Questions for Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone"
The questions below are meant to be used as a guide to reading Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone."
1. Who is Mary Louise Pratt? When was this article published?
2. What point(s) does Pratt make by using the example of her son and the baseball cards?
3. Who is GuamanPoma, where is he from, and what did he write?
4. What does Pratt mean by "contact zones?" How is the term related to GuamanPoma?
5. What does GuamanPoma do in the "New Chronicle?"Why is it an example of what Pratt calls an "autoethnographic text," and how does it relate to an ethnographic text? What examples of autoethnographic texts, in addition to GuamanPoma's, does Pratt give? In what ways does GuamanPoma's text reflect "the dynamics of language, writing, and representation in contact zones?"
6. What does GuamanPoma do in the "Good Government and Justice?" How is it an example of what anthropologists call "transculturation?"How do the figures Pratt gives from GuamanPoma's book provide examples of transculturation?
7. How is "GuamanPoma's text [. . .] truly a product of the contact zone?"What patterns of thinking lead to one seeing it as "anomalous or chaotic," and what patterns of thinking lead to one seeing it as "simply heterogeneous?"
8. Why is Garcilaso de la Vaga's version of the Spanish/ Inca much more readily accepted in Spain and Latin America than GuamanPoma's version?
9. Whatare "some of the literate arts of the contact zone" and "some of the perils of writing in the contact zone?" Why and how are these arts and perils relevant today?
10. Why is Pratt unhappy with the concept of "speech communities" and the way it is used in discussing language? How is her idea of "speech communities" related to Benedict Anderson's idea of "imagined communities?" How are writing, literacy, and what Anderson calls "print capitalism" related to this discussion?
11. What model of language is normally assumed? What different theory does Pratt imagine?
12. What are the assumptions of the analyses of language based on the "autonomous, fraternal models of community" overlook? Why might this model not work "when speakers are from different classes or cultures, or one party is exercising authority and another is submitting to it or questioning it?"How does Pratt use the two examples involving her son (Manuel this time) to develop this part of the discussion?
13. Why is this discussion of contact zones important for the United States in the 1990s (note the date of her essay)? How does she use the experience of the Stanford course in Cultures, Ideas, Values to raise issues involving "the pedagogical arts of the contact zone?" What examples of these arts does she give? Why are what she calls "safe houses" and programs like ethnic and women's studies still needed?