What is Hospitality in the Academy? Epistemic Ignorance and the (Im)Possible Gift

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

This debate over values, most heated probably in the United States, has been dubbed the “culture wars.” See, for example, (Gates 1992; Hunter 1991; Jay 1997; Shore 1986).

Walter J. Ong was the first to point out the problematic nature of the term and concept “world view” which “reflects the marked tendency of technologized man to think of actuality as something essentially picturable and to think of knowledge itself by analogy with visual activity to the exclusion, more or less, of the other senses.” Societies that lay emphasis on orality, on the other hand, tend “to cast up actuality in comprehensive auditory terms, such as voice and harmony.” The “world” of “oral societies” “is not so markedly something spread out before the eyes as a ‘view’” but is experienced and understood through the combination of several senses (Ong 1969, 634). This difference can, in Ong's view, make analyses between the different “world views” difficult if not entirely impossible.

As Parekh notes, early liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill who endorsed diversity did so only within carefully confined parameters “of the individualist model of human excellence” (1995, 95). This view of diversity was culturally specific and had no room for any understanding or tolerance for nonliberal ways of life that did not cherish individualism in the same way that has become the cornerstone of liberalism.

See, for example, working definitions of indigenous people by United Nations, such as the Convention No. 169 (ILO Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries 1989) and the Cobo Report (1986).

I have elaborated the logic of the gift in indigenous philosophies in detail elsewhere (Kuokkanen 2004).

Tom Mexsis Happynook observes how in the colonial context, these cultural responsibilities have been forced into a framework of “Aboriginal rights” to be defended usually “in an adversarial system of justice.” These rights are, however, at their root first and foremost responsibilities (Happynook 2000). Also Spivak talks about the difference between right-based and responsibility-based ethical systems and the “constitution of the subject in responsibility.” She notes: “When so-called ethnophilosophies describe the embedded ethico-cultural subject being formed prior to the terrain of rational decision making, they are dismissed as fatalistic” (Spivak 1999, 18).

While largely accepted, this claim has also been contested by some scholars. For example, Ernest Sirluck maintains that “Kant's concept of reason was never made the referent of an actual university. Humboldt and others used it to develop the idea of culture, which was embodied in the founding document of University of Berlin and had much influence in Germany” (Sirluck 1997, 617). Robert Young also argues that, “No English university…is founded on reason” (1992, 99). See his analysis of the idea of the chrestomatic or practically-oriented university in “Chrestomatic.”

Derrida observes: “if the new arrivant who arrives is new, one must expect…that he [sic] does not simply cross a given threshold. Such an arrivant affects the very experience of the threshold” (Derrida 1993, 33). This certainly was the case with the colonizers and I would suggest, should, conversely, be the case when the arrivant is indigenous epistemes in the academy.

Drawing on Levinas, Derrida argues, “hospitality is infinite or it is not at all; it is granted upon the welcoming of the idea of infinity, and thus of the unconditional, and it is on the basis of its opening that one can say, as Levinas will a bit further on, that ‘ethics is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy’” (Derrida 1997, 48).

The idea of “new humanities” has been also discussed elsewhere, independently from Derrida's speculations. K. K. Ruthven, for instance discusses the fear in the late 1980s of losing humanities to economic rationalism characterized by reforms in higher education. He notes how humanities is, however, “alive and well” with new research centers and an expanding field, including “new humanities” “powered by transformative energies of people responsive to changes in the material conditions of intellectual life both here [Australia] and overseas” (Ruthven 1992, viii). This “new humanities”—at least according to Beyond the Disciplines: The New Humanities, edited by Ruthven—consists of fields such as cultural, multicultural, cultural policy, feminist and gender, postcolonial and subaltern and legal studies. For some reason, indigenous studies still do not make it into the “new humanities.”

I take it as an axiom that the future has always already begun, and that at once, it is constantly beginning over and over again. In other words, the future is always here at this moment yet it starts with every step we take.