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Mitigating Circumstances
Author(s) -
Kendall Martha B.
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 0193-5615
DOI - 10.1525/ahu.1991.16.3.95
Subject(s) - revelation , construct (python library) , psychology , social psychology , epistemology , philosophy , literature , art , computer science , programming language
An anthropological linguist teaching English in Kuwait discovers that both faculty and students in this Arabian Gulf nation construct grades as socially negotiable items rather than as objective signs of merit. Returning home, she reflects on this revelation, only to find that her own and her colleagues' academic forms of knowing and evaluating others are much less straightforward than she had previously surmised. From these experiences she constructs a parable about the nature of truth and how its categories get jumbled.