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Yes, we are prejudicedLiz Smythe

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 prejudicesborn 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 inter-

pretive nature of understanding reveals itself more distinctly. This iswritten 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

fluid, 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

400 Community Development Journal Vol 42 No 3 July 2007 pp. 400402

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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 office we stopped for morning tea. I was very ready

for the cup of fluid, but not quite so enamoured with the clean but

cracked cup, which would have been deemed unhygienic in my world.

When we visited the office on one of the outer islands I realised that a

cup of tea meant gathering the wood, building the fire, working withfire to boil water. It was too much for me to accept that a high-tech office,

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 significance 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 fore-

conception which holds our preshaped ideas and understandings. We

could not function without such a ready made, already thought through cat-

alogue 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 her-

meneutics, 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 tothe 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 aware-

ness, 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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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-fit 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 first looking at self and write

their perceived prejudices into the final 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 workthat 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

References

Gadamer, H. G. (1982) Truth and Method, Crossroad, New York.

Gadamer, H. G. (2006) Classical and philosophical hermeneutics, Theory, Culture &

Society, 23 (1), 2956.

Heidegger, M. (1995) Being and Time, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

402 Liz Smythe

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