Joel Manfredi
English 5870
Dr. De Vries
If there was ever a reading that went way over my head this semester, this one was it. I was pretty much confused the entire time that I read it and still don’t have a good grasp on what it was I was supposed to get out of it. I’m hoping that by reading some of your posts I will gain a better understanding of this reading.
The person who sees the grand canyon but doesn’t really see the canyon because they have been conditioned that the canyon is supposed to be seen a certain way… okay. And the only way to see the grand canyon again (if that’s even possible anymore because it’s called the grand canyon which already skews one’s view) is to approach it from “off the beaten track.” But even here Percy says that finding the canyon this way “will only be the closing of another access to the canyon. He says, “the thing is recovered from familiarity by means of an exercise in familiarity.” I don’t know what that means.
An interesting question, however, is asked at a certain point of this reading. “Does access to the place require the exclusion of others?”(52) I would argue yes and no, because it depends where you are, what you are looking for or doing, and what you are trying to gain from your experience. If you are fishing in the mountains, you might want to have privacy and feel a whole lot better in a remote location with nobody around.
On the other hand, if you are in a third world country, you may want to have some familiarity with others around you to feel a sense of security.
I’m having a hard time figuring out how this piece relates to our class and ethnography in general. Maybe I just need some help in understanding what it is that I am missing. Obviously, I’m not getting something…
I would suggest that we all inevitably package our experiences in little mental cubbyholes, and that when we thereafter encounter something similar we tend to put in the same cubbyhole with that previous experience similar to it, and so when we think about different experiences, we tend to think of them in a patterned way. That way of thinking represses fully realizing the implications of new experiences, and restricts creativity. In any interaction with other people we have inevitably gone through something similar with someone else, and when observing other people we inevitably compare those observations to our own experiences interacting with other people. Therefore, we categorize our experiences and observations before we have even really experienced them or thought about them. Percy’s example of the ways that one might be able to strip of the categorization, “the experience package,” associated with an experience were three. One can just be mentally strong and flexible enough to resist categories (which I actually think is a false statement because categorization is how human minds work, and is what allows us to compile information, create tools based on that information be they symbols or hammers, and conquer the world), the second example is a bomb going off in the biology class that leaves the student on the floor with the dogfish right in front of his eyes(which is equivalent to the random encounter of the young man finding a dead one on the beach and deciding to explore its guts, example he used to introduce the fish to the essay at least in my mind), or the being apprenticed to a great man thing (good luck with that, truly graet thinkers are thin on the ground). So, we are left with the problem of figuring out how to remove our experiences from the packaging they come in. As Ned pointed out, drugs can work, but that is a very dangeroous course, and can complicate things worse than you want or just kill you.
The way I favor is reading as much as much stuff from as many different genres and disciplines as you can, and then consciencely trying to look at your day to day life through as many different mental filters as you can. Fasting and meditation also works, but I have never been good at the meditation part, and so does extreme sports, or fighting in the street, but those are dangerous also, I’m getting too old, and jail sucks.
The major point he is making I think is that you need to experience stuff like it is, not like it is supposed to be, and that follows from the idea that you should go into an ethnography without any expectations of what you will discover. There might be certain questions you ask, but don’t be thingking about the questions as you observe, just watch and experience the dynamics as they are, and most particularly do not try to judge any action until you can see how it fits into a particular environment. People like to judge things and categorize things–it gives us the illusion that we have some control over a situation–we are most comfortable when we know where we belong, and where everything around us belongs, but that is the perspective of ethnocentrism, and little can be learned if you are comfortable in your environment. The trick is to look at everything, every gesture, wink, word, move towards another, move away from another, sunset, dawn, car, plane, or knife as if you had never seen such a thing before. It is an impossible challenge, but with discipline and effort it is possible to take at least most things out of their packages and see them for the wonders that they are.
Do you remember the first time you fell in love? Remember how bright and colorful the world seemed to be? Remember that the annoying thing that always bothered you did not bother you the day you had your first kiss, or your first…something else? That is what Percy is talking about. The analogy of the Grand Canyon can be substituted for anything-anyone we consider truly beautiful. Lacan called this phenomenon the “gaze.” Powerful, inebriating, bewitching… For those of us who are blessed to have a child, or two, remember what it felt like to gaze into that newborn’s eyes for the first time?
Percy asks “how can man truly enrich his life? How can he/she truly, honestly enjoy and understand the surrounding world and all it has to offer? I would suggest that is how his article ties in to ethnography and teacher research; by the power of “the gaze” do we appreciate, absorb, blend in. We covet what we see…and, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
YES! The trick is to learn to see everything in that way, I have not succeded in the quest to do so, but I keep trying.