There’s an old saying that we should never meet our heroes. It explains an innate reluctance in many of us to critically revisit our childhood experiences, out of a fear that we’ll uncover unpleasant observations about ourselves in the process, and thus ruin the idyllic and innocence romance of childhood.
This is where the value of a third party’s perspective lies, as Dr Nicole Perry demonstrates in her work studying the ‘Indianthusiam’ many Germans have ingrained in their childhood nostalgia for Karl May’s ‘German Western’ films. Her relatively distanced perspective enabled her to study this phenomenon detached from the nostalgia felt by many Germans for Winnteou, and allowed her to parallel it with other instances of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation from around the world.
For me this raises an interesting conundrum on the role of personal affiliations in academic work. We’re often encouraged to pursue research we feel personally interested and invested in, yet we see how this connection can itself be a source of bias. Memories we subconsciously wish to preserve may warp or restrict the ways which we approach certain topics, the results of which I’d likely find dissatisfactory, or perhaps even a disservice, in terms of objectivity.
Yet it’s probably unrealistic to expect works to ever be purely objective. The subjectivity of perspective is impossible to completely overcome. It may arguably even be academic work’s greatest strength, as a forum facilitating the clash, complement and subsequent synthesis of alternative perspectives. Subjectivity is probably something we should just be mindful of, and need not fear or fret too much about.
