Defamiliarising normal

In this discussion, share your own reflections and comment on at least one peer’s post. You can earn an extra point by submitting your original post no later than Monday at 11:59PM.

What was Franny Choi describing in her poem “Night in the Museum of Human History?”

What objects would be displayed in the Museum of Human History to represent this phenomenon?

How does it feel to consider this phenomenon as part of the past?

What else might you want to find one day relegated to the past in a Museum of Human History?

What role might research play in making it possible to create a new exhibit on that topic you would like to see in the Museum of Human History, which you described in your response to Q4)? Please address the possible roles of research in advocacy and social change, the possible roles of research in generating content for the exhibit, or both.

Compose a poem or other type of representation of it – or describe what life is like in the utopian present by responding to this prompt: In ancient U.S. society (or any other place), ______________.

Describe something that you take for granted as “normal,” but that people who are outsiders might not “get” or understand.

Why do I/we do the things we do the way we do them? Why do I/we think this way about that topic/issue/circumstance/process?

I invite you to take these historical and anthropological ways of looking at the world with you beyond our classroom.

all info you need below

What is normal?

Most of us assume that what we do, and how we do what we do, is not only “normal,” but also it is the right way to do or to be. We often take for granted the rights, rules, or rituals weve been socialized into. Indeed, we develop this tacit knowledge because we belong to a particular place, time, and people. 

I grew up, for example, assuming that riding a bus to school was normal. I took a bus to school, and so did everyone else I knew. I also was raised in a Jewish family. In our town, Jewish holidays were not incorporated into the school calendar, or even well-known among the administrators and teachers. In contrast, “normal holidays,” so to speak, or those associated with dominant members of society, namely, a certain set of Christian holidays, were reflected in the rhythm of the school year. So, during multiple points throughout the school year, my mom wrote me a note to circulate among my teachers, explaining why I was missing this day or those days, and I would collect the work I had missed, and submit make-up homework. This was not a significant hardship for me, but it taught me at an early age that what some people consider to be normal is not universally shared.

Through this experience as a child, I learned both the norms of my own culture as well as those associated with the larger world in which I lived. People who live in the social margins are adept at such layers of knowing and perspective taking. Those of us who have moved from one place to another (city, state, or country), have studied abroad, have read books or watched movies located elsewhere or amongst people we are unfamiliar with, also may be adept at recognizing the co-existence of multiple ways of being, or may be practiced in the art of perspective taking.

Pragmatically, those who live in the center or people unaccustomed to viewing themselves as different from the perspective of others, tend to not need to learn about those at the margins, and may not often have the chance to question their way of being. This can be a comfortable place to exist, where you are not challenged to learn new ways of being, or even question how things are. If you assume that your way of being or doing things is the only or right way, you might experience a sense of dissonance when you leave that comfort zone, whether through travel, conversation, a university course, or some other circumstance.

How might this dynamic of being comfortable or challenged affect decisions that policy makers determine?

Help yourself notice that not everything you take for granted as normal is necessarily the only or better way of being or doing. One way to do this is to make the familiar strange. See yourself from the perspective of an outsider. Making the familiar strange, and making the strange familiar are skills you can cultivate, just as I did when I studied anthropology as an undergraduate and graduate student. To see how this works, listen to (9:00) or read this brief story from NPR’s Planet Money show called Kit Kat, Puppies, And Masks: Anthro-Vision, which has anthropologist Gillian Tett drawing on her new book Anthro-Vision to deconstruct the meaning and place of one of my favorite candy bars. Using Tett’s framework, what have you done to mark this liminal moment? What is the culture of mask-wearing in your family, neighborhood, state, or country?

Now, take something that seems normal and unremarkable to you (e.g. brushing your teeth, cutting in line, getting groceries at a food bank, needing to keep part of who you are secret, voting, feeling safe when home, etc.). When do you notice yourself acting as if you are on auto-pilot? What do you do without thinking of how to do it, or without questioning why you are doing it? The “thing” could be a ritual, a custom, a habit, an object, a place, an event, a hobby, a feeling or attitude, etc.

Reflect on and replay this “thing” in your mind. Reenact it, or think about how you relate to it or engage in it in real life, so that you will be able to notice all of the thing’s constituent purposes, parts, steps, meanings, effects, etc. What is the tacit knowledge you possess that you take for granted, which you never notice, question, or think about? 

Write out some notes or sketch a drawing to capture as many details as possible using all of your senses. Anticipate that someone from another planet may keep asking why? in a way that indicates they do not understand what you do or why you do it. Try to peel away layers of tacit knowledge that you possess in order to explain it in a way that someone who has never seen it or experienced it before would understand it at least at its most basic level. Do this as concretely and comprehensively as possible.

While you prepare to do this activity, enjoy this humorous look at what others (people who live outside the U.S., and learn about us via our popular culture such as TV, movies, songs, etc.) name as what they think is normal U.S. behavior.

Ultimately, the goal is to take something that is awfully known or familiar to you and share it with an audience who has no idea or no experience at all, no major reference point, about it. You just need to know enough about whatever it is to explain it and translate it. Try to see how strange or unusual this way of life, this way of doing something, might appear to someone unfamiliar with it. Can you make the familiar strange? Try it out with a classmate or someone not taking this course so that you can practice explaining why you do things the way you do.

Insider knowledge is valuable

As a member of society, understanding local rights, rules, and rituals comes in handy. How many of you are first-generation college students? How did you learn what it meant to be a college student? How to navigate the online or in-person campus? Did anyone help you ascertain unspoken norms of interaction? Who do you turn to discern nuances or subtleties when it comes to practices such as course registration, assignment deadlines, or how to ask for a letter of recommendation? How do you develop this “cultural capital,” or implicit insider knowledge about how things work, which others seem to possess effortlessly? 

You may have noticed that I explained in our Syllabus what the term “office hours” means. Did you also notice that I renamed them to “student hours?” This is just one way I try to make explicit the wide range of insider knowledge required to succeed in college.

As social researchers, it is upon us to be aware of the assumptions we carry about what constitutes “normal” or normative behavior. This is because we study human attitudes and behaviors that may not align with our own values or practices. Typically, we question other peoples norms or ways of living when they clash with or simply vary from our own. Researchers are people, too, and so that gap or clash can be accompanied by judgment that informs our data collection and analysis. Analyzing your own habits or normative behavior exercises your critical thinking muscles so that you can examine the world using a simultaneously open and skeptical mind. Taking time to consider what you think is “normal” also provides you some insight into what social researchers do: we seek to understand society in all of its variation.

How things are versus how things ought to be

Transforming our tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge by making the familiar strange is one way to adopt a new perspective on what we take for granted as normal. As justice studies researchers we not only want to recognize our own and understand other people’s insider knowledge, we also study, theorize about, and advocate for decreasing the gap between how things are and how we think they ought to be. At the same time, we may not all share the same vision for how the world ought to be, and even if we do share that vision, we may not agree on the pathway to get there. 

I invite you to envision a future where an urgent social problem you care about has been eradicated. The only way residents in the future can learn about that issue is to visit an exhibit about it hosted by the Museum of Human History. Such a visit is a more somber examination of what we take for granted as normal: it’s just the way things are, or used to be. The vantage point of “used to be normal” is outlined in a poem entitled “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History.” You may listen to Franny Choi presenting her poem and/or read it yourself below. When you are ready, go ahead and complete Assignment 1.1 Defamiliarizing “normal.”

Franny Choi Field Trip to the Museum of Human History, by Franny Choi

 

FIELD TRIP TO THE MUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY

by Franny Choi

 

Everyone had been talking about the new exhibit,

recently unearthed artifacts from a time

 

no living hands remember. What twelve year old

doesnt love a good scary story? Doesnt thrill

 

at rumors of her own darkness whispering

from the canyon? We shuffled in the dim light

 

and gaped at the secrets buried

in clay, reborn as warning signs:

 

a nightstick, so called for its use

in extinguishing the lights in ones eyes.

 

A machine used for scanning fingerprints

like cattle ears, grain shipments. We shuddered,

 

shoved our fingers in our pockets, acted tough.

Pretended not to listen as the guide said,

 

Ancient American society was built on competition

and maintained through domination and control.

 

In place of modern-day accountability practices,

the institution known as police kept order

 

using intimidation, punishment, and force.

We pressed our noses to the glass,

 

strained to imagine strangers running into our homes,

pointing guns in our faces because wed hoarded

 

too much of the wrong kind of property.

Jadera asked something about redistribution

 

and the guide spoke of safes, evidence rooms,

more profit. Marian asked about raiding the rich,

 

and the guide said, In America, there were no greater

protections from police than wealth and whiteness.

 

Finally, Zaki asked what we were all wondering:

But what if you didnt want to?

 

and the walls snickered and said, steel,

padlock, stripsearch, hardstop.

 

Dry-mouthed, we came upon a contraption

of chain and bolt, an ancient torture instrument

 

the guide called handcuffs. We stared

at the diagrams and almost felt the cold metal

 

licking our wrists, almost tasted dirt,

almost heard the siren and slammed door,

 

the cold-blooded click of the cocked-back pistol,

and our palms were slick with some old recognition,

 

as if in some forgotten dream we did live this way,

in submission, in fear, assuming positions

 

of power were earned, or at least carved in steel,

that they couldnt be torn down like musty curtains,

 

an old house cleared of its dust and obsolete artifacts.

We threw open the doors to the museum,

 

shedding its nightmares on the marble steps,

and bounded into the sun, toward the school buses

 

or toward home, or the forests, or the fields,

or wherever our good legs could roam.

 

Franny Choi 2015