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Yes, we are prejudiced

Liz Smythe

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Abstract Understanding is always translated into language. The danger is we then take-for-granted a shared common meaning of language. Gadamer reminds us that we each understand according to prejudices born of our whole life experience. None of us can escape such prejudices for they are how we understand. A hermeneutic approach calls us to strive to articulate our prejudices, recognising that others may have an understanding that is different.

In academia what is silenced, missing and taken-for-granted is all that is already in our thinking. Gadamer (1982) uses the word prejudice, meaning preunderstandings, assumptions, ready-made notions that we unthinkingly accept as truth. He argues, Understanding or its failure is like a process which happens to us (p. 345). Language sits between the speaker/writer and the listener/reader as that which holds understanding. When one has a different language, when the context in which language has been grasped is not shared, when an interpreter seeks to bring meaning from one world into a different contextual and linguistic world, the interpretive nature of understanding reveals itself more distinctly. This is written having just experienced the fascinated gaze of Japanese visitors to a New Zealand workplace experience of morning tea. Together, through a translator, we tried to express the meaning of morning tea. Did they leave understanding that it is so much more than drinking a cup of hot uid, which may in fact be coffee? Did they realise they had interrupted a deep conversation? Did they measure the time we sat there seemingly doing nothing and count it as unproductive? Could they appreciate the difference to the stiffness in ones neck when one leaves the computer for a break? Gadamer says, You understand a language by living in it. American colleagues also remark on this New Zealand custom of morning tea. When they come to visit they live the experience with us, participate in the rousing conversations, share the laughter, and recognise
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the cheerful mood that follows one back to work after a time of being together. They come to understand, but at the same time know how hard it would be to translate their understanding back into their own culture where such things are not done. What tyranny of hidden prejudices do we unthinkingly carry with us from our own community into the community with which we interact? Gadamer says it is these prejudices that make us deaf to the language that speaks to us (p. 239). I remember visiting community work in Vanuatu. In the city ofce we stopped for morning tea. I was very ready for the cup of uid, but not quite so enamoured with the clean but cracked cup, which would have been deemed unhygienic in my world. When we visited the ofce on one of the outer islands I realised that a cup of tea meant gathering the wood, building the re, working with re to boil water. It was too much for me to accept that a high-tech ofce, complete with computer, faxes etc., did not have an electric kettle. I gifted them one (to be sent from the city). It has since intrigued me as to how that gift may have been received. For people who have never stopped for morning tea, did an electric kettle have any signicance in their lives? Were there a hundred other things that would have been appreciated more? Does it simply sit and await the odd occasions when someone like me arrives with a wheres my cup of tea look on her face? We cannot escape our prejudices. We all have them, about everything. Heidegger (1995) talks of our fore-having, which allows us to understand in advance, our fore-sight, which enables us to see ahead, and our foreconception which holds our preshaped ideas and understandings. We could not function without such a ready made, already thought through catalogue of understanding. Yet, therein also lays the danger. We stop thinking. We assume our understanding to be sound, but at what cost? In terms of hermeneutics, one who understands does not claim to hold a superior position in advance but instead admits that his or her own assumed truth must be put to the test in the act of understanding (Gadamer, 2006, p. 51). When one steps into a community other than ones own the possibilities of misunderstanding are huge. In such situations our prejudices need to be brought to our awareness, questioned, and rethought within our beginning of understanding of the different cultural context. If understanding is considered as possibility then it becomes open to question, time and time again. Gadamer (1982) advises that the understanding of the present cannot be formed without the past. Unless we spend time looking back to see who we are, how we have been shaped, and therefore what we bring to a particular encounter, then we have missed a vital step towards being open to the other. So much of academic writing silences prejudices. As researchers, and as authors, we adopt a taken-for-granted stance of being in a position from

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Liz Smythe

which to offer our understanding to others, but seldom inform readers how our prejudices shape that understanding. Perhaps of more concern is the manner in which we take our preshaped understanding into community development work assuming goodness-of-t to the understandings of other. Hermeneutic approach calls for questions rather than answers. Questions help us to open our prejudices to self-scrutiny, not necessarily to discard them but to be mindful of how they colour the way we understand. Research that brings a hermeneutic phenomenological approach demands that researchers begin their exploration by rst looking at self and write their perceived prejudices into the nal report. It would be encouraging to see more writing that opens to question researchers themselves so we could more clearly acknowledge the impact of who we are on the work that is done. Hermeneutic research reveals the taken-for-granted, and we can read it thinking but I know that, yet had we stopped to give it thought, to consider the impact of our prejudices on others? Morning tea was just morning tea until the Japanese visitors asked what are you doing?
Address for correspondence: Faculty of Health, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. email: liz.smythe@aut.ac.nz

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References
Gadamer, H. G. (1982) Truth and Method, Crossroad, New York. Gadamer, H. G. (2006) Classical and philosophical hermeneutics, Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (1), 29 56. Heidegger, M. (1995) Being and Time, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.