Lost too...

I’ve done a little bit googling of Saba Mahmood. She is associate professor of social cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and has quite a number of publications on Islam and Muslims. From her name, research interests, and the institution she works for, I presume that she comes from a Middle East background and has received studied in the States. This cross-cultural background, I think, to a large measure has enabled Mahmood to stand outside the murky swirl of the blasphemy vs. freedom of speech dispute and to reach the heart of the matter.

Rather than remain bogged down in the specifics of the discussion, Mahmood sets herself the task of questioning culturally different normative frameworks within which people make judgments. She points out that in the view of the Europeans, Muslims are too backward to understand that icons are merely vehicles for communicating meanings and have nothing to do with the abstract character of religious beliefs. While for Muslims, icons “pertains [pertain] not just to images but to a form of relationality that binds [bind] the subject to an object or imaginary.” The failure to understand that the two parties in fact talk from different planets (i.e. the semiotic tradition and the iconophile tradition) and their immediate resort to judicial language lead to the escalation of the clash.

Mahmood’s analysis prompts me to think of my own comparative advantage in studying English literature. In order to sell myself last year, I indicated in my PhD application that I was confident that my non-Western background would help me place English literary texts in a comparative and international context and dig up the aspects of culture which might otherwise be taken for granted by North American students. With several months past, I have to admit that I’m far from being confident than my self-made advertisement boasted. During the past few months, I have been applying myself to getting a handle of the logic of academic argumentation in North America. Yet for many times, I found myself mired in theoretical reasonings and couldn't lift myself out of the mess. My undergraduate English writing teacher used to exhort us to abandon the Chinese way of writing (which, she thought, was “circular”) and to follow the English writing style (which, in her opinion, was “straightforward”).  Yet many English academic essays I’ve read in the past few months prove to be far more circular than Chinese essays. (Well, to do justice, it should be pointed out that a great number of essays I’ve read are English translations of those written by French scholars). Sometimes I would spend hours on an abstruse piece before it eventually dawned on me that the writer just wanted to convey one single idea – a simple idea. Here I pose my questions. To what extent do current academic discourses help with our clarity of thinking? Is it because we are so busy with learning to master these discourses in order to survive in the harsh academic jungle that we have but little time to examine the frameworks on which these discourses are based? Besides cultural background, what are other factors that prevent us from seeing the wood (evaluation frameworks) for the trees?