Marguerite Bouvard, Ph.D, Resident Scholar, WSRC, Brandeis University
I was born in Trieste, Italy and grew up in a multilingual household where I was provided with literature from cultures around the world. When my father moved to Latin America, I spent time with him in Sao Paulo, Lima and Mexico as a teenager. He taught me how to immerse myself in different cultures, leaving behind my suppositions and learning new perspectives as well as languages. In the United States, with its emphasis on individualism and the marginalizing of its communal cultures such as the African American and the Native American, we do not realize how deeply culture influences our study of history and how our very epistemology is a social construct. One of my pressing interests as a political scientist is the change in our political culture since 9/11 and my opposition to the Iraq War. Under our current government, people who dissent are labeled as unpatriotic and the executive branch has eclipsed the other two branches of government at great cost to our civil liberties. As a result I have turned to my life as a poet to express my dissent as poets in other cultures have done for generations.
I was born in Trieste, Italy and grew up in a multilingual household where I was provided with literature from cultures around the world. When my father moved to Latin America, I spent time with him in Sao Paulo, Lima and Mexico as a teenager. He taught me how to immerse myself in different cultures, leaving behind my suppositions and learning new perspectives as well as languages. In the United States, with its emphasis on individualism and the marginalizing of its communal cultures such as the African American and the Native American, we do not realize how deeply culture influences our study of history and how our very epistemology is a social construct. One of my pressing interests as a political scientist is the change in our political culture since 9/11 and my opposition to the Iraq War. Under our current government, people who dissent are labeled as unpatriotic and the executive branch has eclipsed the other two branches of government at great cost to our civil liberties. As a result I have turned to my life as a poet to express my dissent as poets in other cultures have done for generations.
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Graduating from an east coast art school in 1970, I was trained as a modernist abstract expressionist painter, steeped in the prevailing ideology that art should be a self-referential, autonomous practice that has little connection to real world events. Growing up as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who never spoke about his traumatic losses, I was used to blocking out real world events. Returning to graduate school in the late 90’s, I was consumed with studying feminist and postmodernist theory, while developing a dissertation project that brought together ideas about art, rape, murder and community. My current project “Erinnerung im Exil/Exiled Memories,” deals with ruptured memory expressed through my family’s Holocaust history.
As a member of the World Cultures Study Group, I am interested in examining various continuities and discontinuities, the tenuous relationship between geography and identity, and the political, economic and social structures of a global environment.
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Having spent some years in social development, interest in varied cultures, practices, thoughts and approaches has grown manifold. With an educational background in Sociology, it seemed to me that development is the best thing for me to be engaged in. Assessing community participation took me to remote places in India. Sometimes flood-prone villages left me stranded and I became the immediate concern of the very community I had set myself to evaluate! Or being offered a ride on a peasant's bullock cart to the nearest local facility so I could treat my malaria-like symptoms. What is it in human nature across cultural and political boundaries that sometimes is discerning, perceptive and insightful? At what point does this nature change to make differences apparent and only remnants of "imagined" community remain? Can recognizing these differences make for closed groupings that guard the threat of disintegration? Or perhaps opening them make perceived identities stronger? These are a few of my favorite questions that seek my attention and yours!
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I was educated to believe that philosophy is universal, but have learned that this is not the case. Mere abstractness is no protection against parochialism. I think of museums, my second professional attachment, as a material counterpart to philosophy; they embody the ideas that philosophy engenders. But like philosophy, museums pretend to greater neutrality and objectivity than they can realize. My interest in both philosophy and museums persists, but it must be fortified with a healthy understanding and appreciation of the world from many perspectives on the ground. And so I travel. I come to world cultures first out of curiosity and fascination with the many ways of representing them, and second out of sadness that this wealth should become a source of so much violence and pain.
My “global awareness” derives from the accidents of birth (in Germany), habitation (USA), multiple influences, widespread wandering, and study. Feminism infuses my understanding of the cultures I encounter and convinces me that the received word is inadequate.
____My “global awareness” derives from the accidents of birth (in Germany), habitation (USA), multiple influences, widespread wandering, and study. Feminism infuses my understanding of the cultures I encounter and convinces me that the received word is inadequate.
Ruth Nemzoff, Ed.D., Resident Scholar, WSRC, Brandeis University
I lived in India for two years, have worked in France and Switzerland. I travel to Asia annually these days and am interested in how women in one country can both influence each other and be understanding of each other. My new book, Don’t Bite Your Tongue: How To Foster: Rewarding Relationships with Your adult Children, explores intergenerational relationships. I am interested in exploring what aspects of these relationships are universal and what aspects are culture based.
