Jake Koch
An Epic Voyage
Bald men, Luck, Strangeness, and the Sociology/Anthropology Major
For some whatever reason, my St. Olaf journey has been most structured by the profound and unintended impact of two bald men. The first, Head Swim Coach Dave Hauck, responding to an e-mail of mine, wrote that yes, there was an opportunity for me to swim on the St. Olaf swim team. The other bald man, Tom Williamson, did even less than that. He simply signed his name, thus adding me to an already full section of Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.
Centuries ago, my ancestors somehow acquired the last name “Koch”, not knowing that in 2005 it would doom me to register last for my first college semester. Were all my preferred classes full? Yes. Were my alternate classes full? Yes. Were any classes open? No. The older student helping me register, no doubt sensing my rising anxiety and frustration, pointed out a professor and assured me that he would add me to his class. I highly doubt when Tom signed that drop slip, he was thinking to himself, “I bet there is a good chance that this will prove to be a serendipitous, life-altering moment in this young man’s life and maybe, just maybe, he will write about in a paper four years from now.” Personally, at the time I did not even know the name of the class he had just added me too.
However, immediately after learning the name of the course, and what cultural anthropology meant, I found that it was captivating. I was never bored reading about Eskimo science, arranged marriage in India, and the beauty of fat in Nigeria. Cultural anthropology was exciting and engaging because its subjects were strange and unknown.
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology also taught me that cultural anthropology could be unnerving and strange. The best week of the semester was also the most confusing and challenging. We discussed the arbitrary nature of racial and gender categories. Up until Tom’s lectures, I had seen no reason to question the biological foundations of race and gender. Discovering that race and gender were not biologically fixed was exhilarating, but it was a struggle to
The unnerving and troubling qualities that I experienced in Cultural Anthropology became a mainstay of my sociological/anthropological experience. In Global Interdependence, European supremacy was revealed to be the result of global accidents. The economic and social positions of the third world and the global South were intimately connected to the neoliberal structures and policies of first world nations. It is hard to imagine in retrospect that it never crossed my mind to wonder why people were poor and underprivileged. That is just the way they were. Sociology/Anthropology, if nothing else, challenged a complacency I did not know I had about the world.
The unnerving and unsettling character of sociology/anthropology became dominant in Sociological and Anthropological Theory. The organization of social life and symbolic meaning was not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Categorization and orderliness were unmistakably arbitrary yet profoundly meaningful. Sociological and Anthropological Theory even provided a means and a possibility to talk about how we talked about things. It was equal parts bizarre and frustrating, but never dull.
Post-Anthropological and Sociological Theory, my experience took an unexpected and at first, unwelcome, turn. Frustration with a theory or an essay is often resolved and always short-lived. Even with work of the most confusing theorists there is a manageable level of organization and precision. Developing my own ethnographical analysis was a messy process that inevitably appeared to lead toward complete failure. I set out with an organized research plan and the highest of hopes and returned with a notebook full of illegible scribbles. I triumphantly translated my scribbles into a breathtaking twenty-five page paper, only to be told by my research subjects, the LARP community, that I did a “decent job but messed up a lot of the details.” It is one thing to read about the impossibility of authentically capturing the experience of another human being, and another to experience the impossibility. Despite the confusions and the challenges throughout the project, upon completion I was proud of the finished project, which I feel does a large degree of justice to Live Action Role-Playing experiences at St. Olaf.
Despite the inclusion of two research courses, Sociology/Anthropology, more than other majors, is assumed to have little applicability to any future vocation. This assumption seems to be true for almost every person that I tell I am studying sociology/anthropology. The pervasive question is response is always “… but what are you going to do with that?” Tell fellow students and friends that the males of the Kabre people of Togo, Africa drink dog’s blood as a ritual for affirming and cementing their masculinity, and they will often respond with fascination, but also with skepticism, questioning the usefulness of that knowledge.
The challenge in “justifying” the sociology/anthropology major is that facts about this people and that custom and definitions of this and that term that make you a more interesting person to talk to are beside the point. More significantly, sociology/anthropology is a collection of analytical tools and approaches toward engaging and understanding the world. Sociology/Anthropology provides a variety of means of getting to facts, rather than just the facts themselves. As I transition into post-graduate study in law, I will not simply be taking “useless” knowledge, like the techniques of successful Go-Go girls in Thailand. I will be taking approaches to analyzing the way people, institutions, and power interact.
The most notable analytical skill I have drawn from the sociology/anthropology major is an ability to make things strange. It is exceedingly difficult to analyze something familiar and inhabited, so you have to make it unfamiliar and weird- you have to strange-ify it. My favorite example of strange-ifying comes from Geertz’s essay on thick description. Geertz, in showing the relevance and significance of cultural analysis, uses an example of a wink. Winks are so natural and inconsequential they resist interpretation. All it is and ever was is a wink- until you make it unnatural and bizarre, urges Geertz. Then winking becomes nearly impossible to describe. Obviously it is more than the biomechanical process of moving an eyelid but what makes winking appropriate and how is such a small and quick gesture so symbolically significant for the intended target of the wink? Geertz also offers the doubly complex example of the burlesque wink, where both participants are knowingly lampooning authentic winking. With strange-ifying, our analysis of the world is capable of penetrating the normal, taken-for-granted phenomena in the world around us.
Beyond providing me with tools, the sociology/anthropology major has enabled me to develop the ability and confidence to use these tools successfully. Sociology/Anthropology is not exclusively responsible for spurring my developing self-confidence and poise, but it deserves the lion’s share of the credit. Unfortunately, I am incapable of describing how I developed any of these attributes- it just seems to have happened. I am capable however, of providing two moments from my time at St. Olaf that will prove, without a shred of uncertainty, that a development of self-confidence and poise has taken place.
Flashback to spring semester sophomore year. I am taking my third sociology/anthropology class and my second class with Tom. Having already taken a class with Tom, I know the importance of class participation yet I speak up rarely. Tom reminds the class over and over again that participation is what makes the difference between B’s and B+’s, B+’s and A-‘s. I intend to raise my hand more often, but I am timid and when I do participate, I begin to nervously sweat which makes me, and presumably the people next to me, uncomfortable.
Flashback to two weeks ago. I am standing, with four other group members, presenting our collaborative research paper at the Midwest Sociological Society conference. I am making eye contact with the audience, my voice is steady, and I have a small, manageable amount of nervous sweating. People are interested, they ask questions, and it is a success. These two events provide demonstrable proof that I have more confidence and ability to speak publicly with clarity and self-assurance, a skill that was underdeveloped when I moved into Kildahl in September of 2005.
I like to think of my four years at St. Olaf in the sociology/anthropology major as an epic voyage, because that better captures the excitement and mystery. The closest I can come to overriding themes for my epic voyage are bald men lead to good things and strangeness. Thinking reflexively about my epic voyage through the sociology/anthropology major is exceedingly challenging. It is hard to strange-ify my own life. Knowing that I failed to recognize how significant adding Introduction to Cultural Anthropology instead of any other course was freshman year makes me certain that I have not yet come to fully recognize and understand the significance of the major as a whole. Having chosen to identify the ability to strange-ify and my increased confidence as most significant for me in the sociology/anthropology major, I have a suspicious that I have left out something extremely important, but I can even begin to imagine what it might be.
I do not believe there is a single word or story that can encompass my epic voyage through the sociology/anthropology major but I do believe in sentimental analogies. In that vein, I feel my voyage is best embodied by the connection I had, as a teenager, to my car. The car was an instrument that set my transition from adolescent to adulthood in motion. The car made me mobile, functional, and independent. Eventually I had to give the car up to go to school and because my mom sold it while I was sleeping in on a Thursday, but I did not lose the mobility and independence. In a similar way, the sociology/anthropology voyage has made me intellectually mobile, functional, and independent. And though the voyage is drawing to a close, I am irreversibly improved as a result.
