Reclaiming Culture by Crossing Linguistic Boundaries

Transcript

1. RECLAIMING CULTURE BY CROSSING LINGUISTIC BOUNDARIES Master Thesis in Transcultural Design, written in support of LINKUISTICS: a multilingual board-game for adults Mili Sethia
3. Reclaiming Culture by Crossing Linguistic Boundaries Mili Sethia Masters thesis in Transcultural Design L’Ecole de Design Nantes-Atlantiquee, Shanghai Studio Self-published in Shanghai, January 2014
5. abstract The thesis uses language as a magnifying glass towards cross- culture-sensitisation. In the first chapter, language is explored as a political device of identity-facilitation. In the second, it is explored as a device for typecasting the foreigner, and then forming attitudes towards the ‘other’. In the third chapter, language is explored as a part of one’s personal identity. In the fourth chapter, consumption of culture and exchange of sociological commodities are explored with regard to langauge. Language is also somewhat explored as a sociological commodity. In the conclusion, some reflections are made about the nature of globalisation. Note: In this thesis, language is not treated as representative of or em- bodying culture, nor culture as something that gave birth to language. Instead, it is treated as a synecdoche that conjures culture symbolically, just as a way of dress would conjure a culture to mind while having a independent form of its own that can be used in plenty of other contexts. In this way, the paper explores what characteristics of power and poli- tics languages elicit, and how an increased amount of political awareness about language and soft cultural domination might help people truly become multicultured, or transcend some amount of cultural boundary.
7. 7 table of contents I. Abstract.......................................7 II. Being the Outsider; A Preface.......................................................10 Language as politics - 16 Language and the Other - 20 Language and identity - 24 Language; consumption of - 30 III. The Case for Diversity; A Conclusion........................................36 IV. Bibliography..........................38 7
9. ‘Identity is in the first place a matter of symbols, even of appearances. When, in any gathering, I see people with names that sound like mine, with the same colour skin, with the same affinities, even the same infirmities, it is possible for me to feel that that gathering represents me. A “thread of affiliation” links me to the crowd: the thread may be thick or thin, strong or weak, but it is easily recognizable by all those who are sensitive on the subject of identity.’1 1 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 114. Print. 9
10. being the outsider a preface In an overly connected world, things are not coincidental. But theories about how they are connected tend to reveal more about the observer than the observed. This is where cultural discrepancy begins. Instead of drawing on facts, and more importantly, history, people draw on stereotypes. People from a certain place are more likely to have the same stereotypes about people from another particular place. A common eclipse of knowledge has overcome their minds. This is the something in the culture that binds us together that makes us also view the ‘outsider’ in a certain way. Chinese stereotypes of India are very likely to be largely based on its poverty, corruption and anything else that elicit backward- ness, with a little bit of Bollywood street-dancing thrown in1. How- ever, just on the left of the border, a Pakistani’s stereotype of India would be very different – perhaps involving largely more freedom and develpment than themselves2. Similarly, when outsiders explore China together, we have a collective blind spot to something that we cannot alone correct in each other’s perceptions of the place. I tried very hard to steer clear of my own Chinese stereotypes when I was all set to arrive in Shanghai, in February 2013, but I am not sure if I pulled myself over in some kind of metaphorical roadless moor. My reading list before arrival included When China Rules the World, The Art of War, and the ever-so-slightly sordid Buying the Dragon’s Teeth3. As compared to any city in India in the year 2012, Shanghai felt like electricity; going past me in all directions, simultaneously old as well as an unimaginable new, a mixture of all the American and European cities I’d visited on family holidays, a slew of cultural remixes whose 1 Raghav, Krish. “In Beijing, Indians Are Seen as Stereotypes or Not Seen at All.” Web log post. Quartz. Wordpress.com VIP, 31 Dec. 2012. Web. 7 Jan. 2014.] 2 Omar, Khalid. “What Are the Things Pakistanis Think That the Indians Are Good at as Compared to Pakistanis?” Quora. N.p., 16 Aug. 2013. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.] 3 Norbu, Jamyang, and Lisa S. Keary. Buying the Dragon’s Teeth: How Your Mon- ey Empowers a Cruel and Dangerous Communist Regime in China, and Under- mines Labor, Industry and Freedom Worldwide. New Delhi: Bluejay, 2005. Print.
11. 11 unadulterated elements I’d never breathed any premonitions of. On the one hand Shanghai exhibits signs of a western science fiction dream come true (refer the city skyline, the indisputably clean subway, the bizarre metallic look in fashion), but as though it were realised by a different, out-of-context director. For a measly little Indian visiting Mainland China for the first time, things felt both futuristic and exotic at the same time. But to understand it from the books I was also readying, the underlying changes China is going through are largely sympto- matic of the pressure put on it by the rest of the world, and the city is but its best façade. Everything from the westernising fashion (or a take on western fashion nonetheless), the number of Starbucks outlets (over one hundred outlets in Shanghai and growing1), are symptomatic of western soft power, what we sometimes miss is that a lot of China’s problems are the harsh result of a western hard power. What keeps intensive labour camps in unethical conditions for much less than minimum wage working, what propels, to some extent, the human rights violations, and perhaps most things China offers to the world today for it to hasty rise to become a powerful country, are but a re- sult of a western pecking order2. If I had to interpret history in my own way, and as a result of resisting those convenient stereotypes, I would say that China’s intense ambition to rule the world dates back to the day its pride was first challenged by an outsider. When this actual moment occurred is a matter of debate, one that I’m only in a position to guess. But we can imagine what it felt like to be the Chinese emperor, the purported ruler of heaven on earth, when people from other lands tried to snatch away his kingdom - as, literally, China in Chinese means kingdom between heaven and earth – literally written as 中国 Zhōngguó, or the middle kingdom – the kingdom below heaven that he was governor of. Maybe that was when China decided that if further kingdoms did exist, the Chinese emperor or ruler would stay true to his own namesake, and try to attain a day when it would indeed rule entire expanse of the kingdom on earth. After all, they had carried themselves with the pride that they had ruled everything on earth so far, and maybe what we see now, in terms of its ambitiousness, is simply China trying to get its pride back in whatever way possible. 1“Starbucks Store Locations in Shanghai.” Mystore411. MyStore411.com, n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2014. 2 To use a slightly indelicate phrase. 11
12. To address something which, from my position is a little more risqué, is the actual consideration that China is even remotely followed by India as a world superpower. While of course neither has the GDP of a rich country, China does have literally an entire planet’s cheap labour force concentrated in one place, giving it value not in terms of money but in terms of power, control. But while I was looking for the similar- ities between the two, and coming from India, I learnt quickly enough that a lot of being in China is both startlingly familiar and startlingly alienating. That, in fact, similarities are in the problems, and never in the solutions the leaders of these countries conceive of. While China and India share a lot of their economic problems and invest in a lot of similar things to survive (labour, export, allowing for foreign invest- ment), they kind of do look similar; however, the way both countries look at themselves is far from similar, or, as we say in Hindi, has “the difference of sky and earth”1. A difference that, perhaps to those com- ing from the western end of the pecking order, is not visible because it is not something they are ever looking to find. For westerners, both China and India are merely two different versions of the same threat they are pretending to prepare themselves for – that of losing power. * The story isn’t complete until I divulge that at the time I arrived, I was having another cultural crisis of my own – that of realising from close watch that the cultures that I had grown up idealising and someday dreaming to be a part of, were on their part also not all they were made out to be. It’s hard to explain it, but I am going to try. In the nineties, India after about fifty years of independence was hit by a second wave of what I like to think of as ‘soft colonisation’2 – marked by a sudden open economy. In my context as a little girl, it simply meant a lot of American tv shows. I grew up watching what were perhaps ‘regular’ American sitcoms like I Dream of Genie, Bewitched, Small Wonder, Silver Spoons, Who’s the boss? and some more. My crisis began approximately at the time I began wondering why foreigners spoke in Hindi on our television (it was dubbed). 1 , aka ‘zameen aur aasmaan ka farak hai’ 2 This term is a mixture of soft power, as defined by the UN and colonisation, because it is in some way a colonisation of the culture and of the mind
13. 13 When it started to air in original English, I then proceeded to won- der how come foreign kids got to also speak in the same language at home and at school, because I couldn’t. I was told strictly not to speak anything but English in school, and I spoke Hindi at home and with my grandparents, because it would be silly to speak to them in anything but Hindi. At that time in the nineties, it seemed like the natural order of things that people be taught one language in school and another at home. I didn’t know that I was living in a country that was going through some large changes; I was told the struggle for independence was over, and I didn’t know that changes were soft- er, or generational, and that the ‘foreigners’ (in my head, the out- side world contained mainly white people from Europe and America, which I know now to make up a very tiny percentage of the world) had something we didn’t. They dominated the world’s culture, and kept the world suspended in this identity crisis. We went for my first trip to a McDonalds when I was ten years old, and I didn’t think the little plastic toys we got with our meals meant for kids my age were all that exciting. When I began to read, it was only in English until I turned nine years old and Hindi was then, finally, introduced as a subject in my primary school. (My Hindi reading and writing skills still remain rough around the edges to this day.) Things have changed since then, most of all my understanding of the larger picture. Questions about all this perhaps lay unformed in my mind, but it wasn’t their time yet. I went to a French International school. I spoke to French exchange students in my university, only to realise that in spite of my grand dreams of living in France as an artist, of going to cafes to bavarder (aka argue heartily) with people over philosophie and epistemologie, that all French people didn’t know or care so much for it. I didn’t relate to them fully or understand them at all. My perfect picture of a roman- tic, artistic France crumbled this way when I realised it was a country just like any other, but not one I knew much about. I met American people, only to realise that though I could relate to them a lot more than any other kind of foreigner, that this was the result of a largely unspecified influence of American culture all around us in India, and only to also realise that I wasn’t American either; when I couldn’t do as they did in every aspect of my life (going to proms, working at a Barista for extra money). This was another example of the pervasion of American soft power, one whose grip is still the tightest in my life, and 13
14. perhaps anyone else’s too. But what changed, at the age of twenty-two, when I arrived in China, was that my initiation into China by fellow foreigners who weren’t from the same foreign country as me made me giggle a little. Sometimes, it felt like people were making some very obvious perceptual errors, and it made me laugh. Ar others, it merely felt like I was always on the receiving end of a fairy tale I wasn’t a part of, and I was tired. And so I put all of these broken identities together, only to realise a truth that I have been resisting from the start: that putting all of those together possibly reveals something, but it’s not about Americanisation1, Francophonie, or Chinoiserie2, but about being about being Indian. And from that day until now, I am in search of the day that I can finally become me. (I am well aware now that this is a crisis not special to only me, perhaps the only reason that I am allowing myself to spread out and indulge in its details. There are people all over the world, waking up to a slightly more western, globalised, shifted world, and are advised to go on living as though nothing really changed.) But the truth is that I am Indian, but I don’t know how to be one, or to have my own frame of reference to being one. But, in my own way, Indian is what I will always be. No matter how multicultured I become, it is this I must embrace first, but the problem is that it sometimes that means being the perpetual outsider to the world’s ‘default’. Maybe it’s time that no one is an outsider any more, or that we all are, and that people see why that’s important. 1 Yes; even the kind with a British spelling. 2 I hope the first footnote rendered commenting on these spellings redundant.
15. 15 ‘Between the language of identity and the global language there stretches a vast space that we must learn how to bridge.’1 1 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 114. Print. 15
16. language as politics Language is both an indispensable part of one’s identity as well a vehicle for state administration, thereby becoming a very effective tool for the same. ‘People die for languages’, said the one of the ex- perts I interviewed for my project. ‘We are defining reality by us- ing a language,’ he said.1 As for how political language is, one only needs to recall the famously unsourced statement ‘a language is a dialect with an army and navy.’2. One way to talk about politics in language is to comprehend the difference between language and dialects. A useful insight: ‘Dialects are all there is’3. This is because dialects come ‘naturally’ from the ‘inherently nondiscrete nature of language change’4. A fact often ignored by language purists is that language is bound to change, vary, mutate and transform itself with the more people that speak it, and as time passes on. The reason most countries with older cultures (China; India) have wider variations of one language than a rich and developed (yes, richness has something to do with it) English-speaking country like America, is because English evolved to a point, and soon got dispersed quickly through widespread printing forces, thereby freezing. This is one of the best ways we know to slow down inherent language change and to construct and establish a ‘standard’ and ‘default’ dialect. Increased print communication, radio, television and other media pit ‘one’ form of English in competition with other variants who didn’t have their own ‘army’ or propaganda – and most importantly, led 1 Chazot, Pascal. Personal interview. 21 Aug. 2013. 2 “A Language Is an Dialect with an Army and Navy.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foun- dation, n.d. Web. 15 Aug. 2013. 3McWhorter, John H. “The Six Thousand Languages Develop.” The Power of Ba- bel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 63-84. Print. 4 McWhorter, John H. “The Six Thousand Languages Develop.” The Power of Ba- bel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 54. Print.
17. 17 speakers to associate with the most widely propagated version. For example, when Black English1 speakers are accused of having bad dic- tion’, it may not necessarily be so – it may just be another dialect of English that is not accepted or in use by the dominant media. There- by comes our first useful insight. Not just that the value judgments we are taught to place on how people talk ‘are purely artificial con- structs placed on speech varieties, because they are things neither a Martian nor often even a foreigner unfamiliar with our social terrain would arrive at,’ at least not on the basis speech alone2, but because it means something happens to ‘recognised’ dialects. In the case of American English, there is no particular reason this happened other than the fact that the chosen dialects happened to be spoken by those who came into power as the nation coalesced into and administrative- ly centralised political entity.3 What is important to remember is that the way a language is ‘dissem- inated’ by powers that be plays a role in its retention, often more than culture does. Because of such state-sponsored ‘control’ (and thence standardisation), we might come to see less and less variation in all global languages someday. Some have criticised globalisation as a pseudonym for Americanisation. In a few years, some people even believe there might not be any languages left4. The discontents with having a uniform world language do exist. Some of these discontents are with English in particular as a ‘global language’, while most are against any one language becoming global: ‘But while it is obvious that a good knowledge of English is neces- sary now for anyone wanting to communicate with the world as a whole, it is equally undeniable that English alone is not enough. Even if it fulfills completely some of our current needs, there are others that it does not satisfy. In particular, the need for identity. ‘For the Americans, the English, the Canadians, the Australians, 1 McWhorter, John H. “The Six Thousand Languages Develop.” The Power of Ba- bel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 61. Print. 2 McWhorter, John H. “The Six Thousand Languages Develop.” The Power of Ba- bel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 60. Print. 3 McWhorter, John H. “The Six Thousand Languages Develop.” The Power of Ba- bel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 64. Print. 4 Levine, Alicia. “How Do You Feel about Being Multicultured?” Personal inter- view. 12 Jan. 2014.
18. and some others, the English language is of course the language of identity. But for the rest of mankind, that is to say more than nine- tenths of our contemporaries, it cannot fill that role, and it would be dangerous to try to make it do so unless we want to produce hordes of people who are unhinged and disoriented, with person- alities that are unbalanced. No one should be forced to become a mental expatriate every time he opens a book, sits down in front of a screen, enters into a discussion, or thinks. People ought to be able to make their own modernity instead of always feeling they are borrowing it from others.1 (emphasis added) The reason language-sensitivity is important toward languages other than English is not because we need to ‘communicate.’ In fact, when it comes to matters important enough, we can communicate fine, if prop- erly motivated to learn. The reason language-sensitivity is important is simply so that more than half of the world doesn’t have to constantly see things through the dominant world languages’ contexts – but that everyone can see through each others’ contexts. Language may be the most personal thing we may lose over the course of globalisation. The linguist John McWhorter believes that this ‘unification’ of language is normal and natural – and needed for peace and harmony in the world2. While linguistically that might be fine, politically speak- ing, I believe there is more to lose than a mere alternative variation of talking to one another. The benefits of language revival, and reten- tion range from ‘ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian,’ and include ‘histor- ical justice, diversity and employability, respectively’.3 It is also more humane to the existing situation. And so, diversity is a better source for peace and harmony. Losing a language means losing an identity too, and it means losing access to historical records. It is extremely dangerous to try to break the maternal cord con- necting a man to his own language. When it is ruptured or serious- ly damaged his whole personality may suffer disastrous repercus- sions.4 1 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 113-4. Print. 2 McWhorter, John H. “Most of the World’s Languages Went Extinct.” The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 283-4. Print. 3 Zuckermann, Ghil’lad. “Stop, Revive and Survive.” The Australian. The Australi- an, 6 June 2012. Web. 10 Jan. 2014. 4 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill Panther, 2007. 110. Print.
19. 19 After all, if transculturality has been defined as seeing oneself in the other1, it has still to take on the humble definition in action as in its academic counterparts. And so, an important problem is the way with which English is becoming a ‘world language’ is that it is doing so at the peril other languages, languages that don’t enjoy a similar soft power. While it is all right to learn English for survival (one cannot avoid it for too long anyway), we must realise that there needs to be a better balance between powerful languages and ‘our own’ languages. 1 Cuccioletta, Donald. “Multiculturalism or Transculturalism: Towards a Cosmo- politan Citizenship.” London Journal of Canadian Studies 17 (2001-2002): n. pag. Web. 14 Mar. 2013.
20. ‘“If he couldn’t be little, how could he know what it’s like to be a ladybird?” Indeed, how could he? So, like Alice in Wonderland, Anna ate of the cake of imagination and altered her size to fit the occasion. After all, Mister God did not have only one point of view but an infinity of viewing points, and the whole purpose of living was to be like Mister God.’1 1 Fynn. Mister God, This Is Anna. London: Ballentine, 1985. Print.
21. 21 language and the ‘ other’ Where one is among foreigners, many things can happen, many insights can come to light. We may realise for the first time that the way one grew up wasn’t the only way to grow up, and that the world is much vaster than it’s been accounted for. At other times, when a joke or a reference we make goes amiss, we may realise that very little is really known about our original homelands. We feel voiceless, and intensely, because one’s context is not easy to explain. A discussion with friends from a variety of countries or places may lead to a discussion of mothers’ or grandmothers’ first idi- oms or life-lessons for us (‘My grandmother said that you should eat fish near the eyes – that’s where the wisdom is!’ – ‘Oh my god! Mine too!’1). At some point in such a discussion, it will become somewhat clear that a lot dwells on language, and while it is one of those mobile things that we can easily share more and more, it is also one of those private, intimate things. And languages at the same time become those parts of ourselves that we cannot share. Perhaps it is the way our environments shaped us, our worldviews, or just the stories and jokes and puns that our very own languages convey best. Some of these effects are apparent, while others not at all. What interests me instead is what can be shared about language, and to what extent. We may never occupy each other’s shoes completely, but we might carry off a good appreciation of the kinds of footwear there are. Let us consider the possibly that the image of a language often comes with a stereotype of the people or the culture it comes from. Tell someone in India that you’re visiting China, and much to your (I hope) 1 Pruenner, Magda. “How Do You Feel about Being Multicultured?” Personal in- terview. Sept. 2013. An actual exchange between a friend from Austria and some- one she met in Hubei, China
22. distaste, you will hear them dissolve into juvenile ‘chee choo chaa’ sounds as if these sounds remotely depict Chinese speech. However, tell them that you are going to America, or Europe, places that are much further away from India, and they will coo and wow with envy. This is no co-incidence. Such is the effect of the culture we consume from media (more about that in the next sub-section) – that places far away from us feel closer, and places close to us since time immemo- rial feel far away (after all, China has been famously mentioned in ancient Hindu mythology like The Mahabharata, and the very word ‘China’ in English comes from the Sanskrit word , pronounced ‘cheen’, which was, in fact, a take on the ‘Qin’ dynasty1). There is an inherent inequality in the media today, and instead of it being di- rected towards creating a more multicultural world, it’s directed to- wards mere demystification, even creating a thirst for the west, by the west. Even the television programmes about poorer countries are not by them, somehow implying that the narrators, no matter what the story might be, also tend to come from the west. And if the nar- rators come from the west, so does language. And so does the story. ‘Language is as sophisticated in all human cultures and is thus truly a trait of the species, not of a certain “civilised” subset of the species.’2 ‘Language change, to the extent that we can perceive it, appears to be decay. And sometimes it is, in the technical sense (erosion of sounds, dropping of endings). But in fact it concurrently entails building up (ne sounds, grammaticalisation of concrete words into new helping verbs, prefixes and suffixes) and plain old reshuffling. NO scholar has yet encountered a forlorn culture where the lan- guages simply “wore down” to the point that the people can no longer communicate beyond desperate barks (not even English, contrary to ever-popular belief). Language change is neither decay nor even evolution; rather, it is transformation – a term I have de- liberately used in place of evolution, with its connotation of 1 Wade, Groff. “The Polity of Yelang () and the Origins of the Name ‘China’” Sino-Platonic Papers 188 (2009): 1-29. Web. 25 Jan. 2014. 2 McWhorter, John H. Introduction. The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 6. Print.
23. 23 progress.’1 This is why the way we view the Other, the outsider, is by itself in some ways an act of discrimination, prejudice, and even violence, and needs rigourous re-examination. One consideration of this paper for the sake of transculturality is the notion that what we all consider the ‘Other’ is all becoming the same, thanks to global consumption of much the same media, and this is part of the problem. We are starting to align our points of view with all the same people instead of going out and organically discovering each other2; we now have a collective ‘us versus them’. Can language transmission be achieved in a way to concretise the sharing, and contextualisation of cultural fabric, rather than reinforcing the false psychological boundaries? Far from politics, culture may barely participate in the autonomous changes langauges are constantly undergoing.3 This of course means that language changes, living of its own rules. But, language in our daily lives, to some extent, does work as a kind of synecdoche for culture, which is to say it elicits cul- ture, not bringing to mind perfectly characteristics of that culture uniformly. Nor is language a subset of culture4. The question actually arises, if language is politically influenced, and if otherness is something we tune into as a result of our politics, how then may it be that we consume language as a form of otherness, and otherness as a form of language? 1 McWhorter, John H. “The First Language Morphs.” The Power of Babel: A Natu- ral History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 40. Print. 2 Horkheime, Adorno, and Max Horkheime. “Frankfurt School: The Culture In- dustry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Frankfurt School: The Culture Indus- try: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Marxist Literary Criticism, 5 Feb. 2005. Web. 27 Jan. 2014. 3 McWhorter, John H. “The First Languag Morphs,” The Power of Babel: A Natu- ral History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 48. Print. 4 McWhorter, John H. “Introduction.” The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 11-14. Print. 23
24. ‘I sometimes find myself “examining my identity” as other people examine their conscience. As you may imagine, my object is not to discover within myself some “essential” allegiance in which I may recognise myself. Rather the opposite: I scour my identity to find as many ingredients of my identity as I can. I then assemble and arrange them. I don’t deny any of them.’1 1 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 14. Print.
25. 25 language as identity Our language differences might make us anything from wildly inter- esting, oddly exotic, and utterly incomprehensible to each other, but they are also what make us who we are. To what extent linguistic pasts inform our personalities and think- ing, science may yet find out. We not only express pain differently in different languages, but no matter how automatic the pain response, we even scream with our ‘own accents’, because even that’s filtered through your language before you finish saying it.1 Your brain is more likely to ‘see’ colours if your language has words for them.2 You’re also more likely to assign colours to black and white pictures of objects with a ‘typical colour’3.You’re more likely to assign seemingly arbitrary gender-based qualities to objects if your mother tongue makes use of gendered nouns.4 I’m Indian, and the first language I ever spoke was Hindi (which is just one of seven hundred and eighty5 that as an Indian, I might have theoretically spoken as a mother tongue). But, like an overwhelm- ing number of Indians, the first language I ever read or wrote in was 1 Harbeck, James. “Why Pain Is Expressed Differently in Different Languages.” The Week. THE WEEK Publications, Inc., 12 Nov. 2013. Web. 13 Dec. 2013. 2 Wade, Alex R., Nathan Witthoft, Jonathan Winawer, Michael C. Frank, Lisa Wu, and Lera Boroditsky. “Russian Blues Reveal the Effect of Language on Colour Dis- cimination.” Comp. Gordon H. Bower. PNAS 107.19 (2007): 7780-785. Print. 3 Bannert, Michael M. “Decoding the Yellow of a Gray Banana.” Current Biology 23.22 (2013): n. pag. Print. 4 Schmidt, Lauren A., and Webb Philips. “Sex, Syntax, and Semantics.” By Lera Boroditsky. Vol. 7. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 65-66. Print. 5 Lalmalsawma, David. “India Speaks 780 Languages, 220 Lost in Last 50 Years – Survey.” Reuters. Thomas Reuters, 7 Sept. 2013. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.
26. English. When I started primary school, English and Hindi stayed at neck-to-neck competition as the dominant language in my mind. At the age of twelve, I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I suddenly realised, as I was walking down the corridor of an interna- tional boarding school, that English had actually overtaken Hindi and was the language I think in. Then when I began learning French in high school, I sometimes thought of words and phrases that could only be better expressed in French, even when I was speaking in another language. This meant that I didn’t need to speak a language well in order to think in it, just that I needed to find a unique turn of phrase, a special edge that hitherto hadn’t existed in another language for me. Thereby anything from the turning of phrases, sentence-con- struction, spelling, or even the body of sound could add a whole new perspective to my experience of language. I also identified some parts of my life less consciously with a language known as Marwadi, which originates, like my family, from Rajasthan, a state in the North-West of India. Marwadi was a language that a lot of my sprawling family spoke many dialects of. I tended to think or speak in Marwadi most when I was around this extended family. I could understand it, but not speak it fluently. The local language of my then high school town was Gujarati, and I learnt to speak a little bit of it too. Indians can hate yoga. Not all of them dance on the streets, and young urban people don’t wear sarees often, and when they do, they trip a lot. I have explained to anyone who would listen that Indian people can also have narrow slanting eyes when they are from the north or the east of India (not unlike Chinese people; we share borders after all), and they can also have blue eyes (if they are from the north) or green eyes (if they are from several places in fact), and that there are also tribes in India of African descent living in India. Essentially, we have nearly all the races on earth loosely packed into one ancient, broken string of states tied together by their shared colonial past. But the most astounding fact for people I’ve met from other countries is always this one: that though my ‘native’ language is Hindi, I consider English my ‘first’ language since that’s what I think, read and write best in. English is in fact spoken comfortably by more people in India than in any other country, the United States included.1 And so I came face-to-face with my specificity. 1 Hitchings, Henry. “What’s the Language of the Future?” Salon. Saloncom RSS, 7 Nov. 2011. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
27. 27 ‘Thus, when I think of either one of these two components of my identity separately, I feel close either through language or through religion to a good half of the human race. But when I take the same two elements together, I find myself face-to-face with my own specificity.’1 1 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 15. Print.
28. Things that happen to a speakers of multiple languages: a personal account Fluid accents – e.g., in English, my accent changes when I speak to Chinese speakers to match their English accent and vocabulary, it also changes with French speakers in order to match their intonation and vocabulary. This is the phenomenon of acquiring a foreign accent in my ‘native’ language when com- municating with foreigners who speak it as a second language. Furthermore, I have a more “neutral” or “international” accent when I speak to people from English-speaking origins other than Indian ones. So in all, it could be said that I have at least four kinds of English accents, noticeable to the keen ear. Borrowed sentence structure from a second language on to a first language, i.e., speaking English in a French way, e.g., pluralising the adjectives instead of the nouns! Language attrition is ‘the loss of a first or second language or a portion of that language. Speakers who routinely speak more than one language may use their languages in ways slightly different from a single language speaker, or a mono- lingual. The knowledge of one language may interfere with the correct produc- tion or understanding of another. The study of these interference phenomena is the field of Applied Linguistics. Interference can work two ways. A person who acquires a second language (L2) after the first (L1), may be inhibited in the acquisition of this second language by the first language. However, interference can also work the other way: the second language can interfere with the correct use of the first. More recently, research has started to investigate linguistic traf- fic containing L2 interferences and contact phenomena evident in the L1. Such phenomena are probably experienced to some extent by all bilinguals. They are, however, most evident among speakers for whom a language other than the L1 has started to play an important, if not dominant, role in everyday life (Schmid and Köpke, 2007) This is the case for migrants who move to a country where a language is spoken which, for them, is a second or foreign language. The L1 change and L2 interference that can be observed in such situations is considered language attrition.’1 1 “Language Attrition.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Jan. 2014. Web. 28 Jan. 2014. Things that happen to a speakers of multiple languages: a personal account 1 2
29. 29 ‘In situations where large numbers of people are bilingual between two given languages, the two languages often come to resemble each other on the level of sounds and sentence structure as well as the exchange of words – rather like married couples who gradually begin looking like each other over the decades. This happens most readily when literacy in the language is not widespread, such that there is relatively little sense that the standard variety – if there even is one – is The Language, which one flouts to the detriment of one’s social legitimacy.’1 Ability to learn about someone else’s mothertongue from the way they form sentences in another language, e.g. Mandarin-speakers routinely add the word for ‘-person’ to adjectives, making me think that adjec- tives are often of that format. Meaning déjà vu: The phenomenon of finding similarities (perceived or otherwise) in any language I learn, with a language I previously know. In my experience, words, over time, become concepts and when the same word is learnt in a new language, it stretches the concept of the meaning a bit further. Eventually, everything from the sound and the structure of the word seems somehow reminiscent, or even, onomato- poeic of the very meaning behind it.2 I could conclude that there is definitely a change in the personality I project as a result of the language-speaking environment I am in. This could be happening because of two things. It could be happening be- cause of perceived cultural notions in another culture, or it could be happening because conversational or cultural mirroring is a strong subconscious mechanism. Any way you put it, it would indicate that everyone goes through unique mental shifts while trying to communi- cate outside of their own cultures. 1 1 McWhorter, John H. “The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One An- other,” The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 105. Print. 2 A large part may also be my synesthesia. 3 4 29
30. It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a certain degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.1 1 Adams, Douglas. “Chapter 1.” The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. 1. Print.
31. 31 language; the consumption of Outline of a multiliple language boardgame for transculturality ‘Only capital and data globalise, all the rest is damage control,’ says literary theorist and philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in an interview.1 If so, is language capital, or data, or both? Seeing as important as it is to our identities, we cannot afford to le tit be neither. Language defi- nitely is data: after all, it’s a way of emitting information and nothing short of a veritable way of knowing.2 But language is capital, too. A language ‘consists not only of its words, but also of its particular sounds and sentence structures,’ wherein words are ‘borrowed most easily’ from other languages.3 According to cognitive science, heuristics are defined as “experience-based tech- niques for problem solving, learning, and discovery that give a solution which is not guaranteed to be optimal”4 But, when I asked a cognitive linguist if he thought that words were indeed heuristics, his response: The difference between words and cognitive heuristics is that words are more concrete. ‘You can taste a word; you can touch a word, you can see it. It has a form.’5 Consider airports. An airport is an example of the transit. A space 1 Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri. “Literary Review: Speaking to Spivak.” Interview by Bulan Lahiri. The Hindu 6 Feb. 2011: n. pag. The Hindu Group. Web. 22 Jan. 2014. <http://www.hindu.com/lr/2011/02/06/stories/2011020650020100.htm>. 2 “Theory of Knowledge Guide.” IB Diploma Programme. International Baccalau- reate, n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2014. 3 McWhorter, John H. “The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One Another.” The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Perennial, 2001. 105. Print. 4 “Heuristics.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 21 Aug. 2013. 5 Chazot, Pascal. Personal interview. 21 Aug. 2013.
32. between two places, two cultures. It has a simultaneous status as both a space between places, under which it has a single allegience with one place, while designed for welcoming every kind of ‘other’, of being evocative of it at least. Its treatment of the ‘other’ is maybe standarised or neutralised, but it is there. Under the surface, does an airport coax people from other countries to behave in a certain, local way? Does it coax them instead to act most western, or look more western? An air- port is a place that can afford to have its own implied terms and condi- tions for otherness and also for viewing; judging everyone ‘outside’ of it. Of acting both as a real space as well as a transit space. Languages are like that. They have an inherent concreteness to them - that of their forms, sounds, imaginations. But they also have their own frequency, their own codes and secrets, representing a way of looking ‘out’ at the world. They are also indespensible as a tool to know a person, such as an airport is indespensible in order to enter a country. Beyond this, an airport might exhibit some signs of how rich or powerful a country might be, so some languages may have a more powerful overpowering ‘visibility’ in our world today. ‘Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with, the an- thropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calcula- tions that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a method- ological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.’1 Possible ways of converting the ‘other’ into ‘us’ Just the way we make our own learning and mismatches (composite words, favourite words or concepts) of languages if we begin to speak them, thereby getting an internal insight, similarly when people actu- ally enter the place behind the airport, and not just transit from the ac- tual countries the airports represent, they may walk into a new world. 1 “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” Introduction. The Social Life of Things. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. 5. Print.
33. 33 But until we learn to do more with airports, and with languages, and recognise them for the magical portals they are, and cultivate open minds, we may always find them a bit distasteful, a bit other-like. When people begin to play with languages, they begin to form dialects of their own accord in-between languages, it follows that these dialects are naturally, organically varied, and so not reflect hegemony, at least not entirely conscious, and at that level they are independent of any sort of governance. It is this raw remix nature between cultures that transculturality needs to enable. The idea is not to create a symbol for multiculturalism or transculturality as much as it is create a transcul- turality ‘generator’, a kind of ‘open source modular transculturality’. This will be done using a cooperative board game wherein players play with, trade and learn words from different languages based on similarities such as sound. As long as an individual’s place in society goes on depending on his be- longing to some community or another we are perpetuating a perverse state of affairs that can only deepen divisions.1 We know that people love ideas, and customers today are getting smarter than ever before - customising, personalising and creating their own stuff.2 I believe one way to introduce the beauty of language is if we draw on peoples’ existing desires to becoming ‘global citizens’, and lead them to discover each other sideways rather than line up in the order that the current political hegemony would dictate. Luckily, there is already a rising interest in ‘culture consumption’ going on around the world, though largely misdirected towards exoticisation, capitalism, and consumption: ‘We do know what hipster means—or at least we should. The term has always possessed adequately lucid definitions; they just happen to be multiple. If we refuse to enunciate them, it may be because everyone 1 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 123. Print. 2 Chmielowski, Adam. “The New Mainstream Rules of Engagement.” Weblog post. Flamingo London Blog. Flamingo Group, 11 Nov. 2013. Web. 27 Jan. 2014. 33
34. affiliated with the term has a stake in keeping it murky. [...] The hipster is that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual—the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postra- cial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dom- inant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.’1 The idea is to target the hipster but be off-the-mark just enough to target authenticity too. “Some ideas are more clubbable than others, more easily turned into commodities and advertisements for oneself.”2 For this reason, we enter into a metadesign realm. What is metadesign? Youngblood defined metadesign as a ‘strategy for instigating a revo- lution in the communication world and overcoming the broadcasting style of mass culture’. Metadesign ‘deals with the creation of context rather than content’, it is a ‘mode of integrating systems and setting actions in order to create environments in which people may cultivate “creative conversations” and take control of the context of their cultur- al and aesthetic production.’3 As such, communication breakdowns are often experienced because stakeholders belonging to different cultures4 use different norms, symbols, and representations. Rather than viewing this “symmetry of ignorance” 5(or “asymmetry of knowledge”) as an obstacle during design, we view it as an opportunity for creativity. Having different 1 Greif, Mark. “What Was the Hipster?” New York Magazine (2010): n. pag. New York Magazine. New York Media LLC, 24 Oct. 2010. Web. 24 Dec. 2013. 2 Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974. 127. Print. 3 Giaccardi, Elisa. “Metadesign as an Emergent Design Culture.” Project Muse 38.4 (2005): 343. Print. 4 Snow, C. P. (1993) The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. 5 Rittel, H. (1984) “Second-Generation Design Methods.” In N. Cross (Ed.) Devel- opments in Design Methodology, John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 317- 327.
35. 35 viewpoints helps one discover alternatives and can help uncover tacit aspects of problems. The “symmetry of ignorance” requires creating spaces and places that serve as boundary objects where different cul- tures can meet. Boundary objects serve as externalisations that capture distinct domains of human knowledge and they have the potential to lead to an increase in socially shared cognition and practice.12 Therefore, the idea with a game was to create tangible boundary objects that conjure a word in a world language, while also being self-explanatory about what it says. Using such objects, which will be in the form of cards, the players can learn, play with, and exchange ‘culture’ veritably. A few ending quotes: ‘Focusing on the things that are exchanged, rather than simply on the forms or functions of exchange, makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics, construed broadly.’3 What we need to do is enter sensibly into an age of liberty and peace- ful diversity, casting aside the injustices of the past without replacing them by new ones or by other kinds of exclusion or intolerance, and recognising the right of everyone to include several linguistic alle- giances within his own identity.4 1 Resnick, L. B., Levine, J. M., & Teasley, S. D. (Eds.) (1991) Perspectives on So- cially Shared Cognition, American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C. 2 Fischer, Gerhard. Symmetry of Ignorance, Social Creativity and Metadesign. Diss. University of Colorado, Boulder, n.d. Colorado: (Publisher), 2000? Print. 3 “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” Introduction. The Social Life of Things. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. 5. Print. 4 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 111. Print. 39
36. ‘Isn’t it a characteristic of the age we live in that has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority? We all have to live in a universe bearing little resemblance to the place where we were born: we must learn other languages, other modes of speech, other codes; and we all have the feeling that our identity, as we have conceived of it since we were children, has been threatened.’ ‘Many have left their native land, and many, though they haven’t, can no longer recognise it.’1 Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of conventional history, and show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other, not that all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution. 2 What is sacred in democracy is not mechanisms but values.3 When the subaltern speaks there is not enough infrastructure for people to recognise it as resistant speech.4 ‘Is globalization about ‘the eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?’5 1 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 32. Print. 2 “Its Origin, Authorship and Production”: The Cambridge Modern History Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 10-12. Print 3 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 126. Print. 4 Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri. “Literary Review: Speaking to Spivak.” Interview by Bulan Lahiri. The Hindu 6 Feb. 2011: n. pag. The Hindu Group. Web. 22 Jan. 2014. <http://www.hindu.com/lr/2011/02/06/stories/2011020650020100.htm>. 5 Hamilton, James. “How Arundhati Roy Took Back the Power in India.” Common Dreams. SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd, 20 Jan. 2002. Web. 20 Jan. 2014.
37. 37 conclusion The arugment for diversity; the argument against uniting as one In this paper, language was not used as a way to explore culture, but rather the politics and identity crises it conjures - therefore, the effect it has on the individual’s sense of self. Language is different to culture in unprecedented ways, because (a) it can embody a vast streak of id- iosyncrasy that is never fully justified by the culture that it precedes, and (b) language-change, as extensively argued by John McWhorter, is hardly culturally driven. Language is, or at least the way we use it, instead is viewed as the re- sult of unconscious politics can become a peephole into those politics, while at the same time exploring how incredibly interlinked it is with our own identities, making it a most devastating and vulnerable politi- cal target in some ways, when it is one. This paper tackled the supposi- tion that there is more we can bring to cultural diversity in a ‘globalis- ing’ world, and that begins with knowledgeably removing the illusion of being globalised. By addressing some of the obstacles to learning language freely, as a result of powers that be, and by contextualising language from a political point of view, the hope was of freeing our perception of language from those very politics - making it something more ‘accessible’ is explored too. Politically, language is a most impor- tant ‘soft power’ tool. This paper also briefly explored language as an exchangeable commodity, and as the consumption of a culture. But here in the conclusion I’d like to argue another point: the point that there is inherent danger in the idea of uniting together ‘as one’ without knowing what it is that we are losing in the exchange. The defects of the quota and the “unity through community” systems have resulted in so many tragedies all over the world that they seem to justify the opposite attitude, which prefers to ignore the differences and rely in every case on the supposedly infalliable judgment of the majority.1 Because when it comes down to it, the question isn’t whether we can, the question is whether we can do it ethically. 1 Maalouf, Amin. On Identity. London: Harvill, 2000. 124. Print. 37
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