大学毕业论文-—文化中介者和文化中介艾略特-波卡-洪塔斯普拉特-伊斯特曼文化中介个案研究设计.doc

Chapter I Introduction

1.1 Cultural Brokering – A Universal Phenomenon

Ever since ancient times, there have been situations where people of different cultures need to communicate with each other for varied purposes, in which cultural brokering inevitably presents itself. The inception of globalization since the late 20th century has almost rendered cultural encounter or contact an everyday phenomenon. Travelling overseas unavoidably brings people of different cultures together, thus creating the possibility of cultural contact and conflict, but the sweet sound of a tour guide could easily dispel one’s complex feelings of being an alien in a foreign country and clear up possible misunderstandings between tourists and local inhabitants. Merchants from multi-national companies have to work with people of different countries everyday, but the fact that people of different countries speak different languages could be a huge hindrance to potential business opportunities. Fortunately, and perhaps misfortunately as well, the participation of what we would call in this paper “cultural brokers” such as interpreters, or tourist guides never fails to ensure the smooth operation of business transactions or tourist journeys. Either being a tour guide or being an interpreter is fundamentally the same, because both function as a medium or an agent whose responsibility is to facilitate the communication among people of different cultures and beliefs. Facilitation of communication among different people from different cultures and different languages is termed “culture brokering”.
Different definitions of cultural brokering have been put forward by scholars over time. One definition states that cultural brokering is the act of bridging, linking, or mediating between groups or persons of different cultural backgrounds for the purpose of reducing conflict or producing change (Jezewski, 1990). Since cultural borders are a universal phenomenon (Szasz, 2001), cultural contact and cultural conflict inevitably occur in almost all times and spaces. Where there is cultural contact and conflict, cultural brokering will present itself. Clearly it is no exaggeration at all to claim that cultural brokering has been and will always be a universal phenomenon.

1.2 Cultural Brokers – A Unique Group of People

The specific figures who are the performers of cultural brokering have been generally labeled as cultural brokers or cultural intermediaries. Other synonyms for a cultural broker include “go-between”, “middleman”, and “mediator”. Cultural brokers or intermediaries can take many forms; they could be teachers, interpreters, traders, missionaries, diplomats, etc. In her Between Indian and White Worlds, Margaret Connell Szasz (2001) defines cultural brokers as those people “between the borders,” of the cultural frontier region, where they often “jungle the ways of different societies with apparent ease” (Szasz, 2001: 6). In her book, Ssasz further explains her understanding of cultural brokers:

Moving across these frontiers demanded extraordinary skill. Intermediaries became repositories of two or more cultures; they changed roles at will, in accordance with circumstances. Of necessity, their lives reflected a complexity unknown to those living within the confines of a single culture. They knew how the `other side' thought and behaved, and they responded accordingly. Their grasp of different perspectives led all sides to value them, although not all may have trusted them. (Szasz, 2001: 6)

Jezewski (2001) has defined “a cultural broker” as a go-between, one who advocates on behalf of another individual or group (Jezewski & Sotnik, 2001).
The universality of cultural brokering renders cultural brokers a constant existence in each chapter of human history. As go-betweens, they are fascinating to both laymen and scholars with the complex, diverse cultural settings in which they mediate and survive. Cultural brokers do not simply establish ties between people of varied languages and cultures. More often than not, they also bring about change to not only other people but also themselves. As a unique group of people, cultural brokers have definitely played a significant role in human history.
In terms of cultural brokers between the Native Americans and Whites in American history, Szasz (2001: 20) speaks highly of the functions and roles performed by those cultural brokers who mediated between Native Americans and Europeans for five centuries, to quote her:

Over the centuries their successes and failures have served as a barometer of the health of cultural pluralism in American and Canadian societies.

However, not in accordance with the enormous significance of these cultural brokers in shaping America’s history, scholars’ interest in this subject appears disproportionally small. Historian Joseph C. Porter (1994) puts forth the need to address the “significant but little-understood role that cultural brokers played in the five-hundred-year history of contact between Indians and non-Indians in North America” (Porter, 1994). Similar statement can be found in Szasz (2001: 20): “Despite their significance, popular historians have largely ignored them.”
To a great extent, the inadequacy of attention and examination of cultural brokers and their activities inspired the present motive to venture into this issue.

1.3 Purpose of the Present Thesis

1.3.1 The Subject Matter

The present paper shall locate its examination of the culture brokers on the one hand and the activity they carried out, namely, cultural brokering on the other between Native Americans and white people in North America. Cases of Eliot and Pocahontas are selected as representatives of both cultural brokers and culture brokering during the earlier period of British colonization of the continent while those of Pratt and Eastman are chosen as spokespersons of cultural brokering around the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century.
The reasons for focusing culture brokering during these two periods and selection of those brokers as typical cases for investigation are threefold:
First, America is known as an immigration country, where cultural diversity is a reality, which makes it a fertile land for studying the phenomenon of cultural brokering. However, interestingly enough, the land on which Americans are dwelling happily today and have so proudly claimed to be their United States of America originally belonged to Native Americans, the indigenous people who had been inhabiting on the so-called “New World” for thousands of years. Hundreds of years of cultural contact, or cultural conflict to be more exact, between Native Americans and Whites which resulted in substantial deprivation of land and considerable population shrinkage on the part of the former and colossal expansion of territory and massive population increase on the part of the latter, is in fact one of the main themes of cultural history of America. During this period of cultural encounter, cultural brokers bore witness to the changes transpired on both sides. Their involvement in between is both of great historical significance and great contemporary reference.
Second, the reason why the present paper has picked four cultural brokers from two historical periods, the earlier period of British colonization in North America and the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, is because these two periods represent two important periods with different significance to both Native Americans and Whites, being that of colonization and assimilation respectively. The power structures or relationships between Native Americans and Whites during these two periods are completely different. In his The American Indians: Past and Present, Roger L. Nichols (1981: 8) describes the changing relationships between the two since early colonization period as follows:

…the relationships between Native-Americans and Anglo-Americans have shifted gradually from the earliest European contacts to the present. Once they outnumbered the Europeans; now they comprise only a tiny proportion of the population.

Clearly, it could be argued that during the earlier British colonization phase, Native Americans undoubtedly occupied the dominant position in the cultural conflict, not only because Native American population outnumbered that of early European settlers by a great margin but also because they knew the skills needed for survival in the wilderness, while those early European settlers did not.
However, ever since the birth of the United States of America, the relationship between Native Americans and Whites has undergone tremendous alteration with the latter taking up the overriding role in the cultural battle. This has been best illustrated by Harold E. Driver. In his Indians of North America, Driver (1969: 484) remarks:

…between 1778 and 1871, when Congress put an end to treaty making with Indian tribes, a total of 389 treaties had been made and remade with Indians … In these treaties, the government set aside a homeland territory (reservation) for the tribe, paid them for land transferred to the United States, and sometimes agreed on periodic distributions of cash, food, or other material goods …

Apparently, since the founding of the United States of America, Native Americans have been in a much weaker position compared with Whites. During the colonization period, if they would revolt, their enemy were colonialist communities, but now if they would do the same, their enemy was a country with sovereignty. In fact, by the time at the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, the Native Americans had become so weak that they even had to rely on the newly-born nation for basic necessities.
Since the relationships between Native Americans and Whites are so different during these two time periods, the roles or functions performed by cultural brokers must also differ. And also it should be interesting to see whether there is certain correlation between the drastic change of power structure of the two peoples during these two separate time phases and cultural brokering. Through analyzing the specific roles or functions of cultural brokers during these two separate time periods, this paper should be able to draw diachronically and synchronically the picture of the phenomenon of cultural brokering in North America.
Third, the reason why these four cultural brokers, namely Eliot, Pocahontas, Pratt, and Eastman, have been selected for case study is multi-fold. To start with, they are chosen purely in the spirit of fairness. Eliot and Pratt are White cultural brokers while Pocahontas and Eastman are native cultural brokers. Furthermore, Eliot and Pocahontas fall into the earlier British colonization period while Eastman and Pratt belong to the time of assimilation. Most importantly, they were chosen because they all have played an irreplaceably significant role in America’s history, especially in the history of relationship between Native Americans and Anglo-Saxon Whites. An English Puritan missionary, John Eliot is the very first person to have ever translated Bible into the native language for Massachusetts Indians and published it in 1663 (Allison, 2004:14); the daughter of Powhatan people, Pocahontas is the key figure to have helped the establishment of Jamestown the English’s first permanent settlement, by supposedly saving Captain John Smith, the president of the establishment from being clubbed to death, and providing food and skill of survival for the whites at the edge of perish (Smith, 1624:101); a Native American, a physician, and a writer, Charles Alexander Eastman has received Whites’ education but states “I am an Indian” in his autobiography entitled “From the Deep Woods to Civilization” (Eastman, 1916: 195); a military man, Richard Henry Pratt is renowned for his quite successful English-Only Education among Native Americans (Cai, 2007:171181). In a word, they could stand as typical representatives for not only different historical periods, different ethnic groups, different cultural positions, but also different brokering functions and roles, which can hopefully satisfy the purpose of this present research.

1.3.2 The Specific Purposes
The specific purpose of this research consists of four aspects. One is to decode these cultural brokers’ behavioral patterns and to decipher their thoughts or mentality as they were serving as cultural intermediaries between the White and Native Americans during these two periods. Another purpose is to sort out the functions or roles performed by these cultural brokers in shaping American history as well as their relevant characteristics. Still another is to venture an unbiased assessment or a fair evaluation on these cultural brokers in light of the multiculturalism view. Finally, the most important purpose of this paper is to unveil the fundamental nature of their brokering experiences so as to achieve a better understanding of the cultural brokering in the American history in specific and the cultural brokering in human society as a whole in general.
As a matter of fact, the above-mentioned four purposes of the present paper are not separate themes; instead, they are interrelated in one way or another. Actions speak louder than words. Therefore, any attempt to interpret the mentality of these cultural brokers has to consider firstly the behaviors they conducted while performing mediating roles. To accomplish the third goal, we have to draw strength from our study in the first goal, because it would be impossible to offer any assessments at all, let alone unbiased ones on the subject matter without possessing knowledge concerning relevant behavioral patterns of this particular group of people. Meanwhile, the realization of the first purpose could also be of assistance to the achievement of third and the final purposes. That is the study on the behavioral patterns of individual cultural brokers could be used to analyze the fundamental nature of the universally existing phenomenon -- cultural brokering. In similar fashion, only when we have decoded cultural brokers’ behaviors and reached a relatively fair evaluation on them could we journey down the road and explore the fundamental nature of cultural brokering as a universal phenomenon.
To phrase it more clearly, this paper intends to unveil the fundamental nature of the phenomenon of cultural brokering from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective.

1.4 Research Methodology and Organization

1.4.1 Research Methodology

The present paper will explore the behavioral patterns and mentalities, relevant characteristics of these cultural brokers so as to uncover the fundamental nature of cultural brokering by adopting a multi-disciplinary methodology–approaching the subject matter from perspectives of history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
A sociological perspective