Reciprocity Says...You Owe Me an(d) IOU

TOPIC: Reciprocity

SOURCE: Casual interaction with other members of a culture obsessed with payment and repayment of goods and services.

RELATION: Page 143 of RR tells that according to the principle of reciprocity, “giving a gift creates social ties with the person receiving it, who is obliged to reciprocate.”

DESCRIPTION: During the final weeks of the semester, students here at HSU find themselves at a busy time in their lives. Whether they are moving, working, or studying for finals, it seems that each student barely finds enough time even for themselves. So what is it that motivates students to insist upon reaching out to one another to offer help even in their busiest hours. Just the other day, as I found myself studying for a final, I was approached by a young lady who happens to be in one of my other classes. She asked for a bit of help on the material we were covering in class, and although I was very busy, I decided to help her. Once we managed to work through the assignment, she and her friends were very grateful and offered to repay me for my help by buying me dinner. And while that was very sweet, what they did not know was that the reason I had decided to take the time to help them in the first place was because I myself had received an hour or two of assistance from my best friend earlier in the day (which was the only reason I even knew how to demonstrate the concept from class). I had viewed the opportunity as a good way to spread the generosity that someone had first extended toward me—and to pay back a social debt, essentially.

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: This was a prime example of the social principle of reciprocity, with both parties involved in an exchange of services/goods feeling as though they owed something to the folks who had helped them, even if the gifts that were exchanged were simple non-commodities that are a bit more difficult to repay. We were all aware of the social obligations to repay the person who offered help, even if they “needn’t be limited to material goods” (RR 143). The giving and receiving of gifts, a tradition observed on so many of the holidays we celebrate here in the US, has trained us all to recognize when it is not only necessary to offer a gift, but to repay a gift that has first been offered to us. In this way, we have become traditional practitioners of the social principle of reciprocity here in the 21^st century, not believing that we should ever remain indebted to a person for an extended period of time, but rather work to reimburse and even reward the person to whom our debts are owed before we can put our minds at ease.

It's All in the Family (and the Culture): What Makes A Family 'Typical'

TOPIC: Family Composition and Ideals

SOURCE: “Certain features of the typical American family stand out” (RR 110).

RELATION: Chapter 5 in ANTHRO outlines the traditions and tendencies of families in Trobriand, Ju/wasi, and traditional Chinese societies. This led me to think about the composition of families in my life and the reasons they exist in the ways that they do.

DESCRIPTION: Upon moving into a dormitory with hundreds of other first-year freshmen, I was not exactly sure what I should anticipate or expect. As one of seven children, I did not think it strange that I would be sharing a restroom with so many other girls on the floor, and I was certainly not new to the idea of having a roommate. To other girls, however, these things seemed strange, and these differences sparked conversation on what we all consider to compose the typical family in America—we all thought we had one. But what we found out was that all of our families seemed to be made up in very different ways with many sorts of people. So we looked for similarities between the many groups that we call families. We found that I came from the largest group, including the most siblings as well as cousins. (I was also the only one of the group who had been raised by a member of the extended family, my Aunt Mindy, which would explain why I was also the only one who readily included cousins and other members of kin in the discussion when asked about my family back home.) Others had situations unfamiliar to me, though, and it seemed that everyone had very different backgrounds and ideas of what they would think to be typical of a family. A common trend I noticed was a household of two siblings, which most people in the group agreed to be “normal.” This was followed, of course, by the count of parents at two: a mother and a father. A few people, including myself, interjected and explained that we had more, and sometimes fewer, parents due to circumstances including divorce, remarriage, and death.

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: What we all managed to gather from this talk was the fact that while our situations all varied, we all had somewhat similar views when it came to what we figured other cultures might consider being “typical” of a family in American culture. And from there, we reasoned why we all seemed to think of that particular sort of family as “normal” despite the fact that none of our own families fit that expectation very closely. We knew we at least had basic understandings of what exactly composes a family in this culture, with consideration for both the family of orientation (father, mother, self, siblings) and the family of procreation (husband, wife, and their children). The ties between our various homes became clearer, too, once families from other cultures beside our own came into the picture. None of us even thought to consider the fact that some people might not even think of both a father and a mother when we think of the rearing of a child. We thought, of course, of the situation in which either of those parents might not be present, but we acknowledged it as just that: an absence, as if something was missing and everyone would consider it thusly. It did not seem usual to us that the people of another culture might not even take into account the contribution made by both a male and female parent in the birth and raising of the next generation. We were thinking of our families in terms of deviations from a standard set by “norms” in the media and the families of our friends. However, there exist many types of families and many different ideas of what it would mean for that family to be “typical”, such as in the Trobriand Islander, Ju/wasi, and Chinese farming families of the world.

Hole In One: Piercings/Body Ritual as a Rite of Passage

TOPIC: Body Ritual

SOURCE: Moving 657 miles away from home to live with other similarly aged students, who had never lived on their own and wished to define their own separate identities by way of self-mutilation immediately after leaving their parents’ houses to start a new life in college.

RELATION: “These rituals [rites of passage] mark a person’s passage from one identity to another. Van Gennep identifies three phases of these rites: first, the ritual separates the person from an existing identity; next, the person enters a transition phase; finally, the changes are incorporated into a new identity” (RR 139).

DESCRIPTION: As soon as I settled into the freshman dormitories here at Humboldt State University, I had the opportunity to get to know the other young adults with whom I would share the building. And everyone began to establish friendships and start to spend more time with certain people over others, it became more and more apparent the things that some valued over other things and how that affected the way they spent their time and the people they wished to accompany in them in those activities. A common thread among the groups, including my own, was that “freedom” from the life they lived with their parents or caretakers was a thing to be celebrated. And for many that meant breaking away from that life in the most obvious way that they knew how, with a blatant disregard for the rule that many of their parents had set for them so long as they were living “under their roof”, by getting their first body piercing.

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: The explanation I received from many of these rebellious young students was that the desire to make their own identities was enough to make them want to do “something”, anything that would make them feel like they were finally members of the grown-up world. In this way, they were able to take part in an unspoken rite of passage that would have to serve as a sufficient ceremonial passage between two phases in life. Each began with separation from their former groups/parents. Then came the time to decide how to separate themselves, which would mark the transitional phase between old and new, developed identity. And following the walk down to the piercing parlor, these individuals all felt something slightly different but all insisted that they felt like new people, thus marking the passage from one role in life to another. It seems that this is the way that it often goes in our society: milestone events become milestone events because we have assigned that meaning to them and allowed those milestones to make us feel as though we have made a significant passage to a new and developed state of personhood. And for those whom I observed, that rite of passage was manifested as taking part in a body ritual common to our culture and receiving a piercing.

R U ready 4 Progress? ;] Wht tht txt is rly saying.

TOPIC: Progress

SOURCE: Changes in monetary growth as well as the cultural implications of money (and other manifestations of wealth) are described on pages 59-66 of RR.

RELATION: According to Robbins, “every culture has a distinct material symbol or activity that defines for its members what is most important in life, what is needed for well-being and happiness” (59), which is true for our own culture, as demonstrated in the way that obsession with new cell phones and the new forms of communication that that allows suggests a shift in the “distinct symbol or activity” our culture has come to value.

DESCRIPTION: In paying closer attention to the multitude of text messages I receive on a daily basis from an assortment of people, with whom I am associated either casually or more professionally, I figured there was more to each message than the actual content of the text. Each message I receive tends to be different than each other in the way it is formed, both in sentence structure and word choice/spelling. I can almost immediately guess the author of a text before I have read who sent it. That being said, the text messages which called my attention for purposes of observation were those which did not follow conventional standards of language composition and spelling of words. I began to notice which of my friends tended not to care that all vowels would be placed in the proper place, safely embedded in a complete sentence, marked by its initial capital letter (or any other necessary uppercase characters), and ended in some way by a mark of punctuation. These differences a few years ago might have come down to the fact that some phones possessed a more advanced technology and could therefore craft a complete sentence with more ease; however, nowadays, it seems that anyone who is texting me has an even fancier phone than me, speaking also to the state of our culture in terms of a previously luxurious item, the SmartPhone, having made its way into the standard way of things. A few years ago, this would have meant that we had all “made it” for ourselves, but today it is deemed usual. Also, in that respect, it was interesting to me to start to observe who insisted on doing what when it came to writing a text message, especially because some took great time to write eloquently when others seemed not to care about the conventions of language at all.

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: This study of the way that people write and send text messages is just a piece of a much larger anthropological case study—the use and function of language itself and the way that our different mediums of technology have affected our choices in communication. And as I took a look at the text messages and other written media of communication in my own life, it became apparent that a lot of the motivation behind crafting a well-written text message has to do with what the recipient of that message would think of the message upon reading it. I, for example, noticed that a text message from a student in one of my classes with whom I rarely speak outside of an educational setting, would take greater care not to allow errors or any hiccoughs in his/her writing (after all, we are working together in classes, aiming for that same high mark). And the same principle seemed to apply to an email from a teacher. I guarantee Professor so-and-so proofread that message before pressing SEND, and it wasn’t just because that same person is a part of the English Department. In addition, I have noticed that certain friends would not have a problem texting another one of our friends using the informal and often incorrect “text-speak” while that same friend has made a point to tell me that the messages I receive are formed with care for the very fact that I am an English major, meaning I would “know the difference”. To me, this consideration for what might “offend” others about the messages we send them—in the same way that simply sending a message at all to a person other than the one sitting across the table and demanding full attention—can be explained by the fact that our culture is what we have allowed it to become, with the responsibility to assign and ascribe meaning in order to make experience matter more to us as people and then to work to “recognize the meanings we impose on our experiences” (RR page 22).

The Monopoly Metaphor

TOPIC: Cultural Text

SOURCE: Pages 94-95 in RR discuss the process of interpretive drift and the idea that as a person becomes more closely involved with a particular activity, he tends to exhibit a drift in the way that he interprets the events associated with that activity. And page 20 discusses the way that this sort of situation can be used as a “text of significant symbols—words, gestures, drawings, natural objects—that carries meaning,” revealing important characteristics about the game/object/ritual and the people who create and involve themselves with it.

RELATION: The effect that involvement in an activity has on a person’s interpretation of that activity and the meanings that we ascribe to those events and activities can be seen in our every- day lives and in the things to which we ascribe meaning. Some of our key metaphors in society work under these same principles, just as we see in the case of sports like football and baseball (CC 310), or even board-games, like in this instance.

DESCRIPTION: I do not like the game Monopoly. And as much as I wish my Monopoly-obsessed friends would quit inviting me to play the game with them, I could not miss out on the opportunity to perform some anthropological fieldwork in a setting I knew would be so rich with American culture. The game itself, which consists of each participant’s forming monopolies over the “land” that is the game-board in hopes of causing all others to declare bankruptcy, would give me all I needed, and I delighted further in the fact that my friends in particular happen to be over-the-top competitive in everything they do, especially when it comes to board games. Upon looking closer, however, I realized that there was a sort of pattern to the way that they all seemed to compete, each of them playing a similar role to the ones that they do in our ordinary social group. For example, one friend kept trying to form alliances (with the intention to “take down” another friend, of course) while another friend simply wished to acquire a certain color of properties, regardless of value. Then there was the friend who wanted everyone to win, even if it meant sharing her money and getting yelled at by each previously mentioned player, as well as a fourth player who seemed to forget that any of us had ever been friends as soon as he placed his thimble on the board…And because these Monopoly gatherings are a regular event for these folks [“Routines are comforting; they bring order into a world in which players have little control” (CC 312)], most of them have their own good luck charms and rituals to perform, which is fun to watch, especially if that person begins to win and that trick appears “important or somehow linked to good performance” (CC 312) and therefore continues in full force in each game that follows. The best part is this: that it’s all very silly. And as it happened, I got to watch each of my friends change and become more and more driven to win in strange ways And for the most part, they seemed not to notice that it was odd, because they were still being themselves, only in a different situation that, due to routine immersion in that situation, they have come to think about very differently.

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: What each of these players has in common is their treatment of the game as a battle, much like in the way that Robbins compares American football to war. The game, which each of them has been playing since he/she was little, seems ordinary and innocent enough, but as someone not familiar with the rules of the game until much later on in life, I started to see that the cut-throat nature of the game does not stem solely from the people who play it. The game, in its very nature, promotes capitalism, competition, and dominion over others—and the game is that way because the creators made it that way to begin with, just as people choose to exaggerate or downplay those features in a modern playing of the game. And that, I think, says a lot about not only the people who play this game, but those people who made it, knowing that people would enjoy that sort of thing. And of course my friends enjoy it: It’s a metaphor for the capitalistic society in which they/we live—and thrive.

Culture Sketch in the Cafeteria

TOPIC: 'Seeing' Culture in Food

SOURCE: Observations were made during a trip to the cafeteria with some food-conscious girlfriends.

RELATION: This account exemplifies the differences which occur between culturally constructed norms of what is 'good' or 'not good' to eat, as mentioned on page 6 of RR.

DESCRIPTION: With so many dining options available on campus, and with j-points to spare, I find myself in many different locations during meal time. However, the things I choose to eat and the standards I apply when making those choices are generally the same in spite of where I find myself when the time comes to chow down. And this seems to be the case for most of the folks with whom I share my meals; that is, that we all have very specific eating habits. A specific issue I have noticed to arise among my friends while in the cafeteria is that of whether a product has been cultivated and harvested organically along with the question of where that food comes from. But it does not stop there. Two friends of mine seem repeatedly to be at odds when these issues arise as both insist on taking a firm stand on both of these subjects, but for very different reasons. One of these young women insists only ever to partake of those things which were brought to her free of pesticide, claiming to place her concern in the fact that many such chemicals work to the detriment of the surrounding ecosystems, but often cares not whether that ecosystem was a local one or not. The source of the food in terms of location seems to be of little importance to Diner #1. The second of these girls shudders at the thought that our friend cares not for that which is produced locally, but also at the fact that she reveres those foods which are termed 'organic' rather than 'pesticide-free', seeing as all foods would technically qualify as carbon-based, organic matter. (Until the powers-that-be recognize and correct such an abominable misnomer, she refuses to pay more for 'carbon-based' simply on principle.) And sure, each of these quirks is harmless enough in theory, but when the two find themselves eating together, trying to make their own decisions based on values which are similar at a glance, while in fact and reality, very different, I find myself in the middle of a real, live culture sketch. As a result, I find myself wondering why these two feel the way that they do, intrigued by the way that the opinions of these girls have manifested themselves. What were they taught, and at what point in their lives were these impacts made? How likely are they to change? And what would that change reveal about the respective cultures which taught them to think that way in the first place?

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: It seems that both of these young women have become a product of the environments in which they were raised. As different values were taught concerning the ever present matter of food, long lasting decisions were made as to what would be okay or not okay to support as a form of subsistence. It seems also that as these two continued to develop and learn more in life, they continued also to apply all that they had learned to their deciding what to eat or to avoid eating, and this appears to be the case for many.

 VS.