Reflections on First Semester, Part 2

This post is a look back at the past semester of Anthropology.

The Human Connection -- Anthropology

I'm very glad I chose Anthro as my Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHS) Foundation course. I almost always enjoyed doing the readings for Anthro, and even when I was frustrated while doing a writing assignment I usually cared about what I was writing. I also got a lot out of the field trips -- I'm better at talking to people I don't know now, and I've learned to figure out what's (anthropologically) interesting in what I see or hear or read.

Structure and content of the class: I didn't enjoy the first unit, which was about the impact of culture clashes and empathy on health care, as much as the later ones. This was largely a function of it being first. I wasn't very comfortable talking to people on field trips yet, and I didn't know what to look for in the readings or on the field trips. When I think back, I don't remember finding anything really worth thinking about in more depth. In later units, many of our writing assignments were about picking out a few sentences from a reading and analyzing them or doing something similar with our field work. We didn't really do that in the first unit until the paper that ended the unit,so this unit felt very surface-level to me.

The second unit was about religion, and it was my favorite simply because religion really interests me. The assignments became more analytical, and we did lots of fieldwork, so we were analyzing what we saw and heard, not just what we had read. The religion paper was the final paper for the course (replacing a final exam), which I'll get to a little later. The last unit was about aging, and by that point I was used to analyzing both readings and fieldwork and talking to people while on field trips. The aging paper was one of my best pieces of writing for the course because I was so comfortable with my evidence and my ability to analyze it.

The final paper: The religion paper had to be much longer than the other two papers. We had to choose a topic having to do with religion, with the only restriction being that we not write about our own religion. I wrote about the differences in practice between Punjabi Sikhs and American Sikh converts (who tend to practice Kundalini yoga). The religion paper was where I really encountered what seemed to be contradictions, which the professor, Caitrin, loves. We had talked about contradictions and puzzles a lot in class -- Caitrin had pointed some out, or we found them in readings as a class, or others encountered them in fieldwork -- but I hadn't had any of my own yet, and all of a sudden they were everywhere. I felt like I was finding conflicting thoughts about tradition and religion, and multiple times during the process of writing the paper I walked away from my laptop muttering to myself about how none of it made any sense. By the end, though, most of it did make sense, and I was happy with the resulting paper.

Just as importantly, though, in the process of writing the religion paper, I went to a yoga class in a place I'd never been before, having never taken this type of yoga class before, and I was with only one person I knew. I had to ask adults at Olin whom I barely knew for rides. I emailed the ashram asking for an interview, and then on my own I interviewed someone I had never met. I am both shy and introverted, and that amount of interaction on my own with strangers or near-strangers made me nervous, but I did it.

I also took two other students to church with me and was interviewed for their papers, which was a lot of fun and significantly easier for me than interviewing someone else. This wasn't terribly surprising. I've known for a while that when I find it very easy to overcome my shyness if I'm talking about something I know and love, like summer camps I've attended or my boarding school. These interviews, talking about United Methodism and my faith, fall into that same category, so being interviewed felt easy. The questions weren't always simple to answer, and some of them I'd never thought about much, but I never worried about saying the wrong thing like I worried about asking the wrong thing when I was the interviewer. Being interviewed actually made me a little more comfortable interviewing (both times I was interviewed were before I was the interviewer) because I had some idea of what the interview would feel like, even though it was from the other side.

Overall: I enjoyed the reading, field work, and the full group discussions in Anthro. The discussions were always fun and helped me think more about the readings or field work, most people talked, and I learned a lot about my classmates in the process. When we split up into smaller groups, I didn't think I got as much out of the activities or discussions; the small groups are less resistant to one person not being at his/her best, and they get off track more easily. I also didn't really like the time we spent on writing mechanics, but part of the point of AHS Foundation courses is to improve our writing, so that time was necessary. For me, though, getting commentary on writing assignments would have been more helpful than handouts about motive, theses, and critical reading. In the last month and a half of the course we got commentary on most of what we wrote (and got it in a timely manner), which was very useful, and I would have appreciated that earlier on.