Knowing another culture needs uncoercive contact and interpretive self-consciousness
Evidence
What I have been describing is an essentially lonely enterprise, which means in this case that the scholar works reactively in answer to what various interests seem to require of him or her; he or she is guided more by a guild orthodoxy than by the exigencies of genuine interpretation, and, above all, the general culture ghettoizes his or her work, rendering it marginal except during times of crisis. Neither of the two necessary conditions for knowing another culture — uncoercive contact with an alien culture through real exchange, and self-consciousness about the interpretative project itself — is present, and this absence enforces the solitude, the provinciality, and the circularity of covering Islam. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 328
Categorization
- DEFINE: Said defines the two necessary conditions for genuine cross-cultural knowledge.
- XREF: connects to: Sociology cannot address group self-understanding without historical interpretation and dialectical communication — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2428; Contact with foreigners plus environmental explanation of poverty dissolved nativist belief — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 700; Restoring a cultural element without adopting its fundamentalist politics requires fully self-conscious intervention — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 188 (+2 more)
Related
- Knowledge of other cultures requires conscious effort crossing distance. (similarity 0.84)
- European curiosity about alien cultures grew from trade, conquest, and need (similarity 0.81)
- Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance. (similarity 0.80)
- Knowledge of other cultures is judged by the needs of the producing society. (similarity 0.80)
- Culturally responsive teaching requires deep cultural self-awareness. (similarity 0.79)