I am probably the worst offender, I have not blogged hardly at all. The piece I am working on deals with the power struggle within a small town, much like quaint Oxford:
There wasn’t really much separating us from them. The only real thing I could think of that differentiated our group from theirs was economics. It wasn’t as if all of the students had money and all of the townies didn’t. It was that all of the students maintained the ideology that their stake in life was yet to be made and the townies believed that their lives were already somewhat predestined, that their destinies are already predetermined.
Each of them had a story. Each had an abusive parent, or a parent who was too much of a friend and too little of a parent. Stories of parents and Grandparents hooked on Meth, sexually abusive uncles, I’d heard it all. None of them kept their pasts too shrouded. Usually after they’d had a couple dozen beers the stories of their tragic pasts came trickling past their lips. I’m sure they assumed that I didn’t care enough to remember them in the morning, but I wasn’t like a lot of the students. Or at least I wasn’t like what their perception of a student was, I wasn’t like a lot of students they’d met. I was working hard as a line cook right beside many of them. After a couple weeks being at work around them they started to realize that I was reliable, that I did do what I said I would, and that I really just wanted to be friends.
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I see in your project a lot of concepts we've recently been covering in Anthropology, particularly the idea of 'othering'. It can be found in almost every case of power-related problems, an 'us vs. them' mentality that leads people to bracket you into one camp or the other, usually based on one or two associated categorical traits. You fell into the group of 'collge student' and so they prescribed upon you the image (and perception! :)) they had for college students: The 'other', someone who looked past them, refused to acknowledge them. (That's something that was brought up in Over the Rhine, actually - the way that everyone in their community greeted you, looked you in the eyes and treated you with genuine respect. So much different from the quiet, gaurded nature in which Miami students walk class to class, avoiding eye contact and mutteting half-hearted hellos!)
ReplyDelete...sorry, lost my train of thought there for a moment. :P
The storytelling element struck a chord with me as well. Everyone has a story to tell, and those in less fortunate positions often feel the need to tell theirs more often, especially to those who will listen, and those who they feel might empathize or gain something from hearing it. Two Summers ago I worked in an Ice Cream Factory and the majority of the workstaff were african american men and women in their late thirties, many of whom could find nothing better than the hard, monotonous factory labor. I was moved from machine to machine and with every new position and partner, I was awarded a new story of loss and regret.
Stories like these can be bridges between the two sides, a way of diminishing this 'othering'. It's a means of sharing perspectives and placing others 'in your shoes' for a moment. I'm interested in where you plan on taking this.