Thesis Thoughts

Derek Gregory, on writing in the Social Sciences (and I'll add, the humanities):

"If, as these [critiques on Ethnocentrism, Sexism, Abstraction in social theory] imply, there is no privileged vantage point, no singular place of reflection, no unambiguous closure, no unitary logic, then how can we make the lives of other people intelligible to us--how can we bring them within the horizon of our own (limited) sensibilities and competencies--without in some way being invasive, colonizing, even violent? Yet surely we are not condemned, in imagination or in practice, to our own eccentric worlds? I can offer no answer to what Clifford calls this predicament of 'ethnographic modernity': perhaps all we can do, at present anyway, is to disclose our vulnerabilities and, as Spivak puts it, 'unlearn our privilege as our loss.' If so, then part of this deconstructive process will entail an examination of our textual strategies-and in particular a consideration of the duplicities of narrative and image--because it is through these modes of representation that many o f our most commonplace privileges are unthinkingly put in place. To put it as starkly as possible, the crisis of representation has once again brought the politics of social theory and the poetics of social inquiry into the same discursive space."

Now don't you wish that you too could spend your days reading about the Historical Geography of Modernity? ;)