Ubuntu
One assignment for DS1 is a paper outlining a topic or research that is of interest to me. As part of the process of framing and writing this paper, I’ve looked into the definitions and origin of the word UBUNTU.
I came across this video clip, posted in Wikimedia, of Nelson Mandela explaining the term from the South African context. I’ve linked it here as a way to remember and bring clarity to the word and it’s semiotics.
The accompanying definition has me reading and rereading to build understanding since it’s a shift for me from previously held thoughts about “I think therefore I am” or cogito ergo sum. Here is the text found in Wikipedia, but I’ll need to dig deeper into the original sources:
“According to Michael Onyebuchi Eze, the core of ubuntu can best be summarised as follows:
“‘A person is a person through other people’ strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance”.”
After doing a library search, this particular article caught my attention so I’ve downloaded to read: Eze, M. O. (2017). I am Because You Are: Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Xenophobia. Philosophical Papers, 46(1), 85-109. From this comes the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a philosophical idea. Framed by individual “difference as a source of our shared humanity while at the same time placing the individual as a mobile subject embedded between his sociocultural world and the global community” (p. 86) rings with some truth when thinking of connectivism as a theory of learning.
For me, at this moment in time, this concept is connecting to the theoretical framework of connectivism since the inherent value of individuals is accepted and valued, and the community builds knowledge from the learning of all.
Interesting confluence of ideas in this reflection. Something to sit with, consider for a while, build on and come back to.
Reference
Ubuntu. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy. Retrieved on July 17, 2018.
