Interpretation; A Cautionary Tale

At the onset of projects like this I have noticed that there is a familiar feeling of uncertainty that sets in. This uncertainty bears with it immense challenge and opportunity to create something new and grapple with difficult concepts. Though I am learning to embrace this ambiguity, the feeling of wavering self-assurance still lingers somewhere between the last page of reading and first page of notes. 

The prospect of creating a proposal for a digital reconstruction was somewhat intimidating for me, as I tend to shy away from anything containing (or even alluding to) the word digital. Though I will say once we began to look into the project I started to conceptualize it less as a remediation and more as a renovation. In this particular sense I considered Marshall McLuhan’s notions that in some cases “the medium is the message”(McLuhan 1). The type of reconstruction was of greater importance than the object or local being reconstructed. This is not to say that the subject had no bearing on the project, rather that the method used to represent the subject was of greater consequence because it was directly responsible for the audiences’ perception.

As I worked through the readings for this project, I was (almost) immediately drawn to the chapter authored by Laurie Gries, Practicing Methods in Ancient Cultural Rhetoric’s: Uncovering Rhetorical Action in Moche Burial Rituals. Gries offers a passionate account of the difficulties of maintaining authenticity in recreation and the dangers of “assigning agency” to ancient rituals (Gries 92).  What I found to be so impressive about her work was the way she implicated herself along with the other scholars who inferred too much about ritualistic practice. In doing so she aptly demonstrates the veritable impossibility of authentically representing the culture of a separate civilization. The further I read into Gries the more intrigued and frustrated I became by the prospect of trying to propose my own recreation.

This reading complicated history for me, though I had often considered the challenges of representing another cultures society through text, I had never reflected on the difficulties of a digital recreation. When the mode is verbal there is room for explanation, words afford the freedom to state, and clarify and restate. A digital representation does not have the same luxury; it is bound by its medium. The principal challenge of a pseudo-physical representation is its lack of room for elucidation. Gries implores the reader to constantly “problematize our own interpretations of the Moche funerary rituals rhetorical meaning”(111). Likewise she demonstrates the need for constant self-reflection and restraint through out the process of deconstructing ritualistic practice and reconstructing ritualistic meaning.

The question of agency was perhaps the most significant for me in my reconstruction. I wanted to allow the artifacts in the Moche tombs to have whatever agency they could, without impressing it on them. Thus, my critical dilemma; if I offer an interpretation of the artifacts I risk imposing agency on them, if I present them as static unexplained objects I chance missing out on the opportunity to demonstrate their importance. How then can agency be preserved and authenticity be recreated? To answer my own question with a question, could not a different method of conceptualizing this dilemma be used to relieve the rhetor of this catch 22?

It is not my intention to discredit the work Gries has done, as is evident in my above statements, rather I intend to complicate her narrative with some contradicting ideas of my own. In my experience as a fledgling scholar of rhetoric I have found that my greatest insights have come out of the process of trying to do something else. Though I do agree with Gries that we need to bear caution in mind when dealing with indigenous cultural artifacts, I disagree that caution should take precedence over discovery. With authenticity in mind, I offer that, though there is harm in overstepping, there is also harm in backtracking. Is there not great rhetorical merit in the act of grappling with ritualistic significance?

Though I do not disagree that anyone who attempts to uncover the history of an indigenous culture runs the risk of colonizing their histories, I take issues with the passive methodology Gries advocates. “As we attempt to uncover rhetorical traditions of ancient Pre-Columbian societies, we must move slowly and carefully; we must listen to what these traditions have to reveal to us” (Gries 113).

In our representation Meghan, Ashley and I attempted to walk the line between presumptuous reconstruction and tentative listening. We settled on a Webtext as our medium so that we could layer is with images, text and music. Our intent was to create a mood for a visitor to our site to step into when they came to it. To avoid over interpretation, we focused more on including those things we knew to be authentic and positioned them in a way that demonstrated how of Moche burial traditions took place rather than what they were. The fluid interactive format of our proposal was intended to reduce the “all or nothing” feel of the multi-media platform. Digital representation can do more than a literary one, however it can also be too static.

Throughout the development of our proposal I kept asking myself “would Gries approve of this?”. Her strict warnings against the dangers of interpretation were a guiding force in our project. Above all we strove to offer the artifacts as they were, with little interpretive attachment. However it would be naive to think that we could ever propose or create anything that had no trace of interpretation. I would like to take a moment to reconsider my critical dilemma in this project. It is twofold: involving a cautious avoidance of interpretive colonization, while still maintaining enough confidence to not be painfully self-conscious. Gries ultimately embodies this dilemma in her work: inviting us to problematize our own writing. “We need to be constantly aware of our own desires and acknowledge our own limitations” (112).