Susan Hill
Young Adulthood through a New Lens: A Chronicle of My “A-Hah!” Moments in the Major
Introduction
Four years ago today, I was a freshmen in college one month away from receiving that pivotal promotion to sophomore status. I had successfully conquered the disorientation of that first year and, with my initial required classes almost completed, I was finally on my way to becoming the die-hard Classics major that I always thought I would be. A few years later, I find myself not only incapable of translating Cicero, but also, in a strange turn of events, writing a senior distinction paper as a major in the Sociology/Anthropology department. Like many of my freshmen fantasies, my choice of major did not go according to plan.
Back then, I would not have predicted that the rigors of Latin translation would be exhausting, time-consuming, and worst of all, boring. Nor would I have expected that I would end up in a major which until college I had thought was the province of adventurers with exotic safari pants and rifles. At some point during the next two years, however, I would discover that my true interest lies in people and the world we live in. This realization would come partly as a result of getting older and thinking more critically about the way I lived my life. Like many elements of my education, however, my interest in social theory would also come from indirect exposure to the social sciences as a consequence of the interdisciplinary nature of the liberal arts curriculum.
I initially stumbled into the Sociology/Anthropology major by way of a religion course and specifically, through the completion of a final paper for that course which compared Biblical and modern portrayals of sexuality. This was the first paper I enjoyed writing as a college student, and it nearly prompted me to pursue a Religion major as well, but after some perusing on the class and lab, I realized that the classes that explored these cultural issues were all actually Sociology/Anthropology courses. At that point, I took a chance and decided to enroll in several core classes of the major hoping that I wouldn’t end up dropping my entire course load in a week.
Now, here I am, a senior, struggling to sum up my social science education in a neat, readable narrative, but I instead I keep coming back to a few central concepts that have influenced my thought throughout the major and have inspired many of those “A-Hah!” moments that resulted in the pieces featured in this portfolio. These concepts fundamentally changed the way I viewed my life and offered a new lens through which to view the emerging project of my adulthood. In this paper, I will use these core concepts of, structure, power, and identity to shape this discussion of my individual journey as college student and as a Sociology/Anthropology major.
Structure
Like most young, middle-class Americans, I grew up with the popular maxim, “You can doing anything you set your mind to, “ringing in my ears. All I had to do was exercise my free-will and use the liberty that American democracy afforded me. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those dreams were for everyone. We all had equal opportunities to achieve them.
Of course I knew that those clichés weren’t always true. There were, of course, those poor people, who needed our charity because they always seemed to mess things up for themselves. Or there were those certain sports that only rich, white kids participated in. Or things that I couldn’t say because I was a girl. Or moments where I found myself acting out a part I didn’t believe in because I knew that I had to. These tensions were always unnamed and unclassified. They were joked about on The Simpsons or vaguely discussed on news shows like 60 Minutes, but for the most part, these restraints were invisible, natural. I couldn’t name them, but at certain moments in my life, I felt them.
It wasn’t until college that I encountered words like race, gender, class, and society addressed in a serious and analytical way. I don’t remember that exact moment of realization, but I know that it happened during my first few weeks of Anthropological Theory as we discussed the restrictive power of societal norms over our lives. Max Weber’s Iron Cage stands out in my mind. I wouldn’t actually encounter Weber’s work first-hand until my senior year in Sociological Theory, but I remember someone explaining it in that classroom. The Iron Cage. The self-made structure of capitalism that binds us all to material goods, capital, and the economic system. Like everyone else in that room, I was trapped in that same framework. My career, my life, and even my most intimate and basic desires were shaped by the structure of global capitalism and the larger society that supported it.
This was an “A-Hah!” moment for me, a realization that I could not be anything I wanted to be. As we discussed social facts, norms, and values, concepts that I would later associate with the work of Durkheim, Parsons, Merton, and others, the larger structure of society as a whole and the socially-constructed origins of my entire world became evident. I would never be black. I would never be a man, unless, of course, I changed some element of my appearance, which further demonstrated the socially constructed nature of these concepts. What makes someone a man? It is a penis? It is a behavior? Is it a sexual orientation? Why in our society do we automatically associate biological sex with gender? Why is this basic issue so invisible to us? The task of “denaturalizing” all those common sense assumptions about myself and others lay ahead of me, and I was eager to “take the red pill” that social science offered me.
The ethnographies and cross-cultural studies that we read in class helped further demonstrate the power of ideology and structure. Shelly Ortner’s book New Jersey Dreaming, which is the subject of the third paper featured in this portfolio, illuminated the constricting influence class has over our lives and careers. Through an analysis of the paths of her graduating high school class, she demonstrates the consequences of “class drag” on social mobility and tracking throughout life. In this paper, I show a basic understanding of class as a key social structure with real, concrete power.
I used this theoretical orientation not only to influence my writing in class, but also in analysis of everyday issues on the St. Olaf campus, such as the “Ring by Spring” phenomenon. The first piece I feature in this portfolio is an opinion piece I wrote for the Manitou Messenger discussing this topic and lightly analyzing it from a macro perspective. This piece is demonstrative of the intellectual contributions that the major has made to my writing and thought in all disciplines and in all contexts. Ideas about structure influence my creative writing, my interactions with friends, my perceptions about current events, and my most basic ideas about who I am and who I want to become. As I embark upon the mysterious chasm of the “real world,” these ideas provide a lens through which to understand the challenges of adulthood that I face daily.
Power
As I trace my intellectual growth through the major, this concept seems to follow Structure naturally because structural analysis was the initial lens through which I encountered power theories. Stucture vs. Agency. The Individual vs. The System. These dichotomies were my original orientation to power. As I mentioned earlier, my paper on New Jersey Dreaming focuses on power theories related specifically to class and discusses Ortner’s analysis of structure and agency in the social mobility of her high school class. The dynamic nature of the relationship between structure and agency was evident in the varied outcomes of her classmates’ lives. People were not just “cogs” in the system. We also had power and exercised it in direct and indirect ways. The relationship between structure and agency was not fixed, but dynamic and changing. People make decisions. Change occurs. Transgression is perpetrated and punished. The concept of agency helped me to understand the flow of power in my daily life more clearly. I might be subject to the coercive power of patriarchy, but I still make daily choices in my life that rebel against patriarchal norms, however small they may be.
The journal entry featured in this portfolio addresses the issue of power and structure specifically within the context of finding a career and using my education. I originally wrote this piece in Anthropological Theory, but rediscovered it my senior year. At that time, the terrifying prospect of entering the job market was lingering in my thoughts, and I felt inspired to rewrite the piece from the perspective of a soon-to-be graduate. I was struggling with the concept of success and the realization that my degree, my career, and my life on a functional level would be inevitably reduced to a form of capital. The power of the economic system weighed heavily on my mind and my encounters with power theory and structure helped me to at least understand my situation, even if I didn’t necessarily like it.
I can’t discuss power theory, however, without also mentioning the work of Michel Foucault. I have encountered his theories in different locations throughout the major, and each time, I have new “A-Hah!” moments. I had heard the phrase “Knowledge is Power,” so many times in my life--on posters, from earnest teachers, on after-school specials-- but I never actually understood what that proposition meant until I encountered Foucault in Anthropology of War and later in Anthropological Theory, Sociological Theory, and Social Movements.
Who defines truth?
Who defines what is knowledge?
Who speaks and who is silent?
These questions were central in Foucault’s work and led me to reconsider my own education. I began to wander who wrote the books that I was reading, who determined the subject matter and track of academic discourse, who was left out of the conversation, who’s point of view was considered legitimate and why. I also was drawn to his idea that power was not necessarily a negative or positive concept. In earlier theories, it had often been framed as repressive and negative. According to Foucault, power was not simply a repressive tool of the state. It was force that suffused everything, including families, technology, and individuals. We all exercised power in some way.
In a setting where I couldn’t recycle my beer cans down the hall without being in view of a security camera, his ideas about surveillance were also particularly resonant. The observation of school officials was a disciplinary power in my daily life and did successfully homogenize my behavior. To hide the illicit contents of my garbage, I always put my recycling in a black garbage bag. A small change, but a meaningful one. Through Foucault’s theories, I have found new ways to understand the technologies of power that will become a fixture of my adult life and which, truthfully, have already become fixtures in my young adulthood.
Identity
Self.
The subject. The object. The body. The mind. Fractured. Whole.
Just a few of the many words that have been used to explain this most personal, yet public of concepts.
When I consider my journey through understanding identity, a recent “A-Hah!” moment comes to mind: Sociological Theory, Spring Semester 2009, George Herbert Mead. On a dark winter night, I opened my theory book to The Self [1934], and in the tomb-like silence of the Rolvaag reference room first encountered micro-sociology. Mead’s conception of self as both subject and object was a revelation to me. I could see the interactions of my daily life in his theories and was given a new lens from which to view such features of college life as fashion, flirtation, and friendship. His theories also further confirmed a central observation I had made about my life: much of my time was spent comparing, assessing, and adjusting myself in relation to those around me. Life was a constant process of differentiation. His theories and those of his symbolic interactionist descendants also helped me to reassess the complicated process of conversation, both verbal and non-verbal. I had encountered many of these ideas in Anthropological Theory, but it had never been so clearly articulated until I encountered Blumer and Mead. The common pitfalls of e-mail and text-message communication made sense. Without the additional exchange of non-verbal gestures in conversation, electronic correspondence was bound to result in the occasional miscommunication. I appreciated that these theorists took the daily dramas of my life seriously. The interactions of my life were complicated and important.
There were also other moments in the major that defined how I understand identity. The fourth paper featured in this portfolio examines conceptions of identity in an Indonesian context. In this paper and the entire Modern Southeast Asia class, I got a chance to step outside my own culture and closely examine others. In this particular paper, I discuss fractured identities of gay and lesbi Indonesians and compare this conception of identity to traditional Western essentialist thought. I was able to analyze and engage with another culture and subsequently better understand my own cultural assumptions. Studying this region of the world for an entire semester also gave me a foundational encounter with colonial history and culture as well as discourses surrounding globalization. Topical classes such as Social Movements and Sociology of Religion supplemented this knowledge.
In addition, some of the most practical “A-Hah!” moments of my experience as a major came from addressing micro concepts such as Identity from a methodological standpoint. Approaching intimate relationships, the core theme of my Quantitative Research Methods course, from a quantitative standpoint was challenging. How do you operationally define such categories as intimacy, love, and happiness? My research partners and I worked through these issues to conduct our research study, which is featured as the fifth paper in this portfolio. We learned that, from a positivist orientation, reliability and validity were elusive but accessible concepts that had to be worked towards, through literature review, peer analysis, trial and error, and revision. By designing, conducting, writing up, and presenting this study, I was able to finally participate in the process of research and analysis. By the end of this semester, I hope to have a final qualitative paper (from Qualitative Methods) that I will feel similarly positive about. As I’ve learned, each of these approaches has its own unique benefits, challenges, and role in the social sciences.
What I most value from these methodological courses is the questions that they have raised in my mind about the nature of truth. Is truth objective? Is it possible to measure it? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I appreciate that I have been exposed to the discourse. When studying issues such as structure, power, and identity in the future, I will at least have some knowledge upon which to base those important methodological decisions.
Conclusion
6 weeks and 2 days from now I will graduate. I will back up my life in my Chevy and leave this place behind in much the same manner that I did four years again when I pulled out of my parents’ driveway and jumped on that well-traveled road towards adulthood. So now the big question arrives: Who will I become?
This question is impossible to answer, and that’s the point. I don’t really know. Too much still lies ahead of me. Yet, I can say with honesty that I want the social sciences to be a part of that identity. In this major, I’ve found a discipline that encompasses all others and engages every aspect of my life. I like to talk about social science. I like to read about social science. I like to teach others about social science. In the discipline’s enormous scope, I have found an endless amount of subjects to engage me.
I admit that I am no “martyr.” I am not that major who aspires to work tirelessly for social justice, who wants to join an NGO and save the world. I admire those individuals and respect their perseverance, but I know that in the long run that is not the life for me. I think my skills and interests would be better suited to teaching, which is an admirable pursuit in its own right. During the past four years, I have become attached to this academic world and the dynamic, collaborative environment it fosters. At this point in my journey, the professorial lifestyle stands out as the most appealing potential answer to the big career question.
For now, however, I am moving to Europe to begin another new life in a new place. The most valuable skills I will take on this journey are those that the Sociology/Anthropology major has given me: the ability to ask questions, to challenge assumptions, to think critically, and to look for the complexity in all issues. Even if I never take another social science course again, I at least know that with these skills, I will live my life with my eyes open.
