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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The anthropologist who didn't want to change

When I act as an anthropologist, that is, when I do my job, I go into the field as a child. Even though my research participants are mostly American-born and living in America, I must be willing to ask what may feel like stupid questions to clarify things I don't understand. This means I spend a lot of time watching so I can learn the rules before interacting. It means I may make lots of mistakes and it means I am seeking to experience and understand a different way of living, a different way of experiencing the ever-elusive "normal".

Interestingly, in research, this outsider status (however precarious as a researcher in my own "back yard") gives me the latitude to make mistakes without offending and to ask questions without ego. This leniency toward the ignorant outsider has been confirmed for me in casual travels abroad, where if I made a mistake, it was often chalked up as harmless and the rule I had violated was clearly explained. In our work, anthropologists are excellent at being quiet observers and inquisitive children. We are by necessity chameleons and must be willing to operate frequently outside our comfort zones. This perspective of being an outsider trying to experience the world as an insider is what gives our research its richness. But I wonder if am I the only one who struggles with this in real life.

In recent years, I have dealt very very personally with walking this line. I have sought to maintain my own personal space and identity and to live according to the cultural rules that have defined much of my life. However, when I (ad)ventured into a situation in which personal cultures clashed, cultural relativism was suddenly worthless. It didn't matter that, after a while, I could map the differences between respective backgrounds (and subsequent expectations) or that I had been able to turn a reflexive eye upon my own culture, had come to think critically about my own rules. I found myself not wanting to change; at times, in fact, I was aggressively resistant to it.

I hesitate (perhaps because of ego?) to say this was quite ethnocentric. I didn't, and still don't, think my way is better, but it became a symbol of me, a scrap that I felt I could hold on to in the face of a life that was swirling around me, often feeling out of my own control. Ironically, central to this very identity - that of an anthropologist - is a view of myself as adaptable and open minded.

All of this has made me wonder: Is this a struggle faced by all anthropologists? As anthropologists, is it fair to expect ourselves to be as accepting and as flexible in reality as we are in work? In fact, do we spend so much time changing, adapting, accepting, in our professional lives that change becomes overwhelming in our personal ones? Do we spend so much time distancing ourselves from judging the differences between cultures that we fail to truly empathize with, or even understand, people's personal connections to their cultural "truths"?