After reading the essay, “Art of the Contact System’, by Mary Louise Pratt, describes the social space between cultures clash, grapple, and meet towards each other.
The context describes the struggle and challenges relation asymmetrical with power and the aftermath today’s world. The beauty how our society had come together with communication with different concepts such as contract zone. Pratt’s explanation was how different cultures must mix and blend with, “The space in which transculturation takes place- where two different culture meet and inform each other often in highly asymmetrical ways.” Throughout the essay, Pratt fanciful with examples that relates in our society and gives us an idea what’s the true outcome. First, the contact zone class would be mainly applied to the extent of developing one’s thoughts with ideas because of its focus was on conversation or speech. Pratt’s went on her personal side to give us an example about her son Sam, and his friend Willie. At the age of six thru seven, Sam and Willie knew so much information about baseball cards.
They both developed an arithmetic skill averages and retirements towards the rookies by learning every little detail about baseball. They learned commodified labor of luminous points such as: cities players were born or played at, height and weight, and including the history of American’s racism and the struggle of baseball. Pratt’s claims that at such a young age, children can learn about culture and the true value through the passion of studying something they love and want to know more about. Schools is valuable in children’s education but have the ‘space in between’ that often is difficult to rephrase the truth. Insofar, Pratt’s later talked about an article Guaman Poma wrote.
In 1908, a Peurvianist named Richard Piet Schuman came across a manuscript that was dated in 1913 in Italy. The manuscript had over 800 pages and had two eye catching titles, “The First New Chronicle” and “Good Government and Justice”. The manuscript had thoughts about writing and literacy, which relates back to contract zones. The New Chronicle was written in Spanish and Quechan with arguments occur representation American’s conquest towards themselves.
Poma’s wrote an auto ethnographic dialogue serving as an intermediate between the different cultures trying to make sense of all that was taught to him and what he is experiencing along with the thoughts of the Spanish conquerors and that of his own elders. Guaman Poma’s open a new argument about the cultures in society and his letter to King Phillip III. Poma’s took over the official Spanish genre to end the picture of Christianity world with an Andean rather than Europeans at center Cuzco in Jerusalem. Throughout the explanation of the letter, Poma’s quotes, “A text to people under take the description towards themselves in a way that engages with repetition.” In our society, we have a difficulty towards autoethnographic thought of autochthons to express or self-represent ourselves.
We have difficulty collaborating without judgement or having to pick sides even if we disagree with the topic. Poma’s often addressed both metropolis. One example that perfectly explains the letter was, “Americans slave autobiography its autoethnographic dimensions.” Mostly likely respect distinguish tradition. In addition, Pratt pointed out the utopian quality and abstract idea of the speech community. The basic purpose behind this type of text is to challenge a dominant belief system and the writers use the framework of the system to their advantage, using the language of the dominant civilization or the conqueror. Poma’s New Chronicle ends with a revisionist account of the Spanish conquest, which, he argues, should have been a peaceful encounter of equals with the potential for benefitting both, but for the mindless greed of the Spanish 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. The idea of the contact zone is intended in part to contrast with ideas of community that underlie much of the thinking about language, communication, and culture that gets done in the academy. For a couple of years different languages where it remained seen as, “Speech Communicates” and had the tension to self-defined together that are held by a homogenous. Sentence that shared identically and equally against us. Benedict Anderson wrote a book called,’ Primodical Villages” that had imagined human communities that exist most people we’ve met or hear yet, in our minds the image is distinguished.
Anderson’s had three proposes that helps characterize the different styles in moderation. First, a deep horizontal comradeship as the image to suggest the nation community as embodied to finite sovereign. Which leads back to contract zone what was first created the invisible network that would eventually constitute the rules by the nation with style of imagining the modern. Also, its strongly utopian the equality, fraternity, and the liberty to be able to the contract zone all together once again.
In sum, Guaman Poma’s text is truly a product of the contact zone. If one thinks of cultures, or literatures, as discrete, coherently structured, monolingual edifices, Guaman Poma’s text, and indeed any autoethnographic work appears anomalous or chaotic as it apparently did to the European scholars. Despite whatever conflict or systematic social differences, it was assumed, the participant is engaged. In conclusion,
