Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Culture Class: the meaning of money
Hola,
I forgot to write this down earlier and it is an interesting story:
I went with some classmates to the Plaza de Mayo to record the Madres de Plaza de Mayo marching, as they do every Thursday at 3. We wanted to get an interview with one of the mothers, but they told us that they don't do interviews. We went up to their book stand to ask them questions without the camera instead. After looking at all the trinkets and books that they were selling at this little table in the plaza, we starting asking about the organization. We didn't really know how to get started, we just wanted to know what they do and how their organization operates. I thought maybe refering to the things they were selling as a jumping off point to talking about the organization would be a good approach. As I interestedly looked at the things they were selling, I asked one of the mothers "So where do the proceeds from these items go, an organization?" The woman immediately put up a guard and got upset at my questions. She was mumbling and hard to understand but said "where does the money go? Where do you think?" Then she turned away from me and motioned for her friend to come closer to her and started whispering things about how insulting my question was or what not. I apologized and explained that I was just interested in what the organization does. She responded "What DOESNT the organization do, you want me to sum up 30 years of work in 5 minutes? Why don't you buy a book!" I apologized again and my friends and I slowly walked away.
I don't know all the reasons for this aggressive response (maybe she's tired of answering questions, upset that I asked her instead of doing my research before hand, or bitter because she has probably suffered a lot in life) but my friends and I did realize that one reason was probably the difference in meanings of the word "money." In my "capitalist culture" money = ability. I thought that asking about what happens to the money would be a good way to find out what actions are being taken by the organization. Are they sending it to other places in the world as donations? Are they giving history classes to the public? Are they sponsering talks and seminars?
Once I stepped out of my capitalist culture, I thought about what money means here in Argentina. Money in argentina is highly associated with corruption. If someone is questioning about how the money in an organization is spent, it probably gives the impression that one is suspicious of their operations. This connection is even more intense for these women because they lived through the incredibly corrupt dictatorship and then the Menem presidency which was sustained by corruption. Even today, corruption is a way of life in Argentine politics (as well as other parts of life, for example getting a doctors appt has a lot to do with your connections). In hindsight, I realize the perspective of this woman and how my question came off as offensive.
This is just one more example of the really important concept that words are more than there dictionary definitions. This sort of miscommunication happens all the time, whether between national cultures, local cultures or even family to family. The words we use often times take on these different connotations based on our experience. It's hard to understand the meaning of certain words for other people and we are even unaware of the associations we make with many word. Apparently I view money from a capitalist perspective, who knew.
Another quick example is the phrase "We'll see." Atleast to me, "We'll see" is something a mom says when she means "no" but doesn't want to say it right away. So basically We'll see = no. One time Tomas said this to me when I asked if he wanted to go somewhere or do something later. When he responded "We'll see" I immediately started challenging him and trying to convince him. He repeated the phrase, sort of confused, and then I realized he really meant we'll see, as is maybe yes maybe no, but we'll make the decision later based on the situation. Since Tomas never grew up with a mom who ingrained "We'll see" in his head as "no" it had a completely different meaning.
I don't know what to take away from all of this excpet that its good to ask lots of questions when communicating because there is a lot of content that is not explicitly stated in a conversation.
Interesting stuff.
Ciao,
Kati
I forgot to write this down earlier and it is an interesting story:
I went with some classmates to the Plaza de Mayo to record the Madres de Plaza de Mayo marching, as they do every Thursday at 3. We wanted to get an interview with one of the mothers, but they told us that they don't do interviews. We went up to their book stand to ask them questions without the camera instead. After looking at all the trinkets and books that they were selling at this little table in the plaza, we starting asking about the organization. We didn't really know how to get started, we just wanted to know what they do and how their organization operates. I thought maybe refering to the things they were selling as a jumping off point to talking about the organization would be a good approach. As I interestedly looked at the things they were selling, I asked one of the mothers "So where do the proceeds from these items go, an organization?" The woman immediately put up a guard and got upset at my questions. She was mumbling and hard to understand but said "where does the money go? Where do you think?" Then she turned away from me and motioned for her friend to come closer to her and started whispering things about how insulting my question was or what not. I apologized and explained that I was just interested in what the organization does. She responded "What DOESNT the organization do, you want me to sum up 30 years of work in 5 minutes? Why don't you buy a book!" I apologized again and my friends and I slowly walked away.
I don't know all the reasons for this aggressive response (maybe she's tired of answering questions, upset that I asked her instead of doing my research before hand, or bitter because she has probably suffered a lot in life) but my friends and I did realize that one reason was probably the difference in meanings of the word "money." In my "capitalist culture" money = ability. I thought that asking about what happens to the money would be a good way to find out what actions are being taken by the organization. Are they sending it to other places in the world as donations? Are they giving history classes to the public? Are they sponsering talks and seminars?
Once I stepped out of my capitalist culture, I thought about what money means here in Argentina. Money in argentina is highly associated with corruption. If someone is questioning about how the money in an organization is spent, it probably gives the impression that one is suspicious of their operations. This connection is even more intense for these women because they lived through the incredibly corrupt dictatorship and then the Menem presidency which was sustained by corruption. Even today, corruption is a way of life in Argentine politics (as well as other parts of life, for example getting a doctors appt has a lot to do with your connections). In hindsight, I realize the perspective of this woman and how my question came off as offensive.
This is just one more example of the really important concept that words are more than there dictionary definitions. This sort of miscommunication happens all the time, whether between national cultures, local cultures or even family to family. The words we use often times take on these different connotations based on our experience. It's hard to understand the meaning of certain words for other people and we are even unaware of the associations we make with many word. Apparently I view money from a capitalist perspective, who knew.
Another quick example is the phrase "We'll see." Atleast to me, "We'll see" is something a mom says when she means "no" but doesn't want to say it right away. So basically We'll see = no. One time Tomas said this to me when I asked if he wanted to go somewhere or do something later. When he responded "We'll see" I immediately started challenging him and trying to convince him. He repeated the phrase, sort of confused, and then I realized he really meant we'll see, as is maybe yes maybe no, but we'll make the decision later based on the situation. Since Tomas never grew up with a mom who ingrained "We'll see" in his head as "no" it had a completely different meaning.
I don't know what to take away from all of this excpet that its good to ask lots of questions when communicating because there is a lot of content that is not explicitly stated in a conversation.
Interesting stuff.
Ciao,
Kati
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Boliche
Hola,
Last weekend I went to my first Boliche. There I am, pictured above, with Ale, Pau y Carla. Boliches are what this city is known for and it took me 3 months to get to one, but I`m glad. I'm glad because before I wasn't feeling comfortable about going because I didn't have a good group to go with. I didn't let my self just hang out with big groups of Americans and so I ended spending most of my time with small groups of 2 or 3 friends. Sometimes we would meet up with bigger groups but I wouldn't know any of them and they were usually all guys so I didnt feel
comfortable going with them either (since I hear the argentinians are a little aggressive). Finally, on friday, some girls from the soccer team said they were going to a boliche and invited me to come along, so I went. We had a blaaaaaast. When we first got there, things were just getting started. Then, suddenly a huge group of people poured in and from then on it was non-stop dancing till 5 in the morning. The time zoomed by and we were all just having a good time. There were a few pairs of couples dancing more intimately but for the most part it was just a bunch of groups of friends there. There were just as many girls dancing as guys, and the guys were even dancing by themselves! That was the striking difference from the US becuase you almost never see a group of guys dancing together without feeling awkward. I guess thats cause their dancing doesn't necessarily mean touching each other and rubbin up on each other. I left at 5:30 am feeling dead tired but wanting to go again the next day.
In the end, I didn't go again becuase I got sick :( I'm still fighting off the cold now, but hopefully I'll be recuperated for this weekend! I love dancin till your body is sore the next day!
Hasta luego,
Kati
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Stress update
I already have 2 sections of the paper written :) and in less than an hour!
And it wasn't even difficult to write because I had a realization in the shower the other day about the perspectives of the two texts I'm writing about so I've just been vigorously pouring it out onto paper and reworking it to so that it sounds right. woop woop.
And it wasn't even difficult to write because I had a realization in the shower the other day about the perspectives of the two texts I'm writing about so I've just been vigorously pouring it out onto paper and reworking it to so that it sounds right. woop woop.
Stress
Hola a todos,
Something I really need to work on: not stressing myself out. Logically I know that its not worth it to get stressed out about things; as long as you do the best you can, whatever you produce is going to be all anyone can reasonably expect. I need to somehow turn this logical statement that I can say and undertand, into the way I act.
For example: In my class in the UBA (Argentine University) I am in way over my head. I am in the class with people finishing their majors in argentina history/historiography, when I've taking only 1 college level history class before in my life and had to look up historiography on wikipedia a week into the class... But besides that, my teacher is amazing. She is completely understanding of my situation, doens't want me to be stressed over my final project, wants me to work on something interesting and something that is going to be useful to me in terms of my interests and studies. So I couldn't ask for a better situation in that regard.
So why do I get so stressed out about this project?
1) First I think its because I'm doing this in Spanish and I don't have a good idea of my potential in Spanish. I don't know how long it takes me to read and fully understand complicated historical texts, to plan out a complex historiographical paper, or write a paper. Even though I a good 3 weeks to work, I guess I'm slightly worried that it won't be enough time to get this done. But who knows.
2) I feel like I have to say it all. I realized that I do this a lot: If I have a task, I feel like I have to exhaust the topic before I can focus on the part that I am going to focus on. For example, right now I'm writing about caracteristics of a historical text and I feel like I have to understand everything the text is saying before I can start pulling out characteristics. I've learned that this is a needless step. I can find 3 or 4 characterstics of the text, without understanding every complicated economic nuance or political change and still have a good thesis and paper. Obviously it would be ideal to understand everything in the text, but for the sake of sanity its not necessary at all. Therefore, I think I need to change from strategy for approaching projects such as this. Instead of going into a project with the mentalilty that I need to read everything and undrestand everything, I should set myself more realistic goals about what I am going to analyze and how. (This actually relates alot to historiography because historians can't take into account EVERY detail about the event they are explaining, they have to "blindar" or wall off what their focus is and what there sources are).
3) The other reason I feel stressed is because I don't put enough enfasis on the thinking part of the process. I feel that in order to make progress, I need to be reading, looking up a word, or finding more sources or texts, but the reality is that sometimes what's missing is just some good old brain work. One day I spent hours reading and trying to make progress on the paper, but then I go for a run or take a shower and suddenly I realize how two things relate or a new way of looking at the concepts I'm reading about. Recently I've been comparing two texts and I can be reading and picking apart the texts trying to find differences, but with just a few minutes of looking at the ceiling and thinking, I'm able to articulate so much better that important differences between the texts. My teacher always refers to this in class by saying "I'd rather have you spend 5 hours working for this class, reading for 2, thinking for 3, than have you spend 5 hours just reading" It makes us think about how to spend our time studying and how to get the most out of it. I think sometimes I get scared of this part because it doesn' always produce results in which case there is a small fear that I might spend all this time and not have anything from it. But on the other hand, the most innovative and worthy ideas won't come out of the text that is already written. Those ideas will have to come from a pumpin brain (is that gross? I don't mean it to be).
In the end, I'm in a great position because no one knows my capabilities in Spanish, so I can't really be held to any standard. I'm just going to do my best and that's that. I hope that with the next big project I get in life I will be able to avoid feeling such stress.
Hasta luego,
Kati
Something I really need to work on: not stressing myself out. Logically I know that its not worth it to get stressed out about things; as long as you do the best you can, whatever you produce is going to be all anyone can reasonably expect. I need to somehow turn this logical statement that I can say and undertand, into the way I act.
For example: In my class in the UBA (Argentine University) I am in way over my head. I am in the class with people finishing their majors in argentina history/historiography, when I've taking only 1 college level history class before in my life and had to look up historiography on wikipedia a week into the class... But besides that, my teacher is amazing. She is completely understanding of my situation, doens't want me to be stressed over my final project, wants me to work on something interesting and something that is going to be useful to me in terms of my interests and studies. So I couldn't ask for a better situation in that regard.
So why do I get so stressed out about this project?
1) First I think its because I'm doing this in Spanish and I don't have a good idea of my potential in Spanish. I don't know how long it takes me to read and fully understand complicated historical texts, to plan out a complex historiographical paper, or write a paper. Even though I a good 3 weeks to work, I guess I'm slightly worried that it won't be enough time to get this done. But who knows.
2) I feel like I have to say it all. I realized that I do this a lot: If I have a task, I feel like I have to exhaust the topic before I can focus on the part that I am going to focus on. For example, right now I'm writing about caracteristics of a historical text and I feel like I have to understand everything the text is saying before I can start pulling out characteristics. I've learned that this is a needless step. I can find 3 or 4 characterstics of the text, without understanding every complicated economic nuance or political change and still have a good thesis and paper. Obviously it would be ideal to understand everything in the text, but for the sake of sanity its not necessary at all. Therefore, I think I need to change from strategy for approaching projects such as this. Instead of going into a project with the mentalilty that I need to read everything and undrestand everything, I should set myself more realistic goals about what I am going to analyze and how. (This actually relates alot to historiography because historians can't take into account EVERY detail about the event they are explaining, they have to "blindar" or wall off what their focus is and what there sources are).
3) The other reason I feel stressed is because I don't put enough enfasis on the thinking part of the process. I feel that in order to make progress, I need to be reading, looking up a word, or finding more sources or texts, but the reality is that sometimes what's missing is just some good old brain work. One day I spent hours reading and trying to make progress on the paper, but then I go for a run or take a shower and suddenly I realize how two things relate or a new way of looking at the concepts I'm reading about. Recently I've been comparing two texts and I can be reading and picking apart the texts trying to find differences, but with just a few minutes of looking at the ceiling and thinking, I'm able to articulate so much better that important differences between the texts. My teacher always refers to this in class by saying "I'd rather have you spend 5 hours working for this class, reading for 2, thinking for 3, than have you spend 5 hours just reading" It makes us think about how to spend our time studying and how to get the most out of it. I think sometimes I get scared of this part because it doesn' always produce results in which case there is a small fear that I might spend all this time and not have anything from it. But on the other hand, the most innovative and worthy ideas won't come out of the text that is already written. Those ideas will have to come from a pumpin brain (is that gross? I don't mean it to be).
In the end, I'm in a great position because no one knows my capabilities in Spanish, so I can't really be held to any standard. I'm just going to do my best and that's that. I hope that with the next big project I get in life I will be able to avoid feeling such stress.
Hasta luego,
Kati
Friday, June 5, 2009
Rules
Hola,
Check out my room! It's a little messy at this moment... We call it my "bulín" thats slang for "little personal space." Actually I don't know how to say that well in english.
So I've already talked about rules in one other blog entry; I mentioned how compliance with rules is crucial for a society to operate well (assuming the rules they are complying with are legit). For whatever reason, it seems that people in the US are generally conscious of rules whereas here in Argentina, there are a bunch of laws that no one knows about and/or follows.
Now I am going to add another observation to the mix. I was sitting in my class in la Universidad de Buenos Aires, thinking about the pictures I wanted to take of the concrete walls covered with bold angry political posters in order to remember the "hippy" atmosphere in UBA. (It's very hard to stay attentive in a 4 HOUR class in a foreign language...) Then I started looking around at all the other students in my class. There is such a large range in my class, from 21 year-olds (me, I think im the youngest) - 70 something year-olds, from sociologist to teacher to unemployed student. It makes me think about how uniform my US classes are in terms of the type of students. If someone older than 24 were enrolled in Lafayette the first question would be "what went wrong?"
I think in my culture (be it bethesda, lafayette, private universities, i don't know) there is too much pressure to conform to the norm, which in a certain sense is a rule. Maybe its more of a rule of thumb:
a general or approximate principle, procedure, or rule based on experience or practice, as opposed to a specific, scientific calculation or estimate.
People go to school until they are 18, then if they have the resources and inteligence, they should go to college for 4 years, postgraduate school and begin there careers. The problem with fitting everyone in a structure is that everyone is different! Things happen, good or bad, and we can't meet these "expectations" that are "ideal." Maybe I was going to go to gradschool but I got an offer to do something meaningful in Tibet or Quatar. Am I worse off because I didn't reach the gradschool level? Maybe I was going to go to college but I got struck with bad luck and had to drop out, should I be looked down upon because I can't continue in the normal "right" path of life.
I get the feeling from my interactions with people here that there aren't as many expectations for people to follow the same path. There are women who are close to finishing their college degree and then get pregnant and leave (my host sister). Hey, if thats what they want at that time, and they are going ot be full time moms for life, then who am I to look down on their decision. If someone for whatever reason doesn't make it to college until they are 70 something, or decide to go back when they are 70 something, then good for them for doing it when they can. If someone has to work for 2 years flipping burgers before they can afford to go to the best university, then they shouldnt be looked down on for being 26 in a college class. They didn't mess up, they did well and they should be embarrased. There are good things about structure, but I think to a certain extreme it is very claustrophobic and creates unnecessary pressure to follow whats "the best" even though "the best" can be very different from individual to individual.
These are still thoughts in process... I'll finish with something a little more concrete: An example of how the rules in the US can reach ABSURD extremes is the fact that in some school somewhere in the US they are now limiting the length of hugs in the hallways in a highschool (according to a friend who read this in NYT). Someone should tell the administrators that the kids here KISS each other EVERYTIME they greet. Limiting hugs? Give me a break, thats waaaaaaaay too much.
Hasta luego,
Kati
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