Question Twelve
The statement made in the above question is a large one, and I will only endeavor to answer a part of it. The piece I would like to draw out is the assumption that one's home country can become foreign to them, which Todorov references on page 249 when he says: "without becoming an Indian, Cabeza de Vaca was no longer quite a Spaniard." I do not believe this statement is true because I do not think we can ever become as distant from our home culture/country as we can be from other cultures/countries. Hence, I disagree with Todorov's statement overall. I would begin by pointing out that the idea of a foreign/home country dichotomy does not capture the breadth of our connection with where we are from. What does it mean to be foreign relative to your home country? At the most basic level, it presumably means you are no longer a member of that country/culture, which can either be based on other people no longer considering you a member or feeling isolated from it yourself. With regard to what other people consider you, I struggle to find examples where the majority of people feel someone has "left" their culture. Generally, this is because we judge membership in countries/cultures based on where people spent their childhood/young adult years, such that if you grew up to become, at some point, a fully fledged adult within a society you are always considered to have been a member. Regardless of your situation in the moment, the history you possess makes it impossible for you to be entirely foreign in the eyes of others in your culture. With regard to what you identify with yourself, I think it is possible to feel alienated from your home culture, or occupy a marginal place within it, and still retain the foundational, subconscious elements of your perspective that originated there. It is common to make statements about how your country's government/popular culture/present-day values have changed for the worse, and no longer fit with what you feel individually. Yet this sort of examination, where someone is essentially evaluating their place within a society, operates on the presumption that they have a place there, and no matter how negative their conclusions about that society, they are not extricated from their role within it. An example is the oft-portrayed old man who complains he does not recognize his own country anymore, because this stereotype has always been a role within American culture, and each generation as they age may earnestly feel that present-day society no longer fits them, while still being contained within it. All of this goes without mentioning the improbability of leaving behind every artifact of your upbringing or culture that rests in your subconscious, outside of losing all of your long-term memory and language processing abilities. Thus, neither other people nor ourselves can truly judge us to be a foreigner from our home country or culture, which means I disagree with Todorov's statement.
2 Comments
Mimi
11/30/2018 01:27:27 pm
Corwin, I really enjoyed reading your blog post but I respectfully disagree with much of what you said. I feel it is the human's place to choose where they identify and I think there are many times when that cultural identity is so tangled they have no other choice than to admit to having no cultural identity. Two of my friends come to mind; Maxim and Alycia. Maxim has a French father, American mother, grew up in Tokyo until age 17 at which point he went to school in Costa Rica. He now attends university in America and calls himself American but retains very very few cultural similarities to his American peers. Can he truly identify with and call himself American? He certainly can't call himself Japanese, for even though that is where he grew up he was an outsider there as well. Alycia has a Canadian mother and father, but grew up in Thailand until age 15 at which point she attended boarding school in Germany. When asked, she says she is Canadian - though has never been and has a strange, Thai-like accent when speaking. There are many people in the world who lack cultural identity because globalization has allowed their families to live in varying places across the globe. They are outsiders - and I feel this is a strength, allowing them to view cultures in the way Todorov encourages - as though everywhere is a foreign country.
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Alonso Pliego
12/3/2018 04:53:39 am
Both of you check my reflection post from week 14.
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AuthorAmerican University Class of 2021. Interested in state-building and economic governance. Archives
December 2018
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