That girl vs. this girl . . . from Hillary

Inspired by my friend and colleague's recent blog post and a visit from a long-time friend, I want to revisit the concept of the changing or evolving "self"both personally and, of course, anthropologically. First, let's take a quick glance at the personal, using the same template Hillary used - "That girl vs. this girl" a ten-item comparison of myself ten years ago to myself today.

That girl . . . 
1) Lived and worked on a horse farm in beautiful rural central Virginia.
2) Was undeniably restless and set to embark on 6+ more years of vagabondish wandering adventures, both stateside and abroad. She didn't ever want to live anywhere for more than a year.
3) Rolled her own cigarettes, wore Carhartt insulated overalls daily, and didn't bat an eye at spending a week's salary on a pair of shoes.
4) Had a BA in Anthropology but wasn't sure what kind of career path she wanted to follow.
5) Wrote poetry while walking, mucking out stalls, or riding through pastures; then performed the poems at open mic nights.
6) Hated the holidays and always asked to work during them so she wouldn't have to deal; she was often called a "grinch" for this.
7) Had no interest in children but buckets of affection and maternal instinct toward dogs, horses, snakes and other non-human creatures.
8) Got tattoos to mark changes in life and self.
9) Still thought she could save the world, or at least other people.
10) Surrounded herself with brilliant, creative, thoughtful people who challenged her to grow and experience new things.

This girl . . .
1) Has been living in the same town for almost 6 years (the longest she's lived anywhere since she was 9 years old!) and just bought a house with her husband.
2) Hasn't smoked a cigarette in at least 4 years and doesn't miss it at all.
3) Gets tattoos because they are beautiful.
4) Is happily directing that maternal instinct toward the funniest, sweetest dog ever.
5) Dropped out of nursing school and abandoned a funded PhD in medical anthropology, but wound up with a master's, a PhD, and career that she loves.
6) Still has a ton to learn about everything, and is grateful to be surrounded by people and critters who are wonderful teachers.
7) Is generally not all that restless. But when she gets "itchy feet" she annoys her partner by endlessly shopping for airline tickets and reading about possible adventure destinations.
8) Climbs rocks (this could never have been predicted), rides her badass horse, and knits in her spare time or to relieve stress.
9) Is still not really a big fan of holidays...or her birthday...except Tour de Fat. Tour de Fat is the greatest!
10) Has lived in 9 states and 3 non-US countries, and has finally figured out that, for her, home isn't a place, it's a person.

An anthropology of change

This little blog was a fun enough exercise in personal reflection, which seems appropriate this time of year and given some major milestones I've experienced in the last year. But it also makes me think about the concept of change in American culture, a concept that I vividly remember writing about on my MA exam back in 2007 (I think it was 2007 anyway). 

In American culture, we are certainly fixated on the individual. We are obsessed with individual rights (both in good and bad ways), we have great admiration for individual creativity and can appreciate out of the box thinking, and we view the self as something that changes over time, that we can expand and grow and improve. Reflections such as "that girl vs this girl" are fun, for sure, but they are also culturally meaningful. This isn't a reflection on experiences, but an examination of who I "was" versus who I "am". And, as an American, I embrace this fully. I think it's good to think about the ways I have changed - both for the better and, although maybe less fun to think about, for the worse. People always say we become more rigid, less willing to change as we get older. I think this exercise in reflection may be a great way to check in ten years down the road. But I wonder, what, really is "self"?

There are some scholars out there who have talked extensively about the concept of "self" and how this self may or may not be seen as maleable in different cultures. The concept of a maleable or changeable self has actually been suggested to put a person at risk for eating disorders or make plastic surgery more culturally acceptable. On the other side of this, cultures that see the self as core, unchanging, a given, may actually be protective against some of these things. What part of the "self" must be malleable to make a particular individual (and all those who share a culture with her) vulnerable to an eating disorder? Some have talked about a linking of the socioeconomic self (one's status) to the physical self. Some have talked about cultural ideas about normal or abnormal behaviors and how, once new norms are internalized, one's sense of self has changed. But I have rarely seen an anthropologist explicitly define this word that we throw around so often.

And when I turn the lens upon my own above reflection, and examine my own changing "self", I am forced to ask, who am I really? For example, as a young person, I had ideas about myself and engaged in certain behaviors that felt core, central to who I "truly" was. Wanderlust was an enormous part of this self. I moved often, I adored the excitement of learning a new neighborhood, culture, language, and making new friends who were perhaps nothing like and possibly wouldn't even like my friends from past lives/adventures. But, as my little reflection shows, wandering is no longer a part of my life. The desire to wander still comes in waves, but it is controllable, "wanderlust" is not necessarily inherently linked to "wandering". So is my true "self" the desire? Or is it behavior? In my research, active methamphetamine users are constantly fighting to avoid the many labels ascribed to them: tweaker, addict, meth head, etc. They may say, "I'm addicted" but most don't view their drug use as a core part of their selves. 12-step programs sort of do though. They view "addict" as an unchangeable part of the self and "drug use" as the changeable part. So again, it seems that in any consideration of the concept of self, or of behavior, or of change, it is worthwhile to explore what we mean by self, and which parts are malleable or not. 

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"?

Ritual, Anonymity, and Coping with Loss

One of the few cultural practices that is likely to be a human universal is the ritual coping with death. When I was an undergraduate in Anthropology at UCLA, I was struck by Renato Rosaldo's description of grief and ritual headhunting among the Ilongot, a tribe in the Philippines. Headhunting offered a ritualized and, up until the 1970s, socially permissible means of coping with grief over the death of a loved one. Rosaldo spoke at length in his writings of his struggles to get a truly "emic"perspective on headhunting and the particular emotion that the ritual was intended to cope with. He noted that it was not until his wife, Michelle, died in the field that he truly understood, experienced, this emotion. Other anthropologists write of rituals and emotional norms relating to death, from rites that celebrate the life to those that help the lost person carry on in the bodies and spirits of those who survive, to cultural rules for mourning. While there is vast diversity in the ways humans employ culture to cope with death, we all seem to turn to ritual.

Yesterday was one of the saddest days I have faced in a very long time. It was the first time that, as an adult, I said a permanent goodbye to someone I knew and it was the first time in my life I said this permanent goodbye to someone young, healthy, and happy. Paul was probably one of the kindest people I've ever met. I didn't know him well, but his energy was contagious. The first time I met him, at my partner's first station out of the fire academy, I remember him talking about his wife. And when he talked about his wife, he lit up the room, even though it was something simple, something probably even mundane. He was just one of those people who inspired the people around him to make the most of life and to appreciate every moment. Because that is how he lived his life. Thus, even though I didn't know him well, I find myself more affected by his death than I have been by the loss of any person in my past. This is the first time I was able to experience my own culture's death rites - the funeral, the burial - from a truly emic perspective, and I must admit that I was grateful for the rhythms and structure of ritual.

Although I'm an anthropologist and I love thinking about and analyzing ritual, I often whine about it when I encounter it in my own life. I don't usually like the relative anonymity of it, the fact that ritual often depersonalizes an entire experience. This is probably why the weddings I find the most moving are those in which people add pieces of themselves. But, in this case, the personal quickly became too much. The hymns, the incense, the readings, those were the things that helped me cope while still providing a way to say goodbye. Yes, these things depersonalized much of the ceremony, but they also made it possible to get through. They allowed us to catch our breath, to mourn together, and to acknowledge the permanence of this passing without collapsing into the grief of the individual and the family he left behind. The eulogies were beautiful, each of them from the heart, each of them honoring the wonderful man while expressing their sadness. But the eulogies were also exhausting, emotional enough that had they been the bulk of the ceremony, it would have overwhelmed.

I have never appreciated ritual quite like I did yesterday. I have always turned to my intellectualization of it, picked it apart, fussed over the idea that we so often participate in it without knowing or caring why, letting it take away that cherished notion of the individual that my American heart holds in such high regard. But it is perhaps the very anonymity of ritual allows us to cope with loss in a shared way, as a community. Mind you, it doesn't take the place of private, emotion-filled mourning and it doesn't completely remove the heartache from the ceremony. Rather, it helps keep things manageable while people come together to say goodbye. I can only hope it made room for us to move forward, taking inspiration from his life, standing by his family, celebrating who he was, without getting entirely lost in the void he left behind.

RIP Paul, you will be missed and you will always be loved.

Curaçao 1: Growing Into My Grown-Up Travel Shoes

My recent, very very short trip to a little island in the southern Caribbean (Curaçao), inspired a number of personal and anthropological thoughts that I will try to cover over my next few blog posts. First, and the one that hit me hardest toward the end of my 5-day (2 of which were spent travelling) excursion, is the idea of growing into a new identity as an "adult" traveler and thinking about what this means for travel and cultural experience in general.

When I was a kid, I had the fortune of riding my parents' coattails when it came to travel. I took my first steps on a boat off the island of Capri, was kicked unceremoniously out of London's pubs while still in a stroller, and lived in Strasbourg, France for a year as a toddler. In the years that followed, thanks to my father's francophilia and my mother's love for movement, I travelled repeatedly to Europe as well as travelling and eventually living all over the United States. When I hit my early twenties, I began to cultivate my own preferred style of travel. It involved working, sort of saving money, quitting my job and impulsively "moving" somewhere (to another state, another country, whatever made most sense at the time) for anywhere from 3-15 months but never more. In this vein, between the ages of 21 and 27 years (when I moved to Colorado), I lived in six states within the US, three countries outside it, and on three continents in total:

* New York City
* Charlottesville, VA
* Fes & Essaouira, Morocco
* Tempe, AZ
* Streitdorf, Austria
* Montreal, QC, Canada
* Rawlins, WY
* Cleveland, OH
* and finally, Fort Collins, CO.

While this movement was eventually exhausting, it was also exciting and enabled me to really get to know places and their people. It was my recreational release for my inner-anthropologist. I used travel as an occasion to get to know a culture on some level.

Since coming to Colorado, I have lived in one city. I have now been here for longer than I remember living anywhere in my entire life, and for personal reasons, I suspect I will live here for at least the next twenty or thirty years. But my feet still get itchy, as in, I still get intense urges to "get out of here". Which is where this trip to Curaçao came in - I needed to celebrate my successful dissertation defense and I needed to do it away. 

Unfortunately, in the past five years of rootedness, I've learned that I don't particularly enjoy this type of travel that many of us participate in for vacation and relaxation. After three days on this beautiful little island, I felt like I was just starting to hit my stride and get a sense of the island's own personality and pace. I felt that I knew more about what the tourist agencies wanted me to know and nearly nothing about what real life looked like. A couple of years ago, I visited Costa Rica with a good friend and had a similar experience. It was a great trip and the scenery was mindblowingly beautiful, but it was impossible to get into the rhythm of the country - which is the main reason I love public transit! - and still see what we wanted to see. We just didn't have enough time for both, a problem that was in part due to the fact that we only visited for a week but that was exacerbated by the fact that I am a poor planner and a horrible rusher. Apparently, I prefer to just move somewhere, hang out for three months, and call that my vacation. But as an adult, in my current life, that kind of travel doesn't seem realistic. So, I am searching the landscape of less lengthy travel patterns to find something I like, that perhaps I can learn from if not emulate. But I'm struggling as most of what I've seen simply does not fit with what I want to get out of a "vacation".

I remember being shocked while visiting a dear friend in Egypt. When we went to one of many of the amazing historical/tourist sites, a bus full of Italian tourists had stopped as well. Many of the women wore only short-shorts, flip flops and bikini/bra tops. None of this was culturally appropriate, but more importantly, it was explicitly disrespectful. There is certainly room for critiquing cultural relativism when over-simplified and over-applied, but it seems to me that if you have the choice to visit a country on vacation, you should select a country whose culture you are capable of respecting, at least outwardly. After all, you are funneling your money into their economy so it may as well be something you support on some level or at a minimum can live with. Many people I know travel exclusively for the very reason I went to Curaçao - relaxation & escape - and so they plant themselves at (all-inclusive) resorts or get with a professional tour company that arranges everything and whisks them from site to site providing carefully selected historical and cultural "context" (I'll talk more about this in a later blog). And, while it's not particularly my preferred way to travel and I am sure there are myriad culture and economic issues associated with traveling this way, it may not be all bad either. At least the people on tours are attempting to learn about their context even if it's typically done in a highly sanitized, voyeuristic way. And those who are going to all-inclusive resorts or refusing to leave the tourist zone are being honest with themselves and what their travel intentions are and may have set themselves in an environment where they won't offend local sensibilities. 

But the lurking question persists: Are we doing ourselves, our home cultures, and those we visit a diservice when we insist on traveling at the constant rushed pace of an American or with the cultural ideals regarding modesty of a "Westerner" (whatever that means)?   

I know that what I love about travel is slowly learning the rhythms of a new place, whether it's in the US or further afield. I find that it fosters the kind of experience that is life-changing even if it's not always as photogenic or as impressive on facebook. Unfortunately, my current life doesn't facilitate this kind of travel. In order to sit peacefully in one place for the next thirty years of my life, I had to settle down. I have a partner, a dog, a horse, all of whom make it difficult (emotionally, as in I would miss them all terribly,  more than logistically) to just pick up and leave for months on end. I have a job that is flexible, but, at least at this point, perhaps not that flexible. So I resign myself to movement-packed travel that often feels like it is more about the principle than about the experience, and I have not yet figured out how to mix my need for cultural immersion with my reality. What I fear is that this new way of travel is simply my new normal, and that a tender part of my soul will just have to wait until I'm retired.

The dog day

So, late last week, we moved into a new house in a new neighborhood and so far, Bagel the dog is beyond in love with her new (bigger and less landscaped) back yard. Since the house didn't yet have a dog door into said back yard, Mike and I went to the hardware store to get the necessary door along with other just-moved-in items like paint and potting soil. Because we have a great dog and are eternally trusting optimists regarding human character, we simply left the back door open so Bagel could come and go as she pleased.

As I was getting out of the car upon our return home, I heard Mike say, "There's a dog in here. There's a dog in the house other than Bagel . . . " Huh? Note, Bagel does not particularly like other dogs, so while my first reaction was amused surprise, my second was one of minor concern (were they getting along? was Bagel ok?). We walked into the house's front room to a happy, tail-wagging Bagel and a nervous, barking heeler/pit mix who was backing his way through the house toward the back yard. Because he had a collar with tags, we assumed he was just nervous/scared at having maybe gotten lost and somehow landing in our yard/house. But after spending about a half hour trying to coax the very wary dog with treats, we were never able to grab his collar to get the necessary information to call his parents. So, we called the humane society (nobody had reported a dog like him missing) and decided to try one last ditch effort at catching him before having them come pick him up. This last ditch effort was to somehow get a leash around his neck, so we again coaxed him with treats, dropping one in the middle of the leash's circle, and when he went to eat it, Mike tried to slip the leash on him. This failed miserably and the dog simply backed up, glowered disdainfully at us, walked to the back of the yard, and ably climbed the chain-link fence to let himself out. This dog was clearly a pro, and he made it clear that he would rather have his freedom than food or treats or praise. Bagel, meanwhile, wiggled and nudged the treat bag at my hip, and licked my hand, making her own preferences known - she loves having a home with her humans and she was pleased that other dog had left. For me, however, the dog's departure was upsetting for a couple of reasons. First, struck by his wariness of people, I worried the dog would return (or be returned) to his own less-than-loving humans. Second, despite my own cerebral questioning of the way we tend to keep dogs (and, arguably, ourselves) leashed, fenced, etc., I found the idea of this dog as lost or homeless unsettling as well.

Lately, Mike has been pointing out that the very idea of having this little (50lb) animal live with us is really kind of strange. But, it seems that what is unusual about it is less that we share a life with her and more that she helps herself to the bed/love seat/couch/papasan chair, etc. She also eats pretty much whatever we will give her - appropriate veggies and fruits included - and would rather hang out with us than other dogs or non-human animals in general. Perhaps the strangest, especially given her affinity for camping, backpacking, hiking and the like, is that she simply does not like to sleep outside. When it's bed-time, she wants to be in a bed, in a car/house/camper/tent. When we go on climbing trips, she does not spend evenings curled up beside us by the fire; at home, when we are up late, she grumpily makes her way to our bedroom on her own. So, perhaps, what seems odd on the surface is that we seem to have a dog who has adapted quite well to the trappings of human luxury.

But, is her attachment to these things really so strange? After all, at 32 I might be hesitant to spend a spontaneous night wrapped in a stray blanket on a beach though I was happy to do so nearly a decade ago in Morocco. Mike and I also transitioned recently from spending our climbing trip nights sleeping in the back of his truck to spending them in a camper (a slip-in, but a camper nonetheless). As I trepidatiously leave my youth and veer toward middle age, I have come to appreciate comforts, and as a species, humans have done the same, becoming increasingly sedentary and dependent on things that facilitate . . . (eating, commuting, communicating, etc.). All of these markers of "culture" have come, in turn, to serve as symbols of our humanity, as ways that we differ from or control nature, including animals.

Anthropologists have spent the last century plus studying what it means to be human, and this has meant first and foremost constructing a category of "human" that is delimited by factors beyond biology, factors such as language and culture. Yet, from an anthropological perspective, the dog (perhaps the animal with whom humans seem to have most closely evolved) becomes a problematic because it challenges our presumed relationship with nature in two ways. Our society's concern about and fear of/for the independent wanderers and "stray" dogs like the one found in my back yard this afternoon may reflect a fear that culture really cannot contain nature. After all, the very premise of modern American society is based on this idea - some striking individual and community-level exceptions aside, we have not shown ourselves to be a culture that seeks or even recognizes an interdependent relationship with nature. On the other hand, our view of Bagel's behavior as "strange" could represent a concern that dogs and humans are less inherently distinct than we would like to believe. Both of these examples blur the lines and presumed relationship between culture and nature, human and non-human. In doing this, they also illuminate the ways we define ourselves.