A Justice Site
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Created: October 11, 2003
Latest Update: October 11, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Changing Cultures, Changing Lives
Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, October 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.
We spend so little time in our climate of learning sharing deeply with others our lived experiences and their relationship to the world we live in today, that I was astounded when I finally managed to get my e-mail and found this gem waiting from Hao Tran. His opening reminder of Anne Peters, a young Professor of Sociology and a community activist and elected city official, brought back a flood of memories. Alan Ryave is the guardian of those memories in our department, and I know that he would be delighted to sit down with you and talk about Anne, Hao Tran. It will give both of them great pleasure to know that her work reached so far and counted for so much.On Wednesday, October 8, 2003, Hao Tran, CSUDH, graciously resent the e-mail my ISP had sent to outer space:
Information about Anne Peters interests me very much. Her contribution is so great. As an immigrant in this country in the advanced years of my adulthood, I do not know what I can do to continue her goals. However, this is a good occasion for me to look back on my life related to SOCIOLOGY, the branch of science that I loved a longtime ago. I have had my first bachelor's degree in Sociology since 1973 in Vietnam. Then historical circumstances in my native country somehow separated me from the world of the sociological scholar . Fortunately, as a political refugee, I came finally to the United States, where I could have an opportunity to fulfill my goal and dream.
I felt attracted to Sociology since my High School years. The person who initiated me to this branch of science was my principal who was a doctor in sociology. At the threshold of higher education, while most my high school classmates still were indecisive, I chose Sociology without any hesitation, although it was a very young science in Vietnam. During all four years of my university life, I was always ranked the first of my sociology class. Finally, in 1973, I received my Bachelor in Sociology (with an equivalence of Magna Cum Laude mention) from Van Hanh University, Saigon - South Vietnam. This allowed me to dream of continuing my higher education in France or the United States and to become a doctor in sociology some day. Unfortunately, my beautiful dream was cut with the fall of Saigon in 1975.
After 1975, I worked at raising swine on a farm for almost fifteen years. First of all, I was "very lucky" to find a job as a manual worker on that farm, because my family had had a "strong relationship with the regime of South Vietnam. It was the way to survive. However, sociology still attracted me. I used my savings to buy used sociology books that I could find, published in French or English. I did this without any hope that I could continue my higher education in sociology. But I am always sure that knowledge about sociology is useful.
My darkest years ended in 1996, when I could come into the United States as a political refugee with my family. A part of my old dream became reality: to study sociology at an American university. At the first opportunity, I enrolled at Long Beach Community College with major in Sociology, again without any hesitation. In 2000, I got my AA degree with honor and distinction. I then chose to transfer to CSU Dominguez Hills because I saw a possible masters degree in Sociology there. In 2003, I got BA in Sociology with honor (Magna Cum Laude). So, I can continue my graduate degree.
I love Sociology, not because it helps me to make a lot of money, but because I could help a lot of people with my knowledge about different cultures. During my university years in the USA, I used to hang around and act as a counselor for groups of Vietnamese youth. Among them were included a lot of Vietnamese American students at UC Irvine. These youngsters speak English more fluently than they do the Vietnamese language. However, they grew up mostly in families strongly influenced by Vietnamese culture. There are a lot of inside struggles for them and their parents. My school years in Sociology in Vietnam and then in USA have become useful for my fellow country people of different generations.
Not only my fellow country people benefit from my knowledge in sociology, but my coworkers gain something too. Recently, I had occasion to explain to my coworker, who is Chinese American, how cultural differences could affect people's behaviors, because she is angry with her husband, who is a second-generation immigrant from Laos.
My goal does not stop there. I hope some day I could teach Sociology at the University level, especially where there is lack of sociology professors, as in my native country. During my university years in Vietnam, there were not a lot of doctors in sociology for all universities of Vietnam. Their fate after 1975 was not very bright. Their role as sociologists ended. There was only one way to explain social phenomena: the way directed by the Communist Party! It would be luck if such explication were based on the conflict theory stated by Karl Marx. I hope that my native country will have shortly a brighter future; then I could contribute to rebuild the Science of Sociology for future Vietnamese generations.
How great is my joy when I meet someone who shares my dream: Recently, I met again a Vietnamese American student at UC Irvine, to whom I gave some advice before. She tells me that her goal is to get a PhD in Sociology, because she knew that "IT HELPS!" I hope more and more Vietnamese American students will engage in SOCIOLOGY.
On Saturday, October 11, 2003, jeanne responded:
Hao Tran, my ignorance in dealing with Eastern cultures is so appalling that I still don't know if it is appropriate and how to address you by a single name. I have had this problem with Dang Cao for years, and we have never resolved it to a point where I am comfortable with it. The reason for the single name is that it relates to the Goffman concept of back stage and front stage. Let me explain briefly for those of you who haven't yet had the opportunity to read Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.Goffman takes the dramaturgical position so often associated with Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players on it." Goffman actually analyzes human behavior in terms of life consisting of roles and parts and how we play them out and who is privy to what. In this schema the actors who are attempting to create a reality that the audience is expected to buy into are playing in the front stage. That means that they maintain their role; they recognize each other as insiders in the virtual reality to be presented; and the audience is excluded from their private innuendos and remarks.
Meanwhile, when the actors are outside the presence of the audience, they are in their back stage. They speak openly their comments about the reallity of their inner world, from which the audience is excluded. They let heir hair down, so to speak. They refer to the audience as a group of Others whom they are willing to persuade of their virtual reality, but whom they don't let in to the reality of their back stage area.
Goffman's example in the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was the scene in a restaurant where the customers were the audience and the workers were the actors.
My reason for refusing titles, and using first names, in our cultural tradition, is to welcome you into my backstage. I don't want to fool you with a virtual reality in which I control the interactions and exclude you from decision-making. I don't want a monologic non-answerable climate of learning. But there are problems in creating this different climate. For one thing, as we have discussed, answerability is neither a gift from me to you nor an epiphany. Answerability, as I understand the concept from Bakhtin through Nielsen, is a gift that each of us has, the ability to understand that to my every utterance an Other may have an answer, and that we, me and the Other, have between us the aesthetic possibility of creating an interrelationship that will alter our community through the properties we bring to and give to that interrelationship.
What I can do is ask you to call me Jeanne, which you have done, and for which I thank you. What I then must do is to offer you enough respect and gentleness and sincerity that you trust that I have indeed welcomed you into my backspace. That means that I must be transparent enough, trust you enough, to make myself vulnerable to your answers. That is a frightening prospect for both of us. But it is the only way that I see, as Nielsen has explained it for Bakhtin, for aesthetic process to enter into the creation of community in which all are heard in good faith. Because it is frightening to all who would engage in this aesthetic process, we must not send out raucous cheerleaders inviting others in, when those Others are not yet sure just how far they can trust and how vulnerable they are willing to be.
Your personal statement, Hao Tran, is a beautiful invitation to enter your world. I accept. And I hope that many of us will find the courage to accept. Day by day, I am learning something that Denice Roberts said in Agencies class last Thursday, "This university talks about diversity as the diversity of skin color. They are wrong. Our diversity is remarkable, and covers a world of lived experience." Hao Tran, your personal statement is the best evidence I could offer in support of Denice's statement. And I remain in awe of the diversity in my classes this Spring. Tired, very tired, but still in awe.
love and peace, jeanne
Discussion Questions
Backstage/Frontstage
Consider the diversity of our population today and the clash of normative expectations that might occur. Consider also that within the backstage you will not know the norms that apply there.
Consider that there are many tasks involved in getting a job done, such as getting food to patrons, or getting a lesson to students, in which there is no need for patrons or students to participate. In that sense you can consider that sterotypical categorization occurs often to make the world manageable. Let diners concentrate on eating. Let students concentrate on studying. The danger occurs in a bureaucratized organization when the roles assume more importance than the humans. The kitchen in Goffman's example provided a space for the staff to snicker at patrons where they could not hear; it provided an us/them territory, where the patrons sometimes were treated with all the venom that outsiders sometimes experience. Answerability doesn't mean we have to be included in everything, but we must be alert when bureaucratization tends to shut off avenues to answerability.
Consider that in front stage and back stage behavior both audience and actors must agree, tacitly albeit, where back stage ends and front stage begins.
Consider the Rush Limbaugh incident. Is intent necessary for social acceptability?
Displaced Persons
Consider the fifteen years that Hao Tran spent on a swine farm.
Consider indigenous peoples. Consider Japanese internment camps. Consider immigration issues. Consider all these issues as structural violence.