Self-Other Flashcards
Self centred geographies
The danger of not acknowledging and reflecting on the self is not only that we can assume that everyone sees the same world as we do. We can thereby, impose our ‘sameness; on to others.
It is very difficult to do anything but see things from our own perspective however hard we try to escape from our self-centred geographies.
Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (1995)
Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (1995) discuss four ideas in terms of new ways of theorising the self
Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (1995) The body
The body - which orders our access to and mobility in spaces and places, which interferes with technology and which encapsulates our experiences of the world around us
Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (1995) The self
The self - which can be understood in a variety of way, ranging from a personal identity formed by an ongoing series of experiences and relationships, but where there is no distinctive characteristic in these experiences and relationships to suppose an inner, fixed personality which self-awareness serves to characterise each experience as belonging to a distinct self
Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (1995) The person
The person - which is a description of the cultural framework of the self and allows for different selves in different frameworks
Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (1995) Identity
Identity - Where the person is located within social structures with which they identify. Traditionally this would have been seen to involve rigid structures like class and family, nowadays they have tended to be constructed reflexivity.
Three interconnected strategies: 1
A strategy of positionally can be identified in which ‘telling where you are coming from’ can be employed tactically as a contextualisation of the interpretation that are to follow. Sometimes this involves the identification of key political aspects of the self. On other occasions, particular spatial or social experiences will be described
Three interconnected strategies: 2
Second, a more radical strategy of auto ethnography involves interpreting people, places and events through the perspective of your own involvement. Autoethnography opens uo intriguing possibilities for studying, for example, our gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality and leo our own personal involvement.
Three interconnected strategies: 3
A thirs strategy therefore, is to acknowledge intertextuality in a practice of Human Geograhy, by finding ways of recognising the significance of our selves as important influences that shape our geographies, whilst at the same imd seeking to listen to other voices.
Philo (1997)
we are often ‘locked into the thought-prison of “the same”’ (1997:22), which makes it impossible for us to appreciate the workings of the other.We will often seek either to incorporate the other into pour sameness, or to exclude he other from our sameness, in order to cope with the threat that difference seems to present.
Edward Said in his book Orientalism (1978; 1995)
Representations of the romantic, mystical Orient, he argues, act as a container for western desires and fantasies that cannot be accommodated within the boundaries of what is normal in the west. Yet, at the same time, representations of the cruel, detached and money-grabbing nature of the Oriental Arab serve to underline the assumed hegemony of the West over political-economic and socio-cultural norms
