Frontier Tales

The Narrative Contruction of Cultural Borders in Twentieth-Century California

Bibliographic Data

ID2107889
AuthorsKerwin Lee Klein (University of California, Los Angeles, corresponding author)
Year1992
Volume34
Issue3
Pages464-490
Publication date1992-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0010417500017916
OpenAlexW2051313658
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited51

Maclntyre sought to raise a series of crucial questions in an address before the Eighty-First Annual Meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. What is the best way to evaluate two competing languages, conceptual schemes, or cultural approaches to being in the world? May conceptual schemes or theoretical languages be so radically different as to be fully incommensurable, that is, incapable of intertranslation or meaningful comparison?2Maclntyre, drawing upon the example of the sixteenthcentury Zuni Indian and Spanish colonial frontier, contended that some languages or conceptual schemes might well be partially untranslatable, but this did not necessarily preclude commensurability. His remarks suggest additional questions, namely, what does constitute a frontier situation? What is involved in the symbolic differentiation of one conceptual scheme, one interpretive group-one culture-from another? We might recognize here the familiar problem of boundary construction, the social process of creating a common group identity that marks it as different from others.3

Archaeology · Colonialism · Commensurability (mathematics) · Conceptual framework · Epistemology · Frontier · Linguistics · Narrative · Social science · Sociology · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Mathematics · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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