Preceptions

I was planning on writing a post in the next few days about my friends comment on my last post. It would have taken quite a while to properly articulate the issue, but luckily, Al Jazeera has done it for me. The issue comes from a simple questions, but one that is steeped in history, politics, power and race. It is the questions of how we can know something about the "other," and how we come about that knowledge. Before I came here, I had a lot of presumptions and ideas about what it might be like. My parents and extended family continuously reminded me to be safe. Did they highlight this because they knew that I was going to a place that had seen the destruction of war many times before, or because I was going a dangerous place in and of itself?


This is an important distinction and one that other people have articulated far better than myself. Therefore I will point to towards them. The first is Edward Said, specifically in his book Orientalism. The other is this article by Al Jazeera. Please read them both.