Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”
Contact Zone is defined as:
I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. Eventually I will use the term to reconsider the models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing and that are under challenge today.
I need help tying Pratt’ spaper with our current healthcare problem
Nick,
I’ll review the essay later today and see what I can glean and try to help you out. I’ll get back to you.
Without an understanding of what you mean by “our current healthcare problem,” it’s hard to make a clear connection. I mean, there are various problems within our healthcare system, including doctor/patient ratios, overworked staff, increased costs of healthcare, the over prescription of certain medications, privatized health insurance whose primary goal is profits, etc.
So, I’ll discuss how I view this in general terms, perhaps a few specifics. So, Pratt defines the contact zone as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” So what contact zones exist in the healthcare industry? I would say contact zones exist between doctors and patients; between doctors and nurses; between consumers and insurance agencies; between consumers and medicine companies…
Pratt says many people view the world as “a unified and homogenous social world in which language exists as a shared patrimony” (so, a place where everyone enjoys the same language and understands in the same way), but if we view the world as a place where people speak different languages (and perhaps share some languages, but not all), we understand that people are not reading/writing/understanding under the same rules and assumptions. So, in the example of the doctor/patient relationship, the doctor is talking in a different language than the patient. So then, a “text” (conversation, doctor’s note, pamphlet, etc.) is read very differently by a doctor and by a patient. The patient, because she, he, or zie, exists as someone subordinate to someone with power (the doctor), the patient must adapt some of the language of the doctor, much like Guaman Poma adopts some of the language of the oppressors (Spanish).
So (my, I’m saying so a lot), Pratt discusses the literate arts that are created in this contact zone (“autoenthnography, transculturation, critique,” etc.) and the perils that exist (“miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning”). Since doctors and patients understand with a different meaning, then there exists a strong likelihood of many of these perils (and indead, some of the arts, in cases where patients parody doctors?).
Let’s look at insurance companies and patient. Patient Bob isn’t getting the kind of service he desires for his cancer or something, but because he’s uneducated and poor and doesn’t speak insurance talk, the letter of complaint or inquiry is either miscomprehended or tossed aside as a dead letter (disregarded) because it isn’t written in the language of the oppressors (the nasty, evil, profit-driven, insurance company; and while I’m trying to be funny in this description of insurance companies, there is also a large degree of sincerity behind it).
I hope I summarized the article well and linked it to healthcare in some way. I’m unsure of what your focus is in regards to healthcare problems, but I hope I made enough connections to be of help.
thanks
Hi Michael and Nick,
I think that Michael does an excellent job of explaining how Pratt’s theory of the contact zone might apply in our current health care situation. I especially liked the way you worked through this concept analogically at multiple levels, Michael.
It’s disheartening to think about our healthcare system in this way–and it’s shocking that the situation is as it is in such a wealthy country. But I think your analysis is quite accurate.