Finding my Footing, and Musings about the Variations of Man

The past week has provided me with ample opportunity for adventure and anxiety while plunging into my ethnographic fieldwork. I am learning to be flexible, to throw the usual structure of academia I have experienced in America out the window, and to attempt to enjoy my amazing time here simultaneously.  I am learning so much each day, and cliché as it is, beginning to love and become attached to the amazing community and friends I interact with routinely.

Regarding my project, my aims have already started to become largely modified, as several former field studies students warned me they would. My new project title is, “The Influence of Formal Education on Cross-Generational Perspectives about Cocoa Farming.” Here are a few brief things I have been able to do since starting my observation and research:

-I have visited a couple cocoa farms, accompanied by the farm owners. They look nothing like I expected, and it has been quite fun tramping through the jungle and bush, especially when it rained. Local villagers got a kick out of the crazy obruni in her bright blue rain poncho.

-I have started to gain insight into the forces of formal education and government shaping the younger generation’s hopes for the future and career pursuits.

-I have started to sit in on junior high and secondary school classes, and get to know the students. It has been a blast visiting with younger kids, and seeing the fun ways their teachers interact with them.

-I was able to sit in on a school staff meeting that was as exciting as full court of law, with yelling and laughing and demands for votes. I also will start teaching a few English classes tomorrow with the help of a Ghanaian teacher at the secondary school

-I have scheduled my first official interview for Wednesday, and am excited to start hearing the opinions of teachers, students, cocoa farmers and others on relevant issues surrounding education, careers, and agriculture here in Wiamoase.

Note: If you ever find yourself following a 75 year old man into the forest to see his cocoa farm, and he is shuffling along, practically dragging his machete, do not doubt that he can lift that machete in the blink of an eye and whack a tree blocking your way right in half. Haha!

I have started trying to do a deeper reading and analysis of Clifford Geertz’s classic Interpretation of Cultures than I have before done for classes. His writing and explanation of anthropological inquiry and the ethnographic research and inscription process is nothing short of genius.

I was especially impressed in the last couple days by his theorizing about how those in the fields of social science choose to go about trying to define human nature. While here in Ghana, I have often pondered to myself how it is that humans are connected biologically, but can vary so drastically in so many other ways. I just kept trying to wrap my mind around how I would be a different person if I was born a Ghanaian, or even into the family living in the next house over from my own family I was actually born into. Geertz helped me realize that the reality of this incomprehensible variation is actually one of the most breath-taking and spectacular parts about human nature.

He states that in the past, especially starting in the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers have tried to understand human nature through universal commonalities. They have searched for the constants between peoples, the mainstays of cultural and social systems – “consensual man”.  However, he points out that theorists may want to consider that more can be learned from studying the phenomenon of human variation instead, because if we known anything, we know human nature is variable.

His musings culminate in the conclusion that, “Out of such reformulations of the concept of culture and the role of culture in human life comes, in turn, a definition of man stressing not so much the empirical commonalities in his behavior, from place to place and time to time, but rather the mechanisms by whose agency the breadth and indeterminateness of his inherent capacities are reduced to the narrowness and specificity of his actual accomplishments. One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one” (1973, Geertz 45).

Studying culture could possibly be looked at as a way to honor God for his miraculous creation. The fact that, as Geertz says, we have the inherent ability to be shaped and molded to live a countless number of lifestyles is proof in itself of the beautiful and unfathomable creature God has created in the human being.

As I attempt culturally immersive research methods while living here in Wiamoase, I am trying to remember and apply the insights I am gaining. I am so grateful for this experience, and even now realize that I will be forever indebted to each and every one of the kind Ghanaians who have provided love, encouragement, and assistance already in the first two weeks  to an undeserving undergraduate who is trying to “find her footing,” as Geertz would call it, in a culturally foreign context.

PS: I will start posting a few photos, and selected parts of my journal entries each Tuesday, as well as insight posts like these, so watch out for those!