Sarah Kirby
Anthropology/Sociology Distinction Portfolio
My portfolio reflects the story of how I came to be a sociology/anthropology major and what I’ve learned through my college years. My distinction essay tells the story of how past experiences and family influences led me to the major and how ideas that I learned in college have shaped how I think. I include my final from my first anthropology class, Modern Elixirs, to show where I started in the major. Then, I include the final paper from Anthropological Theory to show how my understanding of core concepts developed through that year. I also include the final paper from Quantitative Research Methods to illustrate my ability to work with a group and to conduct original research. I include my final paper for Modern Southeast Asia, the class I took over interim this year, because it demonstrates how I am combining my interest in anthropology with my focus on Asian studies. Finally, I include a paper from my senior seminar in order to portray how I can apply anthropological concepts to concrete issues such as that of human rights.
The Gazebo
My grandpa is notorious for telling the same old stories over and over again. This one stuck with me:
When he was a journalism student at University of Missouri, he took an introduction to journalism class with about 400 people in it. One day, the professor walked in and started lecturing. Students, as always, began to fall asleep. All of the sudden, there was a ruckus behind the curtains. The struggle soon became visually noticeable. Two students, fighting viciously, fell out onto the stage right beside the professor. When he tried to break up the fight, one of the students pulled out a gun and shot him. He fell to the ground. Everyone in the auditorium remained motionless, shocked. All the sudden, a person dressed as a witch with a broomstick sprinted across the stage laughing. The professor stood up and told all the students to write down what happened. The lesson was that though 400 students witnessed the same exact events, no two perceptions or interpretations were the same. Everyone told a different story.
People's perceptions and interpretations are fundamentally shaped by their backgrounds. My entire life, I have had the opportunity to be consistently surrounded by people with very different backgrounds than myself. In first grade, I attended a public Montessori school downtown. The teacher called my parents to tell them which of my friends' houses I shouldn't be allowed to visit. I had classmates that were abused, neglected, and even homeless. While I had aunts, uncles, cousins, and my grandparents at my house to visit every day, some of my classmates had no one to depend on and lived day to day not knowing where they would get their next meal or sleep at night. While I adapted somewhat to a more erratic social life at school, I was always an outsider. I had also gained the perception of my own family and home from the view of someone with a much different background.
For second grade, I transferred to an elementary school in the suburbs. Because I had had a very diverse group of friends from whom I had learned a lot, I became fascinated with other cultures. In middle school, most of my friends were from other countries. I had met my best friend, Cesia, when I was ten. She was from Mexico City and didn't speak a word of English. As I taught her English, she taught me Spanish. When my sixth grade Spanish teacher learned that I was bored, she allowed me to go to the English as a Second Language classroom and help out instead of sit in her class. I made friends from Bosnia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. I discovered that if they taught me a word in their respective first languages, I could still remember it months later. As I went to their houses, I learned more and more about their cultures and their intensely different perceptions of the same world. A seventh grade French teacher saw this passion and let me stay after class to show me helpful ways of learning. The Montessori school had taught me to learn quickly on my own, and I became obsessed with foreign language. My family members began giving me foreign language dictionaries when I was twelve years old. I would make long charts with languages on one side and important words on the other. I would look up one word in the various languages, record it, and memorize it.
In high school, I decided to go to Chile as an exchange student. The American Field Service sent me to live with a host family and study in La Serena. In Chile, the concept of time was much more relaxed. While there is a respected value of punctuality in the U.S., it was polite to be at least fifteen minutes late in Chile. One day, my host mom said that we were going to visit my host sister in Viña del Mar for a few days. I packed three days worth of clothes and we headed out. Each day, I asked when we were going back to La Serena because the American Field Service said that I would need a very good reason to miss school and every day my host mom said “soon, soon”. We were in Viña del Mar for three weeks. My experience in Chile validated and amplified my interest in foreign languages and cultures.
After graduating in 2006, I came to St. Olaf where I was able to formally study culture for the first time. I continued my passion for languages by taking Spanish, French, and Chinese and working at the World Languages Center. I took modern elixirs with Tom Williamson for interim my freshman year and fell in love with anthropology. After being taught the story of history the same way for so many years, the story that involves a lot of Anglo forefathers wearing silly wigs, I was taught the story of history along the lines of mood-altering substances. Beer consolidated class structure in Europe until coffee came as the catalyst for the industrial revolution. What a unique way of looking at history-not defined by humans but by the substances they consume! In this class, I was intrigued by the concept of biopower. I began to look at my community in terms of how we intimately embody regulations and control techniques.
Sophomore year, I learned a new story of American history in contemporary Native American issues with Carolyn Anderson. The story that I had been told and forced to regurgitate a million times was finally revealed as a lie. I was able to realize that all of history is subjective and that it is told by a dominant group with specific goals. Anthropology Theory helped me to further use this concept of subjectivity by turning the anthropological eye on my own community and altering categorical assumptions that had been placed on my community by outsiders. Identifying the categories of structure and agency was especially powerful for in terms of being able to explain how my generation has been affected by the enormous amount of surveillance, supervision, and regulation controlling us from birth. Subjectivity and language were also incredibly fascinating for me because of my obsession with foreign language. In an Asian linguistics class, I learned about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and came to see how it is plausible that our language alone is the framework for our perceptions and interactions.
That interim, I had the opportunity to travel to China and Japan through the Asian Conversations program. We explored the concept of national identity through observation at various public places. I was able to apply my newfound anthropological lens to interpret the ways by which people embody their various identities. As taught by my family, I learned the most about people and places through stories. Over the summer of 2008, I was able to dive into my passion for stories by interning at Ethnographic Research, Inc. in Kansas City. I had just become engrossed in filmmaking working at the World Languages Center sophomore year so video ethnography was the perfect field for me to explore. While I got to further practice wonderful office work skills such as transcribing interviews, I also got to sit in on ideation sessions and was even able to accompany researchers into the field to videotape! My favorite project thus far was a project for a top photo company in which researchers got to look through subjects’ photos and listen to their stories, considering the ways in which technology is altering our memories and how we tell stories.
Last semester, I learned more variations of the American story of history and perceptions of life in Race and Class in America with Bruce Nordstrom-Loeb. I even took up the opportunity to attend the annual Wacipi (pow-wow) in Mankato, MN! I found that I am especially passionate about injustice in American education when reading the book The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol. I also conducted group research for the first time in Ryan Sheppard’s Quantitative Methods for Social Sciences course. My group studied attitudes toward inter-ethnic romantic relationships at St. Olaf in a project entitled “The Colors of Love”. We found that having a diverse social network and more experience with interethnic romantic relationships positively correlates to more open attitudes toward interethnic romantic relationships. I was able to present this paper with my group members at the Midwest Sociological Society Conference in Des Moines this March.
Last semester I also began tutoring English as a Second Language at Greenvale Park Elementary through the Northfield Reads and Counts Program. Children’s’ learning processes are so transparent that you can see their faces change when they finally master a concept. Observing children at school as an outsider reveals to me how we are so fundamentally influenced by our early education and serves as a partial explanation for the extremely varied forms of thought and learning around the world.
During interim, I studied modern Southeast Asia with Tom Williamson where I learned about how history is written and re-written in other countries and was also fascinated by other cultures’ perceptions of American culture. For example, in Malaysia, the U.S. is seen as a place to make money but not as a place to raise children because of the isolation from family and friends relative to Malaysian kinship and social systems. I also found the ways by which the mass media and globalization are blurring lines of national identity and creating new transnational identities, altering the historical stories of nations to historical stories of the world as a whole.
This semester, I will conduct my own ethnographic research in Professor Chiappari’s Ethnographic Research Methods course. I am enthralled by this opportunity because interviews will allow me to hear people’s stories, which I find is the best way to learn about my community. I am doing a program-evaluation-type ethnography on the PRIMEtime after-school program for “at-risk” youth in Northfield Elementary Schools (specifically Greenvale Park Elementary, where I’ve been tutoring ESL). My disbelief at certain aspects of American education systems is being brought out again. For example, while the school district uses a lot of resources for a program to teach non-ESL students to learn Spanish, they do not have any program to teach children who already speak Spanish to read and write in Spanish (which would greatly help their transition to reading and writing in English). Rather than being seen as bilingual students with an important asset, they are seen as “at-risk” by “No Child Left Behind” legislation and categorized as being at a disadvantage in terms of language.
I am also taking both Professor Anderson’s seminar on ethics and another ethics seminar on human rights in Asian contexts. The parallel struggle between universalism and moral relativism in both of these classes has proven both frustrating and captivating.
Next year, I plan to travel to Shanghai to teach English at East China Normal University through the China Fellows program. I hope to go on to participate in the Peace Corps and graduate school and eventually teach at the college level.
