In Response to Jennifer Tan's & Pippa Stein's Articles

After reading the 2 readings written by Jennifer Tan, as well as Pippa Stein, I generated my own little statement regarding my take on meaning-making – meaning-making is a process which is all-encompassing as it involves one’s culture, physical behaviour, mentality, creativity, and sensory.

Looking at the statement above, I think the writers’ stance on the pedagogical aspect would be to incorporate all of the aforesaid elements to help students establish their sense of “selves” as well as “identities”.

Something interesting, at least to me, was raised while we were discussing what the students in the DUSTY programme were doing. It is in relation to how some of the words these people use may be incomprehensible to people who do not understand their culture & way of using the English language, especially when there are so many slangs in theirs. Let us just say that everyone is encouraged to involve the above elements to (re)present themselves not only to the world, but also to their ownselves, but how will the world be able to see what these people are trying to (re)present themselves if the world does not even get the meaning of some of the way they express themselves through these elements?

One of my course mates, Syazwani (if I recall correctly), remarked that we do not need to understand, say, the linguistic elements of these people because we will still be able to see what these people are trying to express through other elements, like, their body language & facial expressions, for examples. Hearing that, I actually did agree with that. When I was pondering over it at home, however, I thought about the theory of relativism. To put relativism simply, I’ll use this saying to illustrate its definition – “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”. How does this link to the issue above? Let us have a look at the followings.

There’re many languages existing around the world currently, even though many have “died” over the millennium. Thus, language might already, in itself, be a source of “hindrance” when it comes to using it to bridge understanding between people. Even when two people are using English, do note that there’re many Englishes in the world too – Singapore English, British English, American English, and tonnes more! If I say “Porridge”, I mean congee as many Singaporeans use them interchangeably; but I believe the British would think of “Porridge” as “Oats” as that is what is known as Scottish porridge.

In terms of body gestures or languages, from the top of my mind with what I can think of, a thumb’s up in many countries implies “good”, “okay”, “yes”, and so on. These signifieds are not shared in either some parts of Australia, if not, Australia as a whole, however. The thumb’s up in Australia implies, “Up your ass” – to put it in a crude way, “F**k you!”

In terms of culture, just to quote an example from Stein’s article, the Americans deem it respectful when conversing with one another by looking at each other in the eyes, but this is considered rude in Africa, especially when one of the interlocutors is of a lower social rank than the other.

Looking at the 3 examples of relativism in 3 different aspects, how are we sure that what we intend to convey about ourselves to others are received in the way we intend to? Don’t you think every element is actually pretty much contextual? There is really not much everyone in the world share in common.

To answer the above issue, I suggest that we should all make an effort to try to our utmost to immerse ourselves, if not at least know a thing or two, into the cultures & lives of people we are not really familiar with. In addition, there should be no assumption made of anything we see, hear, smell, feel, & touch. Ask & clarify!

Yes, the suggestions I made may seem tedious as we might have to go to a huge extend to inquire about every single thing, but do note that nobody says this was going to be easy right from the start!

I read parts of the journal written by Captain John Smith, who is a real person (not just a fictitious character from the cartoon “Pocahontas”), & in it, he actually talked about immersing oneself to the culture of others in order to really know the people. It was only in the later stage that he came to a realisation that the Native Americans should not be considered as savages for they share numerous disparities in many aspects when compared with people of his own country.

I would like to emphasise that when we see the people in the DUSTY videos, we think we know what they are trying to express, but take a minute to think about whether we are interpreting everything we see of the video based on our own culture? Are our interpretations accurate if that is the case? Is it not important to know the author’s culture before generating any sort of interpretation of what we witness of them? This is just food for thought.