Non-being or not being: making meaning of Asian invisibility
Mitsue Sano, Joanne Gozawa, Lien Cao, Vivian Chandran, California Institute of Integral Studies, USA
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 31st Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2001, University of East London
THIS paper attempts to relate our sense of Asian cultural epistemologies to conditions that have supported and thwarted our capacities to learn. We are four middle-aged Asian women who are in different stages of a doctorate program in transformative learning. Amongst us are two Japanese-Americans, and two immigrants, one Vietnamese and the other Filipina, both of whom have lived in the United States for over twenty years.
As diverse as we are, we discovered that we had similar feelings about our educational experiences. Absent for us was a field that invited our cultural way of being which made our participation in the academy inconsistent. Our difficulty, we believe, was compounded because our Euro-American instructors and classmates often mistook our 'silent' way for cultural reserve rather than distress. Adding to the complexity, at times we were reserved and, according to our cultural sensibilities, appropriately invisible. However, at other times our silence reflected our inability to find our place in the learning milieu. At such times we felt overrun and shut down.
Methodology
The four of us began meeting regularly both to fulfill a course requirement and to enjoy each other's company. On those occasions we talked about our dilemma. In this organic way, we began an inquiry into our learning experiences. This paper presents our reflections from our meetings held over three years, an analysis and theoretical framing, and some insights for a pedagogy that is more inclusive.
We used Organic Inquiry (Clements, 1998) as our methodology, and we were also informed by Synergic Inquiry (Tang, 1997). These methodologies allow us to use our stories and reflections as the data, honors multiple ways of knowing, proposes a holistic rather than reductive analysis that allows the integrity and natural coherence of the data, and encourages conclusions born out of the researchers' insights evoked from the inquiry process itself.
Transpersonal, heuristic, feminist, and participative methods inform Organic Inquiry. We chose this methodology because it is more paradigmatically aligned (Gozawa, 2000b, p. 67) with who we are than are other qualitative methods and also because it embraces how we researchers were with each other.
Substantiating multiple cultural epistemologies
Dr. Nisbett's research reported in the New York Times makes the case for multiple epistemologies (Goode, 2000). It notes For more than a century, Western philosophers and psychologists have based their discussions of mental life on a cardinal assumption: that the same basic processes underlie all human thought, whether in the mountains of Tibet or the grasslands of the Serengeti ... Recent work by a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, however, is turning this long-held view of mental functioning upside down ... In a series of studies comparing European Americans to East Asians, Dr. Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have found that people who grow up in different cultures do not just think about different things: they think differently.
Though Nisbett's research does not include Asians of American descent or immigrant Asians, it is reasonable to think that different ways of thinking and being still inform these groups. Though they appear assimilated or more American than not, they are still informed by their ancestral roots and their participation in subcultures. This rationale, in any case, reflects our experience.
Different epistemologies mean that people with different cultural traditions make meaning of the same thing in different ways. They are in relationship with phenomenon differently. For example in the Nisbett study just cited, subjects were asked to describe what they saw in a film showing a 'focal' fish. Japanese subjects were more apt to mention the surroundings while American subjects 'zeroed in on the fish, the brightest object, the fish moving the fastest.' Further, the perception was not superficial as Japanese subjects, unlike their American counterparts, had difficulty recognizing the fish against a novel background.
The differences carried over in social situations. Japanese subjects were more sensitive to context while American subjects had difficulty changing their judgements even when situational factors were altered.
We deduce from this study that if epistemologies are culturally different, then learning environments favoring only one culture's way of knowing may feel inadvertently hostile towards those who have different cultural ways of knowing. This paper is in part about the consequences of a pedagogy that knows only one cultural epistemology.
Reflections
Before beginning, we offer some context. The individual, western self seems to know explicitly what it thinks, needs, and wants. Euro-American instructors know that 'good' students will answer when they ask them, 'What do YOU think about x?' To their dismay and to our own, we are silent when asked. We are mortified that we cannot answer as they want us to answer - directly and with certainty. Our silence is born out of several dilemmas. One may be that the question is not asked in away that gives merit to answers we know. We are then in a double bind. We feel that our not answering shows that we have not learned and that disrespects the teacher. In short, we cannot answer and we cannot bear that we can't. Thus, we are silenced.
The question 'What do YOU think about x?' assumes that x is knowable without context and that it is an object or phenomenon with essence independent of its surround.
It also assumes that the relationship between instructor and student has no bearing on an answer. It assumes that there is an objective truth to the phenomenon independent of context that is discernable through rational processes. The question also assumes that the knower is separate from that which is to be known, and that she can know the object solely through her individual, critical assessment. These assumptions, the one about x (objectivity of the phenomenon and the way one knows it) and the one implied by YOU (an independent knower) are related. They both point to an ontology and an epistemology that believes things and people exist independently of each other. In this scheme, where things live, that is, their context, does not necessarily inform reality. This is contrary to what and how we researchers know. We know through relationship and connection; we believe that all things are in communion.
Further, what we think connects to what we feel. Our heartmind is what engages our knowing. Thus, the question, 'What do you think about x?' can only be answered from an inter-subjective standpoint. What informs the heart-minds of the group asking the question and in what social context is x to be considered. It is the we and not just the I that is connected to x in some lived way that gives it its meaning.
To see x out of context is to see a cadaver and not a living phenomenon of which we are a part.
While we may appear inarticulate to instructors, they to us seem heartless when wielding their objectifying lenses.
When we are caught in the headlights, that is, frozen by the dilemma of the unanswerable question, we are most apt to feel that they have no feeling. In a less traumatic context we appreciate that many of our Euro-American instructors genuinely try to see what we see (this is, we believe, a credit to our program and to some of our faculty members-it is not what we would expect from a conventional program).
And yet it is hard for both of us, instructors and Asian students, to get in the other's shoes.
Given this context, we offer the following representative quotes from our reflections. I hope all our context setting allows you to enter our world. (Yes, we note how Asian we are - having to set all this context before presenting data. And yet, can you enter the significance of what we say- not with the objectifying lens but with your heart-mind -if we don't do so?)
The times during my student career when I most acutely felt my Asian cultural difference is related to working in large groups. Usually, one of the first tasks proposed is for the group to define norms for relating and openly negotiating the different goals and styles of learning. I usually feel very inadequate and unprepared for that task. I don't really think of the individual (the I) apart from the group. Placing foremost emphasis on harmony, my first task in joining or forming a group is to attune to the sense, character, and spirit of the group. I know others also do the same, and it is through this attunement that all individual needs - although we never use that expression - eventually are met.
Throughout the group meetings, I find I am most open to listening when I have a sense of the group context, and learn most from members with whom I have built a relationship and felt some resonance. It seems that I have a need to situate the words I hear in the context of that person's life experience in order for my heart-mind to accept that I have truly understood that person. I also notice that I listen a lot more than I speak, for it is important to have 'gotten' the person before responding to her words.
- Lien To be considered fully engaged and fully participatory, I am supposed to have something to say about everything. Those who have chosen silence as a form of participation have been labeled as disinterested, covert, and even manipulative.
I will forever be considered a novice since it will never be natural for me to be annoyingly curious, to probe or describe, to analyze, to tear apart, and reduce most everything I encounter for the sole purpose of extracting meaning for me. I do not find the need to know a sparrow's anatomy so that I may enjoy his song; I do not need to know what makes a Brazilian cymbidium so fragrant that I always marvel at the joy it brings; I do not need to know why a story dies to mourn its loss. My hope is that one day I would be left alone to just be without needing explanations, without needing to choose sides or without needing to-do-something-about anything, and even then, still be regarded as an equal.
- Vivian But that (maintaining harmony of the group) is not their knowing. Their knowing is just, 'I need to have you know what I mean.' We come in with a relational sense of self, and they come in with their individual sense of self. There is one issue, and it's a big issue and that is the issue of inter-subjectivity. Asians have a deep level of inter-subjectivity. When say, Vivian speaks for Asians in her feeling way, she'll capture our concerns.
- Mitsue I would like to focus on this whole idea of intersubjectivity. When the environment seems excluding, it seems dangerous to us; it seems really hostile and that's why I get frozen. It's reflected for me when a meeting or engagement is over. I feel that some colleagues are more apt to cut the connection instead of stretching the connection. In an Asian good-bye, I know I'm still connected, even when I leave. The connection stretches.
-Joanne (B)ecause of our epistemology about interconnectedness, we don't know how to ask for help because we've never needed to.
- Lien. And that is why (name of Asian student who felt unsupported in her dissertation work) doesn't know how to advocate for herself. A good Asian anticipates the needs of others. Before you even know what you need, people are already there with open arms.
-Vivian For a person as intelligent as (instructor's name), I couldn't learn from her. I closed my mind whenever she spoke. We had a conversation because she sensed that there was something between us and the only thing I could say was, 'I sensed something positivistic about you.' And she said, 'You're absolutely right. I come from a medical background and I have to be post-positivist.' It was almost as if (our cohort) was a lab experiment. She had some idea in mind that in order for a group to be successful, that certain roles had to be there. That's how we got into the cohort. We apparently filled one of her roles. But, you don't make your job easier- to hold the experiment in the lab, to control all the variables and just cancel the people who don't fit. So that's the day when I lost total respect for her.
- Lien We believe what saves us and allows many of us to do well in the academy, is that in a paper unlike the classroom, we have more time to gather our thoughts, to consider where they are coming from, and what they want us to say. Euro- American instructors and classmates are not attuned to what we can offer from our authentic selves. The learning environment does not ask and cannot receive what we know.
But we are good at attuning to what they want. However, as this paper attests, we are more able to articulate and contribute who we are if allowed to come together for the expressed purpose of exploring our cultural consciousness.
(Euro-Americans were asked to do the same thing in their own group.)
Analysis
We now step back and try to surmise a deeper meaning of our experience. What organizing frame can we offer that makes sense of it? We have already made a point of the objectifying stance being different that our relational ontology. We would now like to theorize about why a different epistemology is so disorienting to us.
Why did we disengage and shut down on those occasions mentioned? A frame that seems to make sense of it can be fashioned from the rare literature that synthesizes the psychology and spirituality of trauma (Grant, 2000), (Gozawa, 2000a). As human beings we are all ontologically vulnerable, meaning that our realities are constructed. We take the construction for truth, and we depend on the collective, that is, the culture that we are a part of, to uphold the myth that our reality is concrete and enduring. Without this assurance we face the meaninglessness of nothingness and concomitantly the psychic death of our self. 'The collapse of any social myth or belief can turn upside down the most grounded of individuals and force them to face life's harshest realities before they are intellectually or emotionally ready' (Grant, 2000, p. 24).