Ethnography- An Experience in Europe

I did this essay for a school assignment.

It is an ethnography. If you want to know what that is, look it up. It basically tells people about some aspect of your life, but in a cultural and a bit more literary sense.

The format of the paper is in an interview, which my peers recommended I do while we were reviewing our papers in class.

It is long. Enjoy.

Home is where…(?)

Inquirer: Where are you from?

Me: That is not an easily answerable question, unfortunately. As an individual who was raised as an American, but in a foreign country, I apparently belong to a group of individuals known as “Third Culture Kids,” or TCKs. The term was first coined by John and Ruth Useem, American researchers who lived in India for some time. Oftentimes when I tell people “where I am from,” they ask if my dad works for the military. The majority of my peers have at least one friend or cousin or acquaintance that lives in a distant land. Almost always that person is referred to as a “military brat.” Personally, I’m not sure how I feel about this term. Illogically, I get somewhat defensive when people say “military brat,” but in defense of my friends. If I were a military brat, I don’t think I would mind the term. I could get used to being called a “diplobrat,” but only if it didn’t sound phonetically gross and remind me of a sausage-shaped dinosaur.

...

Inquirer: I bet you guys visited a lot of cool places, huh?

Me: Despite the random nature of his schedule, he absolutely loved visiting places and exploring large cities with old castles and stuff, both with and without us. The “stuff” I so affectionately refer to were generally copied and pasted cathedrals, broken bits of ancient wall, or melancholy towns sprinkled about Europe that badly needed a large economic pick-me-up. My two brothers and I would go on “adventures” with my dad to these different locales. The buildings and architecture really did little to spark my interest. However, I was acutely aware of the different natures of the people and auras in the different places we visited. Oftentimes they were somber and empty; in my estimation, both the people and locations of Europe share these traits to some degree. However, much of that may have been a projection of my own feelings onto their own actions, body language, and facial expressions.

            Nonetheless, one memory that clings vividly to my mind was the small village of Maus in northwestern Spain. My father and I were visiting the major cities in Spain, but were also going on smaller byways to find dolmens. Dolmens are the ancient stones that can be found in the Celtic regions of European countries, including Ireland, Spain and Portugal, England and Wales, and France. Inexplicably enough, they also appear in South Korea, North Africa, Jordan (in the Middle East), and India. We were driving in our modern, blue rental-car, searching for these arcane and widespread relics, thought to be the tombs of ancient dignitaries. The day was gray, cloudy, and imbued with a certain Atlantic calm-before-the-storm feel. My dad thought he knew where we were headed, but it turned out we were lost.          

            We ended up far from any major city, in a small, run-down, mucky hamlet. There was mud and cat feces mixed indiscriminately around the corners of each dwelling. Sulking, laying dogs eyed the car, while alert-but-lazy cats sauntered along the old walls between buildings. Finally, my dad spotted an old lady in her garden, and began to attempt a conversation. Her very limited Spanish met with my dad’s very formal past-knowledge of Spanish in a drawn-out, difficult conversation. As they spoke, I shot quick glances into her eyes. They were dull. The sky was dull. Her cabbage garden was null. The town was void. A small, illogical, pulling panic grasped hold of me for a moment. No, this isn’t my life. I remembered how silly that panic was.

             The next emotion to hit me was a sort of sadness and devastation; I felt sorry for the old woman who lived surrounded by mud and ivy growing on her wall and what seemed to me a lack of will to live. It was amazing to me that the same panic did not infect her daily and drive her to insanity. Then, my mind realized that this was all she knew; this old woman, and who and what she represented, knew nothing other than the confines of her small village. Perhaps she had visited a son or a daughter in the Big City. Perhaps she felt the same panic and dread in the city as I felt in what I thought was a sucking abyss of a town: a dark, empty hell of intellect and activity. She was comfortable here, however. I no longer doubted that.

            The final two emotions, simultaneously felt, were both admiration and confusion. How could she be so comfortable? It was amazing to me that she did not need something more than cabbages and cold stone walls. That she could tolerate the squalid conditions of the town, be entirely happy, and not hope for something more was an idea so fundamentally foreign to me. As we drove out of the village on small, dirt roads, I felt a strange appreciation for a woman like that. I recalled that when I peered at her she had actually been smiling. That she was able to withstand such conditions, and most likely be happier than myself, both befuddled me and gave me a strange, abstract sense of gratitude: gratitude for modern luxury and the comfort it brings to me, and gratitude to her for her sad, yet admirable abject contentment. She seemed happy where she was. I was happy where I was. She was at home there, I was at home here. The imbalance that had momentarily thrown me off had been restored.

Inquirer: So if you had to choose one place that you call home, where would it be?

Me: Firstly, I don’t think of home as a place. It is not possible for me to pinpoint a single location of origin. If I tell people I am from Virginia, I feel like I’m lying; besides being born in the state, I only lived there for 4 years when I was a child. I have fond memories of the growing up there—the stream with crawfish close to our house, the stray cat my dad threw over our fence, and my very first days of nervous schoolhood with my best friend Mary, who helped soothe my juvenile angst—however, the location of Virginia or the town house we lived in can’t be called home for me.

 I’m not from Germany, really, even though that is where I spent the most numerical years to date.  I felt at home in South Korea, but I think that was just the experiences and people I felt attached to. So location-wise, I don’t feel rooted. My parents have purchased a house in Sandy, but I think that that will never be my “home.” Even after visiting my relatives here almost every summer growing up, I don’t feel that dropping a red pin on northern Utah would be an accurate reflection of my home. If I remain in Utah, perhaps in a couple of years I can say, “I’m from Utah.” However, I don’t think of myself as a “Utahn,” and I have doubts as to if I ever shall.

I play a strategy game called Supreme Commander, which is a sort of real-time, advanced chess. Next to each player’s name there is a national flag. Instead of a flag next to my own name, there is just blank, yellowish-green square. Whatever system is used, it cannot read my IP address and identify it as being in the United States; therefore, it just displays a generic fill-in for something that is lacking. I feel that this mistake is more correct than my erroneous, but bureaucratically-correct, passport. However, my home is only lacking geographically.

When defining the term “home,” I believe it would be most accurate to say that to me, at least, “home” is where I am most comfortable. When thinking back on my memories of the small village of Maus, I feel that that feeling is as far from home as I could have ever been. The hotel across from my school where my very closest friends ate lunch, created memories, spun up wild ideas and laughed, smiled, and felt platonic love for one another, is home for me. Home, for me, is also the airports around the world, which remind me of a blood-line of connections from place to place, so that a person is free to fly and explore. I am comfortable with those feelings. Home is even my own mind, where I feel a thin resentment at being dragged to random, boring castles with my dad. Home is a classroom, where I have been taking in bounteous fruits of knowledge for almost two decades. Home, essentially, is not where the heart is. Home is where the habit is.