Post #111

society, colonialism, imposition, behaviour "re: eye contact: i have a lot of Thoughts about the expectation of enforced eye contact in Western culture and its connections with colonialism. It starts with the fact that eye contact being associated with honesty and virtue is pretty much chiefly a Western cultural idea. In many other cultures, its a sign of disrespect or defiance. It could get you in a fight, if you do it with the wrong person. In those same cultures, avoiding eye contact is a sign of respect for one's superiors. However, in Western culture, its a sign of disrespect, dishonesty, and cowardice. This means that from a colonizer's view, people in these cultures could be seen as morally inferior. What we have now is a pretext for forcing changes in behavior upon the ones being colonized, or “civilized” in the colonizer's view. The idea is that by forcing eye contact, one is retraining the “savage” to behave according “civilized” moral standards. Many colonialist thinkers believed that indigenous people would ultimately benefit i they were reeducated according to these: standards. The actual result of this, though, is a setup where authority figures can exert control over what someone can do with their eyes. This means controling where you can look and what you can se, ie. where you can put your attention and what information you can take in. Its a very aggressive power move. On one level it controls your awareness of your surroundings and your abity to respond to them, and on another level it's an attempt to establish control over your body."