach, I learned from students who do not share my background (even as I taught them). While I had to encourage students to explicitly tap into their own cultures (or hybrid cultures) regarding style, they did find approaches that I could not have initiated—and have never experienced myself. Perhaps I could appreciate some approaches more than others because they tapped into Western sensibilities.
But students also identified issues and stances that I had to work hard to both understand, and sometimes to appreciate, because the ideas were foreign to me. To the best of my ability I tried to give those perspectives space to develop. As I see it, students were in the process of exploring knowledge and influence through visual/verbal arguments.
While I fear talking beyond my headlights, I’ve read some of the negative perspectives on globalization (Hines, 2003; Van Elteren, 2003) But there is the other side. My summary is reductive, but Tomlinson sets out to consider that in globalization, we experience upheaval, but can also become more aware of and interested in preserving culture. He states:
What I will try to argue is something more specific: that cultural identity, properly understood, is much more the product of globalization than its victim. (p. 269)
To push back on your point, Vargas Llosa sees globalization as liberating culture from national conformity. He states:
It is true that modernization makes many forms of traditional life disappear. But at
the same time, it opens opportunities and constitutes an important step forward
for a society as a whole. That is why, when given the option to choose freely, peoples, sometimes counter to what their leaders or intellectual traditionalists would like, opt for modernization without the slightest ambiguity. (p 3-4)
So while I can agree with the perspective embodied in your post, I’m confused by this:
In this case, culture is then a product and not a
process as even knowledge is a product with out a process.
The question for me becomes, is the search for one’s one cultural legacy really meaningless, really without process, in light of globalization and the emergence of hybrid cultures? Are my Irish roots, and where they take me, meaningless, contributing no process to my explorations, because of my American birth? Or do the two color each other as part of my process?
Thank you for the food for thought on this.
Susan
On Jul 23, 2017, at 12:19 PM, Jinan K B <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Friends
As long as the non-western countries are living on 'western knowledge'
which we consume right from our nursery talk of culture for these
nations are meaningless. The whole educational paradigm is based on
western content and pedagogy.
Unless one creates knowledge there is nothing called one's own culture
worth talking about. The whole issue of colonization is this.
Colonized are the ones living on others knowledge.
So what ever experiments can happen is with in the western cultural
sensibilities. In this case, culture is then a product and not a
process as even knowledge is a product with out a process.
Jinan
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