Hi All,
I think I am still as confused as I was in class and trying to collect my thoughts i think made it even more messy. But this is what my train of thoughts were,
I think what I got from Deloria is the ongoing struggle between modernity and traditional. I think the reimagination of spatiality of the contexts with which engagement is essential is important but modernity narratives undermine it by treating it as a temporal process. I think what Deloria hinted was absent in
the binary conception of modernity and traditional is the aspect of that the norm is attributing a singular universalizing concept of modernity and disregarding the possibility of more than one modernity. As Tsing had suggested, I think Deloria also implies that we need to look at modernity not only from the center to the periphery (indigenous culture), which is the norm in the modernity narratives but also how the periphery can diffuse to the center. For this reason, I think the question of "unexpected" rises. I think because the
activity of the periphery in the creation of modernity remains systematically invisible at the center a narrative of traditional is imposed to channelize the process of diffusion only from center to periphery and not the other way round.
Deloria explains in the final chapter how non-Indians translated the sounds of Native America into westernized music and used the recorded artifacts as the source for a new Americanized sound and also Annita's video both shows how the natives ridicule the non- native perception of Indians as primitive. Deloria examines both whites who chronicled Indian sounds and native performers who tried to bridge the world between Indianness and western music. He explores how Indians used non-Indian expectations alongside impressive talents associated with westernized music to draw white audiences. I think this successfully extends Deloria's questions about the historical construction of Indianness and expands a discussion raised by the author in the beginning of the book as he mentioned chuckles, as I stated in class also the Indians mimicking the expectations of non-Indians.
Sorry if I sound confusing!!!
Somava
I think I am still as confused as I was in class and trying to collect my thoughts i think made it even more messy. But this is what my train of thoughts were,
I think what I got from Deloria is the ongoing struggle between modernity and traditional. I think the reimagination of spatiality of the contexts with which engagement is essential is important but modernity narratives undermine it by treating it as a temporal process. I think what Deloria hinted was absent in
the binary conception of modernity and traditional is the aspect of that the norm is attributing a singular universalizing concept of modernity and disregarding the possibility of more than one modernity. As Tsing had suggested, I think Deloria also implies that we need to look at modernity not only from the center to the periphery (indigenous culture), which is the norm in the modernity narratives but also how the periphery can diffuse to the center. For this reason, I think the question of "unexpected" rises. I think because the
activity of the periphery in the creation of modernity remains systematically invisible at the center a narrative of traditional is imposed to channelize the process of diffusion only from center to periphery and not the other way round.
Deloria explains in the final chapter how non-Indians translated the sounds of Native America into westernized music and used the recorded artifacts as the source for a new Americanized sound and also Annita's video both shows how the natives ridicule the non- native perception of Indians as primitive. Deloria examines both whites who chronicled Indian sounds and native performers who tried to bridge the world between Indianness and western music. He explores how Indians used non-Indian expectations alongside impressive talents associated with westernized music to draw white audiences. I think this successfully extends Deloria's questions about the historical construction of Indianness and expands a discussion raised by the author in the beginning of the book as he mentioned chuckles, as I stated in class also the Indians mimicking the expectations of non-Indians.
Sorry if I sound confusing!!!
Somava
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