Borrowing & Extending

Summary here

In this straightforward example of borrowing and extending, Lahiri first offers a brief explanation of Michel Foucault’s approach to discourse and then offers a preview of how she will use it to illuminate her own topic. A somewhat more complicated version of the same move is executed in the following passage, which comes from Jeff Leopando’s final essay for the sophomore tutorial:

Charles W. Eliot, the President of Harvard during the early years of the Arnold Arboretum, wrote about it in one of his yearly reports:

[t]he natural woods and the systematic collections attract the attention of the greater part of these visitors chiefly for their beauty, which varies with the succession of the seasons; but there is a considerable number of visitors on foot who visit the Arboretum for study combined with enjoyment” (Eliot 1895:30).

His comment underscores a duality that has defined the Arboretum from its inception; it is a place that is at once “natural” and “systematic” a site for both the “enjoyment” and the “study” of nature.

Here, Leopando quotes Eliot not so much to borrow his ideas as to glean from his words an implicit theme that will play a prominent role in Leopan- do’s own analysis of the Arboretum, which is undertaken from an anthropological perspective.

In a still more complex instance of borrowing and extending, Michael Herzfeld draws upon the work of Paul Willis to explain a counterintuitive finding of his own: the fact that in training apprentices to become skilled and highly valued artisans, instructors in Greek craft institutes inadvertently reinforce their own as well as their students’ sense of being work- ing class and undervalued. In the following passage taken from The Body Impolitic, Herzfeld describes similarities and differences between Willis’ approach and his own:

These are also questions that Willis has asked, but asking them in the Greek context reorients the investigation to larger patterns of [global] domination... In asking questions to similar to those Willis posed about the self-reproduction of working class culture in Britain, I have instead chosen to explore these matters among artisan-instructors who are reproducing their own sense of inhabited class identity, and who are also reproducing a sense of regional and national humiliation.