Wednesday

We talked about perceptions of the self tonight in my class..... my one class of the semester that I am taking. One class. One time a week. Three hours. Not so bad. Last semester - sometimes it seemed bad. But move it over to middle-of-the-week-day, and somehow that extra-buffer-space-acting-Tuesday makes all the difference. Ahhhhh, Tuesday.

Not to mention that the chairs in the new classroom don't resemble the bottom half of a plastic kiddie slide.

So, we talked about different theories on the idea of the "self" and the "person" today. One thinker, Michelle Rosaldo, challenged the dualistic thinking of Western culture and said, really, that the distinction isn't really so distinct as we might think - between the public persona and the inner self. In her observations of the Ilongot peoples of Indonesia she saw that for them, the heart and the actions of a person flow as one - they are not separate. These people also don't have the same ideas about anger as the Freudian-soaked repression theories of Western culture. Ilongots feel anger, but can stop this anger when payment is made by the offender. One such way they would deal with their anger and move on from it was taking heads from other villages. Yeah, people heads.

The other thinker, Hollan, argued against the "cultural model" as being completely true to what everyone in a culture experiences, or views themself. There are degrees, within a culture, of how much like the typical cultural idea of self one has taken on. We Westerners are, perhaps, not so austerely Western as we might think

Bible study also started up again this week. We looked at 1 Peter 1 and it talked about holiness and about inheritance, about the corruptible and incorruptible, and about salvation. I wonder what the Ilongots would think about it.... they did, after all, in large number convert to Christianity. They were drawn to it as a way to deal with anger and fill the hole left in their cultural ways once head hunting was out-lawed.....

I'm glad I've never felt the need to head-hunt - although the idea that head-hunting or receiving payment can immediately turn off anger seems almost like a too-good-to-be-true fix-all for anger issues - but am still pondering what my own experience of the self is, what I consider my "self" to be, and how that fits into the larger picture of my culture and my own experiences. I think that a life of action that flows out of the heart smacks a good deal of integrity... at least from the limited, culturally-biased viewpoint of my own self.....