For this final blog post for my Cultural Anthropology class I will be combining the previous post that I had not been able to post due to family commitments and the Blog posts that will comprise my final. My research subject is a PNW transplant who I’ve known since my time in the Army came to an end two years ago. For the purposes of this blog I’ve given them the nickname of “Brian”. Brian is a mid-30’s average looking white male, married with three children, two boys and one girl. Being a PNW transplant, Brian hails from different areas of the United States since he himself is many refer to as a “military brat”, with both of his parents having served in the Army themselves. Moving around the country as a child made making friends when he was younger harder for him, but that didn’t deter him from trying to be as normal as everyone else. Brian’s parents raised him with the belief “that everyone should be treated the way you want to be treated”, the Golden Rule if you will. Before joining the military, Brian’s parents had retired to NE Florida when he was in the ninth grade, seeing as that is where both of them were from. Brian along with his sister, “Josie” had a hard time fitting in at their new school since they had just moved there, but since they had been used to moving around and changing schools during their parent’s service. Now it was at this time that Brian would be faced with a situation that would change his views of his formative years, he made his schools’ soccer team. How would this event change Brian I thought to myself. How could something as simple as joining a team influence someones life as much as it did Brian’s? As I had mentioned earlier Brian’s parents had raised him to treat others the way he wanted to be treated, and lend help to those that needed it. But his joining his schools’ soccer team changed that, at least for the foreseeable future. Growing up as a military brat, Brian was somewhat of a loner, due to having moved around a lot, the friends he did make were pretty temporary whether due to his family moving or their family moving. As a new member of the team he did his best to try and fit in with his fellow players but he never truly felt like he fit in, as Brian puts it he “faked” a lot of his interactions with his fellow players so that they would like him. This included the typical high school locker room talk, whether it be jokes or name-calling, Brian joined in.

As Brian continued through high school, he became less of a loner and became more popular due to his association with the other players on the team, some who were from families that were more “fortunate” than others. From his interactions with these players and his growing popularity he was introduced to the local student Republican club, which he became a member of during his senior year in high school. Even though the idea of politics was not foreign to him, his parents never reinforced a particular party in their household, they reinforced the ideas that every person has the right to be themselves and that they should be responsible for their actions among others. As a newly minted member of this group he found something that would influence his outlook for the formative years of his young adult life.

After graduating high school, Brian was faced with several choices, continue on to college, go into the military like his parents did, or enter the workforce early, to at least get some experience. Brian chose the latter, which as he states, “was probably the worst decision he made, but he wouldn’t change what he chose”. This particular statement puzzled me, why wouldn’t he change the so called worst decision he ever made? What about this choice of getting a job right out of high school was the worst choice he made? I needed to know what outlook he had on life to make him come to this statement. As we parted ways for the day, I spent a lot of time thinking of that statement and started to look at some of the choices I had made throughout my life and it troubled me.

Brian’s military career and mine share many similarities, even though we come from different backgrounds, and didn’t really agree on many things, our friendship had been pretty solid because we had been through some difficult situations together, whether in training or going downrange, we never let our personal beliefs influence our friendship. When we met up the next day, I asked him why he thought working right out of high school was the worst decision he made, and why he wouldn’t change his choice? If he did, he would probably have not met his wife, or myself(which to me was more important if only jokingly). His answer was surprising to me, and hadn’t been what I thought it would be. After high school he worked several part time jobs, nothing that really made a difference to anyone, even though he learned a lot from the people he worked with, whether it was different perspectives of the world, what kind of person he didn’t want to be, the kind of woman he was attracted to, or the kind of people he valued. All of these things he said he “would give up in a heartbeat because all it was to him was a waste of time”. Through his time in the Army he told me, he had met the same type of people he had spent his time working with before joining, so all of that stuff he learned before hand, he could joined sooner and probably have been close to retiring at a higher rank than what he was had he joined sooner. I understood what he meant here because I had had those same thoughts, and I think everyone at one point or another has them as well. But this still didn’t answer his second statement. As he pulled a long sip of his drink he noticed that I was still puzzled, and I asked him to explain why he wouldn’t have chosen to do differently if he was afforded the opportunity to do it again. His answer made me realize I had been thinking about it all wrong and I never put it together. He told me that even though he said the decision to not go to college or into the military right after high school was the worst decision of his life, and that his reasoning about it on the military side was that he could have been at a higher rank and closer to retirement, he wouldn’t change his decision because not only of the ripple effect of changing his entire life, meaning he wouldn’t have met his wife, he wouldn’t have had his three beautiful children. He wouldn’t have changed anything because his going to work part time jobs right after high school allowed him to get the bad decisions out of his system. It allowed him to get all of that “young and dumb” stuff out of the way, and allowed him to really see what he wanted for his life.

In closing, doing this blog was difficult, for me at least. I have a hard time staying focused and writing my personal thoughts for anyone to just read. I felt more vulnerable than I expected and wanted to. However, I did my best to overcome this as I have anxiety when it comes to things that I write, I feel I never write as good as I could. Nonetheless, I tried to follow as closely as I could to the style of Hochschild’s writing and her ability of telling someone else’s story.

Another struggle I faced while doing this assignment was setting up times for me and my research subject to get together to conduct my research as he is still Active Duty and his unit was getting ready to head to the National Training Center in California and being a Platoon Sergeant, his time was taken up mostly with getting his platoon ready and spending his time with his family before he would be gone for a month.

Even though timing was not the best, I felt that participating not only in this class but this assignment helped me learn to just sit and listen to someone tell their story without judging what they say. That was the most interesting thing to me as it allowed me freedom to just be a witness to someone tell their story, regardless of who I was. It helped me learn to listen more for the sake of learning more so than just to respond. I never really put much though into Anthropology before I took this class, but at the end of this quarter I feel that I have a newfound respect for the work that they do. I don’t feel that my “Empathy Walls” have changed because I’ve tried to be as empathetic as I could for most of my life, but I can always improve.

Good evening and welcome back to my blog. This week I will be going over another chapter in Arlie Hochschild’s book, “Strangers In Their Own Land” and discussing certain processes Anthropologists use to conduct the research of their subjects. To start off, let us take a look at the anthropological processes and guides that are used. Anthropologists use a code of ethics to perform their research and bring the lives of their subjects to the view of the world. The code of ethics entails the following:

• Do No Harm
• Be Open and Honest Regarding Your Work
• Obtain Informed Consent and Necessary Permissions
• Weigh Competing Ethical Obligations Due Collaborators and Affected Parties
• Make Your Results Accessible
• Protect and Preserve your Records
• Maintain Respectful and Ethical Professional Relationships

For my blog I will adhere to these codes, paying special attention to protecting the identities, reputations, and integrity of my sources. To help with this I will for example only mention that they live in the Pacific Northwest, not specifically where in the PNW. This will be especially difficult, however I am up to the challenge of this assignment.

This weeks chapter that I will be covering will be Chapter 2 of Hochschild’s book which is titled “One Thing Good”. This weeks chapter focused on the continued story of Lee Sherman and dealt with his time working for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass(PPG) Company. Lee spent many years doing some interesting things, either racing cars, playing football for the team which would later be the Kansas City Chiefs, working in Seattle, WA on the Navy Shipyards and then moving to the state of Louisiana to perform pipe fitting duties, and while he was working for PPG, pollute the environment. This last is what would be the most interesting thing to me, because here is a man who knew better than to pollute the environment but since he was a loyal employee he would do what he was told to do. Even after he would have several incidents at work that would leave him ill later on in life, he performed his duties as they were assigned. This devotion to his job, coupled with his experiences makes him an interesting subject because of where he is in his beliefs in this stage of his life(Lee is 82 years old at the time of writing). When Lee lived in Washington State, he was a conservative Democrat, and upon moving to Louisiana he became a Republican, and at the time of writing had become a member of the Tea Party. Even though Lee classifies himself as an environmentalist he supports making the EPA smaller, which if it had been in place during his time working for PPG, he probably wouldn’t have poured the toxic waste into Bayou d’Inde. His actions, which he would publicly own up to and take the blame for, led to a public meeting between the residents surrounding Bayou d’Inde, members of PPG, and representatives of the US Government. This meeting took place in 1982 after the waters surrounding the PPG plant had been determined to contain toxic waste and there would be a limit placed on eating fish caught in the rivers and bayous surrounding the plant. This publc meeting took place 15 to 20 years after Lee had been ordered to dispose of the remnants of toxic byproducts made from the manufacturing of products at PPG. Interestingly enough, shortly after Lee had been ordered to perform the disposal, he had suffered an on the job accident and had been put on medical leave by the company doctor for roughly 8 months, after the 8 months Lee would return to work only to be brought before a workers competency board and would be fired due to “absenteeism”. This unjust firing would be because due to his accident his health had begun to fail, and companies then and now still prefer profits to payouts. However, due to Lee’s and other workers experiences since the 60’s and even now, more and more companies are being held accountable, however slowly. The chapter’s namesake comes from a statement made by Lee about his actions during the dumping of the toxic waste in which he had rescued a bird that had flown over the toxic chemicals and breathed in its fumes. Lee saw the bird and had resuscitated the animal and after placing it on the hood of his truck to stay warm and he went back to overseeing the disposal, he came back and the bird had flown away, being the “only thing good to come of the whole thing”.

In Closing tonight, I am going to contemplate 3 questions to ask my subject of research:

• Has there ever been a time when you were at your darkest, and there was still light?
• Is it difficult to juggle the current state of the country and your personal beliefs?
• Do you feel that your upbringing impacted your current political or philosophical beliefs?

Hello, my name is Matt and I would like to welcome you to my blog which I am using as part of my Cultural Anthropology class. The purpose of this blog is for me to tell the story of someone that is either politically or ideologically different from myself. As I go along on this journey I will provide you “the reader” my findings and insights into this subject. In order to do that I will be using, referencing, and applying research already performed by Arlie Russell Hochschild, who in her book “Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning On The American Right” set out to do the very same thing.

For my first discussion I will choose five things from the first chapter of Hochschild book which is titled “Traveling to The Heart”. In this chapter Hochschild describes her initial journey into the topic of the political divide in our country that has become worse in the past decade and what type of people might be at the heart of The American Right. The first topic I am choosing is empathy walls, which are the walls people put in place mentally to block out the ability to deeply understand another person often creating hostility to those that are of different beliefs, or social standing than ourselves according to Hochschild. Is it possible to see things through the eyes of someone else so to speak? Is it possible to put oneself in someone else’s shoes and experience the world as they do? Behind their wall and outside of ones own wall? I feel the same as Hochschild, because even though its comfortable to be around those that have the same mindset as yourself, we learn so much more about each other when we put ourselves with people that challenge our mindset, not only do we learn more but so does that other person if they are also willing to come out from their wall. Secondly she meets a man by the name of Mike Schaff, a tall 64 year old Cajun farmer who in the first chapter of Hochschild book recounts the tragic tale of how a sinkhole swallowed his home and community whole. Ironically, Mr. Schaff is a member of the Tea Party movement which in his area had pushed for lighter regulation on drilling companies and also less environmental protection. Fighting for the very thing that caused him to lose the things he loved is paradoxically saddening. Thirdly, one question that Hochschild came to from this interaction was how can a system create pain and deflect the blame for that very same pain? This question is interesting because it is a very valid one yet it is also hard to answer and is itself a paradox question which relates itself to Mr. Schaff’s situation and his beliefs. Could the very thing that he wants, less government interference, lead to what happened to his community? I’ll come back to that once I’ve done more research because answering that question before would be done so in error. My fourth topic of discussion was most interesting to me because it truly resonated with me, which was Hochschild discussion about Sally, a mother of a former graduate student of Hochschild, and Sally’s friend Shirley. These two women couldn’t be more different, Sally an artist and a Democrat who favored Bernie Sanders during the 2016 election, and Shirley who’s a flight attendant and Tea Party enthusiast and supporter of Donald Trump. Opposite ends of the literal spectrum and yet they were good friends, throwing parties at each others houses, have spare keys to each others houses and yet they believe differently as night and day. My fifth and final discussion topic is the power to mislead. Since the 2016 election there has been a huge amount of misinformation, whether on major news channels, Facebook and other resources that contribute to the way people receive their news. There is no doubt that the media and information around us is designed to control the way we think and live.

Thank you for reading this first blog and I look forward to expanding on some of the topics and questions that I’ve learned of in the future.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. “Traveling to the Heart”. Strangers in Their Own Land. The New Press, New York.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.