Multiculturalism has been compared to a patchwork fabric where a number of different cultures, like different pieces of fabric, exist side by side. Although diverse cultures can create a solid and colourful whole, the fabric still has areas where the stitching easily comes apart.
The University of Toronto community is doing its part to patch up the gaps between cultures. With diverse courses, programs and services, students are exposed to cultures, languages, religions and philosophies outside the traditions with which they are most familiar.
For professor David Turner, the benefit of exposure to other cultures is that it makes one ask, “Why the difference between me and them?” Turner believes asking this question will make the differences between oneself and others begin to dissolve. “It doesn’t make you one of them [a member of another cultural tradition], but it makes you a person in other terms,” he says.
Turner teaches Indigenous Spirituality, a third-year course in the anthropology department that examines the religious or spiritual traditions practised by Australian Aboriginal, Canadian Native, and West African cultures. What makes this course unique, however, is its performance aspect. While the first part of the course consists of lectures on the three traditions, the final weeks of the course are performances created and staged by the students based on what they have learned.
Turner explains, “In religious experience, ‘experience’ is the keyword. I want to give [students] the experience of performing things. You could lecture all you want about Sweat Lodges, but you won’t know until you try it. This gives them the chance to create something of their own out of something long-standing and enduring.”
For Turner, the experiential aspect of the course is an important pedagogical strategy that further reflects the philosophy underlying the spiritual traditions being studied. Speaking from his particular knowledge of the Australian Aboriginal tradition, Turner reflects that the difference between textually and orally based spiritual traditions is that in one, “you are taught to believe the text,” while in the other, “you are taught to believe the experience.” Turner explains, “If you don’t experience something, then you’re not expected to believe. You don’t believe something because I tell you to.”
In Turner’s opinion, the only way to gain a fuller knowledge and respect for a spiritual tradition is to directly engage with it. The experiential approach is about bridging theory and practice. “Go Native, why not?” says Turner. “That’s true multiculturalism, truly learning another culture, not just going to a restaurant and eating Chinese food.”
But what constitutes the difference between studying or acting out spiritual traditions and eating ethnic food? And can we consider spiritual experience outside of the classroom and off the stage in terms of a performance equipped with lights and stage directions?
Jimmy Dick, the Cultural Program Coordinator at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, recognizes two sides to courses that explore Native spirituality. On one hand, the academic institutions are “finally starting to open their minds to First Nations’ culture and spirituality.” On the other hand, studying Native culture also threatens to become a simple “profiting” from it. Rather than engaging with a culture, learning about a culture can become a one-sided exercise, so that one can potentially even adopt aspects of a culture and fit them into one’s own logic without fully understanding them.
One effect of a simple embracing of different cultures is that they can end up being unfairly lumped together. “They say that we come from the stars,” explains Dick, “but the Ojibwa are different from the Dakota and the Dakota are different from the Cree. In the south there is another version. These are different societies.”
While an oral tradition encourages an experiential approach to learning about spirituality, it also makes the study of Native spirituality more problematic. According to Dick, Native traditions are “passed down in the community” and they appear “mystical because they are not written down. Because they are not written, there is no instruction.”
How, then, can the academic setting account for different cultures and religions? For Professor Leonard Priestley, a teacher of religion in the Department of East Asian Studies, a good way of considering different religions and spiritual traditions is “approaching each on its own terms.” He says, “If we assume, for example, that all religions are seeking something similar to Christian ‘salvation,’ the result is guaranteed to be misunderstanding and confusion.”
Reflecting on his experience in the Indigenous Spirituality course, Kevin Hille feels the course “emphasized the distinctness of Indigenous traditions and their respective cosmologies from one another, [while] rejecting attempts to slew them all together.” According to Hille, the course also “emphasised the ethnic and geographical rootedness of the indigenous traditions.” But he admits that he has concerns about learning and performing another culture. “The reasoning behind the performance aspect,” says Hille, “is that it makes us students ask ourselves what it takes to translate cosmology into activity, which is an essential part of any religion.” On the other hand, he explains that he can see “problems associated with representing a tradition that is not yours, especially in such an extravagant fashion.”
Professor Karen Rice, the director of the Aboriginal Studies program at the University of Toronto, echoes Hille’s sentiment. If there is an issue with a course like Indigenous Spirituality, Rice thinks that it might have something to do with “having the appropriate voice.” Although she admits it is hard to have a blanket answer to what constitutes an appropriate voice, she explains that it has something to do with comfort. “This is something we think and talk about a lot [in the department],” says Rice. “Students need to feel comfortable to speak about their particular experiences,” presumably without becoming typecast to particular images and experiences.
For Rice, the question of feeling at ease with telling one’s own experience is not about the telling of stories but about “the ownership of stories, the right to own versions of stories.”
But does the right to tell a story depend on some sort of hierarchy or privilege? For Rice, this depends on the tradition. It also depends on the relationship one has with his or her audience. “How can you know what the relationship is?” asks Rice.
Considering what he has learned working with Aborigines in Australia, Turner suggests seeing issues of appropriation in another way. Rather than being able to build relationships between cultures, for Turner, obsessions “with personal possession and property and ‘own’ cultural identity” end up acting as blocks to this process.
Seemingly between the two views, Priestley considers the relationship between different cultural traditions as being a tension between adopting other traditions and preserving their specificity. “Just as people of different languages who have to function together gradually come to speak the same language,” suggests Priestley, “which may not be exactly the same as any of the languages they started with, so people of different cultures, if they have to function together, will gradually create a new culture. How good the language is, or how good the culture is, will depend in part on how much can be retained of the richness of the contributing languages or cultures.”
Weaving our own story and culture with those of others appears a very worthy and worthwhile project, but also a very difficult one.
A recent Globe and Mail ad reflects the difficulties involved in the relationship between cultures—”First Nation. Third world. A matter of perspective”—reminding us that different cultures and their experiences are not easily reconcilable.
