Teaching Comparative

Cleavages

If the geographic, religious, ethnic, and economic cleavages in Nigeria aren't graphic enough for students to grasp the basic ideas about coinciding and cross-cutting cleavages and permeability of barriers, Pakistan provides even more.

As a comparative case study, this article in The Guardian (UK) offers a valuable example. Pakistan might not be part of the AP6, but an exercise or writing assignment built around this example might ensure learning. The article might be the spark to begin a comparative study of politically-relevant cleavages in other countries or it might provide the basic elements of a sample FRQ following up on an examination of cleavages in Nigeria, Mexico, Iran, and Russia (for example).

Pakistan bloodshed opens new fault lines

"When Dr Khaled Massoud commutes... through Benares' Chowk area... [to] the teeming slums of Orangi... he crosses the front line...

"To the untrained eye and ear, there is little to distinguish the two areas. Orangi, where more than three million people live in desperate poverty, shares Benares' equally poor crowds, its chaos, its cholera, typhoid, dysentery and its daily dose of violence. Yet there is a difference. In the former they speak Urdu; in the latter Pashto, the language of the tribes from Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. It may not seem much, but last week it was enough to spark political and inter-communal violence in which 47 died and hundreds were injured.

"The linguistic divide marks an ethnic and a political fault line too...

"The population of Orangi are Mohajir, descendants of immigrants who fled from India to Pakistan when the state was founded as a Muslim nation 60 years ago. Yet the vast slum is surrounded by communities dominated by other ethnicities -- Pashtuns, Sindhis from the city's rural hinterland, Punjabis from the north east, Baluchis from the west. The communities, as on a national scale, coexist uneasily, all armed, all mindful of decades of past conflict, all sweltering in the 40-degree heat and the frequent power cuts, all aware that civil war could be just around the corner..."

Labels: concepts, pedagogy

posted by Ken Wedding @ 10:50 AM