SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

7
Comparison, Pragmatics,
and Interpretation
There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy, idea that in
order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting
one's own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign culture. This
idea, as I said, is one-sided. Of course, a certain entry as a living being into a
foreign culture, the possibility of seeing the world through its eyes, is a
necessary part of the process of understandingit^wtitjhis were the only
aspect of this understanding, it wo^fldmerely ^duplication and would not
entail anything new or enriching. Creative understanding! does not renounce
itself, its own place in time, its ownTulvme; and « forgets nothing. In order to
understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be
located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in
space, in culture.
—Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1986:6-7)
Models and Strategies of Comparison
A NOTABLE FEATURE OF contemporary intellectual discourse in the
"human
sciences" is the flowering of the comparative perspective in both disciplinary and
interdisciplinary domains. 1 The emergence of publications, journals, and conferences
in fields such as comparative politics, comparative literature, comparative
philosophy, comparative history, and comparative sociology, building
earlier endeavors such as comparative mythology and comparative philology, necessarily
raises reflexive theoretical and methodological issues about the nature of
the comparative enterprise. The multidisciplinary conferences "Religions in Culture
and History" held at The Divinity School, University of Chicago, and the
corresponding essays and books published in the Toward a Comparative Philosophy
of Religions series raise a critical question for all these comparative activities:
is the current trend toward comparative studies the fulfillment of the ultimate
Westerniiegemony in which scholarly discourse becomes a powerful regimenting
'metalanguage, or is it a sign of global, multicultural, dialogic convëRyiiuirän'd '
emplitrieTicunderstanding that mirror the cultural heteroglossia of the modern
worla^ (Gadamer 1979; Schwimmer 1983:12e)? 2
While these extreme poles of
regimentation and dialogue are rarely manifested this boldly, they remain asymp-
. ay
on