Cultural Difference

Annotation A.

Danielle Endres (Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2009) explains that when people wish to
change Native Americans, they are viewed as assimilated members of our public, which leads to
colonization and homogenization. Instead of specifically labeling natives as “savages”, the strategy
names native nations as a piece of the public; denying negotiation, describing all opponents as public
critics and forcing participation in the comment event. This strategy is key to the perpetuation of
colonialism upon because it allows the government to national interest to justification unclear policies
affecting the natives. The intended audience is the American public, aimed to inform the public of the
negative consequences of socially accepting criticism of Native American people, and how the social bias
affects them not only socially but also politically. This article correctly points out the flaws in social
perception of native American people but the author fails to provide a solution to the communication
with Native American people, not proposing an alternative method to communication at the level of
culture.

I learned:

1. The government justified stealing native American land with nuclear testing.
2. People used cultural studies against the natives, using their ideology of not “owning land” as a
justification to take it away.
3. Native Americans were generally rejected reparations for their losses due to social stigma.

Connections to Ceremony:

1. Both the article and Ceremony relate social stigmas to how white Americans treated the natives,
with a dehumanizing sense of superiority.
2. Both pieces of literature tie to the struggles of assimilation, and the abandonment of a lot of
culture the natives faced.
3. The writings connect by the covering of the openness of racism, people did not directly call
natives “savages”, but the way white communicated with natives was different than with other
white people.

Ceremony is a great novel because it points out what problems to escape in order to achieve happiness,
the key ideal of the American Dream.

Annotation B.

Gayatri Spivak (Outside the Teaching Machine, 1993) states that the criticism of the colonialist thinking
of native Americans is key to opening a space in the system of value-coding. By challenging our
perspectives of native Americans, we open ourselves up to a new form of respect for native culture,
moving away from the unequal treatments from indentitarianism. This articles was written as an
alternative to our current social biases against native Americans by questioning our moral values
through social intervention. Spivak establishes a relationship with the reader by creating a new ground
of ontology to prevent the patterns of marginalization of native Americans. Unlike Annotation A, this
article takes the step to provide a solution to current communication with the native American people
by imagining a world of the interrogation of social racism against native Americans, giving Annotation B
more leverage for potentially understanding the situations that natives go through, but Spivak’s
alternative “ways of thinking” are very vague and do not specifically point out what to interrogate,
leaving room for social injustices to continue.

I learned:

1. Biases toward groups of people is triggered by indentitarianism.

2. Coloniality, or the establishment of moral values, shapes how people approach others.
3. Social progress is often done through social intervention.

Connections to Ceremony:

1. Both pieces relate to the effects of identity, such as how Tayo feels uncomfortable with falling
outside of traditional racial labels.
2. The post-coloniality mentioned in the article relates to the Texans’ representations of the native
Americans as being “odd beings”.
3. People’s perspectives of Native Americans shapes how a lot of natives live and how they view
themselves, commonly having negative consequences such as how multiple characters in
Ceremony abuse alcohol usage.

In the perspective of Annotation B, Ceremony is a great American novel because it marks where
prejudices exist with natives and how to target them tying to the American Dream of progress, wanting
to make life better.

Annotation C.

Makau Mutua (Terrorism and Human Rights: Power Culture, and Subordination, 2002) explains that
people’s ideas of human rights is a product of cultural bias that spreads the savior-victim dichotomy and
universalizes American norms. The decider of who is and is not a victim is all in the hands of the elite, to
toy with people’s experiences determining how important people’s issues are. The author wrote the
article in order to inform the reader of this type of thinking because this is what stimulates
misrepresentation of groups of people, by the poor evaluation of their conflict without a sense of
urgency. The intended audience is Americans, with the intention of opening up their minds of more
closely analyzing native American history. This Annotation well expands upon the analysis of articles A
and B, analyzing the root cause of the misrepresentation of human issues, but fails to provide what
issues are important to the native American people, the reader of this article does not learn of the
abuses natives take to heart that white Americans tend to forget.

I learned:

1. The concept of “human rights” is socially structured by western normatives.

2. Cultural bias still oppresses natives with the misrepresentation of racial and ethnical
discriminations.
3. Discrimination shapes the ontology behind the concept of “human rights”, racism makes it
socially acceptable to not feel a need for advocacy.

Connections to Ceremony:
 1. This article relates to the dysmorphia Tayo faces for being mixed race, since people do not
declare Tayo to be truly native American or white,
2. This article ties to the abuse of alcoholism native Americans enacted, since there was little
concept of human rights for natives

Citation

(Endres, Danielle. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Routledge, 2009)

(Spivak, Gayatri. Outside the Teaching Machine. Routledge, 1993)

(Mutua, Makau. Terrorism and Human Rights: Power Culture, and Subordination. Buffalo Human Rights
Law Review, 2002)
Human rights is a product of cultural bias that spreads the savior-victim dichotomy and
universalizes American norms
The international law of human rights, arguably the most benign of all the areas of international law,
seeks the universalization of European cultural, philosophical, and political norms and social structures. It
is largely a culturally specific doctrine which is expressed in the idiom of the [*5] same culture. The
human rights corpus is driven -- normatively and descriptively --by what I have called the savage-victim-
savior metaphor, in which human rights is a grand narrative of an epochal contest that pits savages
against victims and saviors. 5 In this script of human rights, democracy and western liberalism are
internationalized to redeem savage non-Western cultures from themselves, and to alleviate the suffering
of victims, who are generally non-western and non-European. The images of the savage Taliban, the
Afghan victims mired in pre-modernity, and the American saviors put the metaphor in sharp relief.
In the human rights idiom, North America and the European West --acting generally under the guise of
the United Nations and other multilateral agencies -- are the saviors of hapless victims whose salvation
lies only in the transformation of their savage cultures through the imposition of human rights. The
human rights corpus is presented as a settled normative edifice, as a glimpse of an eternal, inflexible
truth. As a result, attempts to question or reformulate a truly universal regime of rights, one that
reflects the complexity and the diversity of all cultures, have generally been viewed with indifference
or hostility by the official guardians of human rights. This refusal to create a culturally complex and
diverse human rights corpus is all the more perplexing because the view that the human rights doctrine is
an ideology with deep roots in liberalism and democratic forms of government is beyond question. In fact,
an increasing number of scholars now realize that the cultural biases of the human rights corpus can only
be properly situated within liberal theory and philosophy. Understood from this position, human rights are
an ideology with a specific cultural and ethnographic fingerprint. The human rights corpus expresses a
cultural bias, and its chastening of a state is therefore a cultural project. If culture is not defined as
some discrete, exotic, and peculiar practice which is frozen in time but rather as the dynamic totality of
ideas, forms, practices, and structures of any given society, then human rights is an expression of a
particular European-American culture. The advocacy of human rights across cultural borders is then
an attempt to displace the local non-Western culture with the "universal" culture of human rights. Human
rights therefore become the universal culture. It is in this sense that the "other" culture, that which is non-
European, is the savage in the human rights corpus and its discourse.