Question 3

In “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance” Lutz writes, “One of the most obvious difficulties is comprehending the performances of the indigenous participants” (32). This statement contains an assumption about the nature of the article’s audience which I would like to examine. Lutz expands upon this comment by claiming, “The key and usually unremarked problem is that we have insufficient distance from our own and our ancestor’s world view.”  In this statement Lutz is demonstrating the extent of his own ‘unremarked’ assumption about his readership. By using the inclusive “we” and “our ancestors” (32) Lutz is actually excluding all non-europeans. This implicit exclusionary act betrays a certain ideological assumption about knowledge production and the institutionalization of knowledge. While Lutz’s article makes a concerted effort to promote critical self awareness on the part of the reader by emphasizing a  “defamiliarization of the familiar,” the article nonetheless reproduces certain ideas about academic authority and issues of power. The very fact that Lutz expects to be writing for an audience of european descent reveals the implicit power hierarchy present within the academic institution.  As an academic,  Lutz speaks from a position of socio-cultural authority, whose claims to knowledge also invest him with a certain claim to cultural capital. While it may be impossible to transcend such a position as an academic, it is nonetheless possible to gesture to this position of cultural authority in one’s work and to acknowledge some of the problematics that such a position entails. Perhaps an acknowledgement on Lutz’s part as to the structural inequities present in the ‘researcher- subject of study’ relationship would help to address some of the implicit assumptions in the text. This discussion makes me think of Thomas King’s commentary on postcolonial theory in Chapter 2 of The Truth about Stories.  While acknowledging the promise that postcolonial theory contains, King questions the extent to which post colonial theory actually affects the lives of colonized peoples. He writes: “I know that postcolonial studies is not a panacea for much of anything” (58).  I feel King’s comment speaks to the structural inequality that is still very much present within academia and institutionalized education.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. “You’re not the Indian I had in mind.” The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto, Ont: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003. 31-60. Print.

Lutz, John. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Encounters on the North American West Coast” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 30-45. Print.