A Journey: How Knowledge Transforms the Self
Amy Hutton
At the forefront of my academic journey, I was interested in international relations, and knew that traveling and learning about foreign cultures was something I wanted to pursue during my studies at St. Olaf; however, I didn’t ever anticipate the Sociology/Anthropology major being the medium for that academic journey. After taking Introduction to Cultural Anthropology and a travel-writing course my freshman year, I had high hopes that Sociology/Anthropology might provide me with the valuable knowledge I would need to fulfill my vocational calling. Although these courses helped me choose a major, it was really my initial involvement in St. Olaf Christian activities that spurred me to passionately seek this major. After freshman year, I felt that my specific vocational calling was to become a missionary overseas . An essential foundation for missionary work would be understanding other cultures and how to relate to people. At the time, I believed my intentions to use the Soc/Anthro major as a basis for my missionary work were genuinely honorable. From my naïve and narrow-minded standpoint, I felt that the only way to truly help people was to share Christianity with them and, essentially, guide them in practicing the institutionalized Christianity with which I was familiar. In the next pages, however, it will become evident how this perception gradually changed, and unabashedly disclaimed. Being at the end of this academic journey, it is with interest that I look back and reflect on these initial intentions and realize how blind I was to some of my religious ideals which were grounded with veiled structural oppression. In this realization, I can bring to light the significant transition I have undergone and show how sociology and anthropology helped me understand who I once was and who I am now.
Michel Foucault once said that he would like his work to be “a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area…to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don’t write for an audience, I write for users, not readers” (Foucault, 1974). As a model of sociological and anthropological theory, Foucault’s work embodies the idea of a comprehensive approach to inspire social change. Fundamentally, he submits to the idea that knowledge should transform the self and the world. In the past four years, my journey as a Sociology/Anthropology major has not only profoundly shaped my beliefs and the way I understand the world, but it has inspired me to take action with that knowledge as a foundation. The major provided me with a theoretical framework, and challenged me to critique both foreign and familiar cultures and social institutions. In gaining this foundation, I have reached a point where I can use that knowledge to be an agent of change. For it is not useful to simply have the ability to critique cultures or simply have theoretical knowledge as a background. Social theorists, like Marx, have taught me that social change most effectively occurs with an interdisciplinary comprehensive approach. My portfolio and distinction essay are meant to reflect my continual understanding of how knowledge has transformed my inner-most self.
To begin with, both Anthropological Theory and Sociological Theory were the first classes where I began to understand and conceptualize theoretical frameworks and explore the implications of different ideologies and cultural constructs in order to more fully understanding culture and society. These elusive concepts challenged me to think critically in a new way, and, in doing so, I began to realize my utter naiveté in truly grasping the essence of foreign cultures, much less my own. In striving to grasp these complex ideas, these theory classes started transforming the way I understood the world.
The first piece of work in my portfolio demonstrates my growing understanding of such concepts. This piece, a portion of an Anthropological Theory exam, examines the role of Anthropology in understanding normative structures in a modern context. Alma Gottlieb notes that Anthropology can “help us to re-imagine the meanings we often take for granted of seemingly obvious concepts” (Gottlieb, “Interpreting Gender and Sexuality: Approaches from Cultural Anthropology”). In this way, I became aware of the importance of context, in order to more fully understand the nature of a situation. For example, when examining the idea of modernism and its anthropological implications, I became aware that even the disciplines of sociology and anthropology are bound to a cultural and historical context. In transitioning from a modern culture to a post-modern culture, I came to realize that ideologies are fluid and constantly being re-evaluated and re-constructed.
Similarly, the next part of that same Anthropological Theory exam demonstrates my understanding of how cultural constructions, like nationalism, can be observed more comprehensively when they are broken into categories. Bernard Cohn states that culture is “continually being invented or modified, without being totally transformed” (Cohn, “History and Anthropology: the State of Play”). In this way, constructions like race, class, religion and gender can be seen as arbitrary categories, which organize cultures and societies. These essays mark the beginning of an understanding that our social experience should be seen in shades of gray, rather than stark black and white.
After identifying the theoretical framework of social theories during my sophomore year, I studied abroad in Perth, Australia the spring of my junior year. This gave me the unique opportunity to analyze a foreign culture while being immersed in it. Having social theories deeply imbued in my thoughts made me acutely aware of cultural differences, and gave me a passion for understanding the social organization within Australian culture. As an “outsider,” I was able to observe life with a more objective lens, as Australian ideological thoughts and practices, which were unnoticed by Australians themselves, quickly stood out to me. The most astonishing example of this is the dynamic between Indigenous Australians and the rest of Australian society.
In the essay, “Culture and Identity: An Indigenous Australian Perspective,” I offer a critique of colonialism and the oppressive power white Australians exercised over the Aboriginals. I discuss the profound affects that such violent oppression has had on Aboriginal cultural identity. Although this essay wasn’t for a sociology/anthropology class, conflict theory and Marx, in particular, were at the forefront of my mind as I examined the oppression which Aboriginals still endure today. I became aware that powerful groups like white Australians not only have the power to physically oppress and discriminate against Aboriginals, but their oppression goes so deep as to profoundly shape Aboriginal cultural identity. I noted, “Unfortunately, in the case of Aboriginals, we come to realize the importance of cultural identity through the stripping of, and abuse of, culture itself. This tragedy is one that should not simply be acknowledged as history, but as a tragedy and a lesson that should not be repeated” (Hutton, 2006).
As I reflect back on the disgust I felt toward the Aboriginal oppression in Australia, I am taken aback because I now see the stark similarities between the Aboriginals and Native Americans in the United Sates. While I was in Australia, the Aboriginal oppression was blatantly obvious to me, so why didn’t I ever recognize the eerily similar Native American experience when it was happening in my very own culture?
I think it is only when one leaves his/her native culture that it is possible to grasp the importance of culture in its entirety. As I studied abroad, I not only was able to critique Australian culture, and the oppression that lies within the seams of society, but I began to question the veiled oppressive forces within American society. In traveling to Australia, I was able to disengage in American culture to the point where I began to see American culture as the “other.” This was a significant point because I began to question the status quo; not simply the status quo within a foreign culture, but one that is uncomfortably familiar, one that I engage in as a white, heterosexual, female Christian American.
As I slid back into St. Olaf culture my senior year, it was a genuine effort to maintain the critical eye toward culture which I had developed while I was in Australia. I began to notice aspects of “normal” American life—history, religious traditions, family structures—that I had previously taken for “normal.” Recognizing this presented me with a transforming decision, a moral obligation in which I needed to come to terms. Foucault insisted that knowledge should change the self, and clearly, this journey marked one of critical transformation for me. My initial intention of using sociology and anthropology to benefit the mission field started to transform. In this experience, I have witnessed many of the generic, ideologically-bound religious worldviews crumble before my very eyes, which I once proudly claimed.
Taking both Sociology of GLBT Issues and Feminist Theology this year have helped me to witness first hand accounts of the how religious institutions’ gender structures have legitimized a patriarchal structure in American society. This traditional religious framework is one that I have grown up with and never even realized problems with until my study of social theories. In studying the cultural context of the Bible, and discovering how many conservative misinterpret messages, one is forced to question the legitimacy of the status quo espoused by the prevailing religious structure of Christianity today. In “Lesbians’ Silent Cry for Freedom,” I wrote a passionate critique of lesbians’ experience in American society. In it I discuss the paradox that the lesbian experience and identity is constantly being defined and redefined by the dominant male power structure rather than by lesbians themselves. I go on to discuss that “as a means of reducing lesbians’ power, society slyly uses sexism and heterosexism to exclude them entirely from popular culture.” Lesbians are juxtaposed as a marginalized group that is even oppressed by other marginal groups like gay men and heterosexual women. This critique is one of my first true attempts to make a bold statement about how I see society working to maintain the current framework in which powerful groups maintain their role by marginalizing other groups.
Further, it is a critique of the power structure of institutionalized religion and seeks to unmask oppressive forces that can be justified through religious tradition. It is important to note that while I learned how to question my beliefs and the structures which give my beliefs a framework, I still consider my faith an extremely important and relevant part of my life. However, I have learned the importance of questioning the way in which Christianity is practiced and promoted through missionary work, and have shaped and redefined my faith accordingly.
Through courses like the Sociology of GLBT Issues and Feminist Theology, I have finally been able to integrate academic analyses and concerns about social justice to question my experience as a white, heterosexual Christian. The papers I have written in the past year have reflected this growing passion for unmasking the oppressive forces within our society. My passion has made my writing unabashedly more powerful, though it is still an uncomfortable and complex process coming to harsh conclusions about my society! I feel that my writing has sometimes blurred into a cynical and sometimes hopeless outlook on society. When one discovers how to recognize the problems in a culture and how big those problems really are, it is extremely easy to become paralyzed with hopelessness and cynicism.
This tension between being critical without being cynical is a fine line to walk. The tendency for the critical perspective to overwhelm and transform into cynicism is extremely easy, especially considering influences in our popular culture that mediate our thoughts. Society’s penchant in the media to spend more time reflecting on the negative instead of the uplifting is one such culprit. In Medical Anthropology, I was passionately overcome with cynicism, overstating my critiqued of biomedicine. The essay, “ Independence at a Price,” shows how easy it is to unremittingly focus on the negative impact prominent structures like biomedicine have on individuals and societies. Unfortunately, in this essay I lost sight of any redeeming value in that may still be present within the construct of biomedicine.
In being caught in this tension, with graduation quickly approaching, I realize that it would certainly be easier to forfeit my moral calling to work for social change and live a comfortable life as a wealthy, white Christian American. Problems of the world like extreme poverty are more than overwhelming. They successfully deter a great number educated individuals from even approaching the problem; however, Margaret Mead and other individuals continually remind me of the hope that is present in working for change. Mead said, “Never believe a few caring people can’t change the world. For indeed, that’s all who ever has.” This wisdom which comes from an anthropologist who undoubtedly understood the vastness and complexities of inequality in our world reminds me that simply knowing about the injustices of the world isn’t enough. If knowledge truly transforms the self, then I cannot simply accept my Soc/Anthro education and hang it up on the wall after graduation. For me, action to this knowledge will reflect a true transformation.
It is here that I have realized that to achieve my goals and use soc/anthro to help inspire social change, it is imperative to use other avenues to act as an agent of change. For example, anthropology by itself cannot eradicate poverty in Africa, but neither can international corporations be successful in the long-term by only applying business principles in helping those poor countries. Anthropology and sociology give insight into problems and may suggest solutions, but such knowledge and insight has to be operationalized by a person or an organization. Knowing and doing are different skill sets. In gaining practical knowledge and beginning to search for outlets where that knowledge can adequately be used to help the world, I have become aware of the disconnect in the current popular approach in fighting inequality in our world: while there are many disciplines and organizations fighting for the same goals, their myopic and individualized approach in achieving those goals makes it impossible to ever achieving successful, long-term, viable results. Soc/anthro is the foundation with which to bridge disciplines together in creating effective agents for social change.
Muhammad Yunas and the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh is a practical example of an individual bridging cultural understanding with economic structures. This innovative micro-finance program doesn’t simply provide a narrow economically opportunity for the poorest demographics of people to work their way out of extreme poverty. The model is deeply imbued with embracing cultural practices and fostering community support and growth. Yunas brilliantly wove together economics and indigenous cultures to make a powerful first step toward change, in which the core principles of both economics and cultural preservation are maintained. Models like Yunas successfully who use an interdisciplinary model to approach problems like poverty helped me to realize that hopelessness and cynicism aren’t an inevitable response to world problems.
I am working to adopt the kind of positive mindset exhibited by Yunas, yet I continue to grapple with how I should become involved in promoting social change, especially with graduation approaching and the need to make a decision on future plans. Jeffrey Sachs posed an interesting question in his book, The End of Poverty, challenging my generation to think about the major social movement of our time. I address this question in that last portion of my portfolio, and suggest that education is a vector for change, and that in order to have any viable social movement, it is imperative to have knowledge as a foundation. Sachs’ challenge to my generation has helped me to realize that knowledge is a continual process.
As I come to an end of my Soc/Anthro education at St. Olaf College, I recognize that education will be an inevitable presence in my future. I will continue to learn through actions and experiences to increase my ability to promote social change. Initially, I plan to take action in grassroots nonprofits, and then gain experience working abroad, and eventually come back to further my academic education with a masters or PhD to gain more practical and applicable skills. As I have experience in the past four year, this dance between education and experience is a way to move forward and continually seek better understanding of the world.
As a freshman, my notion that missionary work was the only means of truly helping individuals became the main inspiration in seeking education in Sociology and Anthropology. As a result, my voyage through the Soc/Anthro major has helped me redefine and refine my idea of missionary work. I have come to understand that the missionary ethos doesn’t mean converting someone to practice a specific religion, nor does it mean to simply provide economic wealth or medical assistance. Rather, a missionary ethos is deeply embedded in one’s thoughts and actions because of the profound desire and yearning to help others. This ethos doesn’t simply have to be manifested as a Christian missionary, but can be found at the core of sociologists, professors and many philanthropists for that matter. I have realized that at my core, a missionary lies within; one that I would not have recognized as a freshman in college, but one that has a deeper wisdom and understanding, and a higher potential to truly better someone else’s life.
