Ta’ārof as a Baggage and Gift for Crossing White Ontologies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.o1dfus-2540Palabras clave:
ta’ārof, everyday academia, white ontology, contact zoneResumen
In this paper, we analyse our own bodily experiences in everyday interactions in relation as scholars and women of colour in Europe. We aim to build on ta’ārof (تعارف) as an ontological and epistemological standpoint to situate our bodily experiences. We follow encounters and experiences where ta’ārof is both a gift with the potential for unsettling whiteness and a baggage that settles as sediments feeding racial hierarchies in the contact zone of academic encounters. We closely analyse different ways in which ta’ārof was performed in forms of hospitality, gratitude, respect, and self-breaking, and situate it in relation to asymmetries of racial encounters in academia. The inability to understand the knowledges around ta’ārof did not put the white gaze in an inferior position. Instead, the ontological blindness was translated to reproduce the orientalist gaze by positioning us primarily as informants, thereby denying our epistemic authority. The paper invites the reader to reflect on the politics and ethics of academic knowledge production through the standpoint of ta’ārof, especially in the spaces of the classroom, fieldwork, and formal and informal interactions of Knowing.
Citas
Afghari, Akbar and Amin Karimnia. 2012. “A contrastive study of four cultural differences in everyday conversation between English and Persian”, Intercultural Communication Studies 16 (1): 243–250.
Ahmed, Sara. 2021. Complaint! New York: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, Sara. 2007. “A phenomenology of Whiteness”, Feminist theory 8(2), 149–168.
Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality. London: Routledge.
Aparna, Kolar, Zeinab Mahamed, Ingmar Deenen and Olivier Kramsch. 2017. “Lost Europe(s)”, Etnografia e ricerca qualitative 10(3): 435–452.
Aparna, Kolar, and Olivier Kramsch. 2018. Asylum university: Re-situating knowledge-exchange along cross-border positionalities. In Decolonising the University, edited by Gurminder K Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, 93–107. London: Pluto Press.
Beeman, William O. 1986. Language, Status, and Power in Iran. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bhambra, Gurminder K, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. 2018. Introduction: Decolonising the university? In Decolonising the University, edited by Gurminder K Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, 1–15. London: Pluto press.
Cooper, Jan. 2004. “Queering the contact zone”, Journal of Advanced Composition 24(1): 23–45.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dehkhoda, Ali Akbar 1931. لغتنامه . Tehran: Tehran University Press.
Eslami, Zohreh R. 2005. “Invitations in Persian: Ostensible or genuine?”, Intercultural Pragmatics Journal 2(4): 453–448. https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2005.2.4.453
Farahani, Fataneh. 2015. “Home and homelessness and everything in between: A route from one uncomfortable zone to another”, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 22(2): 241–247. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506815576148
Freire, Paulo. 2000 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2016. “On Difference Without Separability.” In Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, edited by Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças, 57–65. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. F. 2014 “Toward a Black feminist poethics: The quest(ion) of Blackness toward the end of the world”, The Black Scholar 44(2): 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2007. Toward a Global Idea of Race. NED-New edition. Vol. 27. University of Minnesota Press.
Ghorashi, Halleh. 2005. “When the boundaries are blurred: The significance of feminist methods in research”, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 12(3): 363–375. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506805054275
Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Goldberg, David Theo. 2002. The Racial State. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Gross, Lena, Sepandarmaz Mashreghi, and Emma Söderman. 2023. “Refusal – Opening Otherwise Forms of Research.” Fennia – International Journal of Geography 201(2): 154–168. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120482
Hamzah, Saba and Kolar Aparna 2024. “Moving margins: Writing in relation as liberatory practice.” Social Inclusion 12, Article 8534. https://doi.org/10.17645/si.8534
Harding, Sandra. 2010. “Standpoint Methodologies and Epistemologies: A Logic of Scientific Inquiry for People.” World Social Science Report 173‑175.
hooks, bell. 1989. “Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness”, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36: 15–23.
hooks, bell. 1991. “Theory as liberatory practice”, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 4(1): Article 2.
Izadi, Ahmad. 2015. “Persian honorifics and im/politeness as social practice”, Journal of Pragmatics 85: 85–91.
Karimi, Zeinab. 2024. “I am not the info desk for Islam and Arabs: the racialization of Islam and boundaries of citizenship”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 47(1), 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2023.2210659
Karimi, Zeinab. forthcoming. Selective secularisation: Racialisation of Islam and boundaries of citizenship. Routledge.
Koutlaki, Sofia. 2002. “Offers and expressions of thanks as face-enhancing acts: Ta’arof in Persian”, Journal of Pragmatics 34(12): 1733–1756. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0378-2166(01)00055-8
Koutlaki, Sofia. 2010. Among the Iranians: A guide to Iran’s culture and customs. Boston: Intercultural Press.
Lomnitz, Claudio. 2001. Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico. An Anthropology of Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lugones, María. 2008. “Coloniality and Gender”, Tabula Rasa 9: 73–102.
Maldonado-Torres, Nwlson. 2007. “On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept.” Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 240–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. ““Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(2): 499‑535. https://doi.org/10.1086/342914
Mählck, Paula. 2013. “Academic women with migrant background in the global knowledge economy: Bodies, hierarchies and resistance”, Women’s Studies International Forum 36: 65–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2012.09.007
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.
Puwar, Nirmal. 2002. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. New York: Berg Publisher.
Rahbari, Ladan. and Olga Burlyuk. 2023. “Introduction: Narrating migrant academics’ precarity and resilience in Europe”, In Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe, ix–xxx. Burlyuk O and Rahbari L (eds). Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.
Rosello, Mireille. 2002. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Saberi, Kourosh. 2012. Routine Politeness Formulae in Persian: A Socio-Lexical Analysis of Greetings, Leave-taking, Apologizing, Thanking and Requesting. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Canterbury.
Said, Edward. W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Said, Edward. W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
Said, Edward. W.1999. Out of Place: A Memoir. London: Granta Books.
Sharifian, Farzad. 2005. “The Persian cultural schema of shekastehnafsi: A study of Compliment Responses in Persian and Anglo-Australian speaker”, Pragmatics & Cognition 13 (2): 337–361. https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.13.2.05sha
Sharifian, Farzad. 2011 Cultural Conceptualisations and Language: Theoretical. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Suhonić, Dino. (forthcoming). We Are Not Your Data: On Queer Muslim Resistance, Refusal and Rupture.In Differential doings, europes in margins, edited by Kolar Aparna and Jody Metcalfe. Helsinki University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson, & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Taleghani-Nikazm, Carmen. 1998. “Politeness in Persian interaction: The preference format of offers in Persian”, Cross-roads of Language, Interaction, and Culture 1: 3–11.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument.” The New Centennial Review, 3: 257–337.
Yaqubi, Mojde. 2012. “A cross-cultural study of politeness strategies applied in translations of English Requests as Face-threatening Acts into Persian”, Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods 2(2): 31–44.
Yaqubi, Mojde. 2018. “On subtitling of Ta’ārof apologies”, Journal of Language and Translation 8(1): 31–42.
Yaqubi, Mojde. 2021. “Revisited interpretation of Ta’ārof towards a model of analysing meta-implicatures of Persian offers in Iranian films”, Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 34(2): 712–738. https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.19017.yaq
Yaqubi, Mojde., EbrahimDavoudi Sharifabad and Wan Rose Eliza Abdul Rahman. 2013. “Gender-linked choice of politeness strategies applied to translation of Persian face-threatening acts into English”, International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 1(7): 66–80.
Descargas
Publicado
Cómo citar
Número
Sección
Licencia
Derechos de autor 2026 Zeinab Karimi, Kolar Aparna
Esta obra está bajo una licencia internacional Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0.
Authors agree to publish their articles in ACME under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
