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