First Impressions

Borneman writes that “In many of my encounters, Syrians were torn between a desire for me to declare an identity – married, or unmarried, gay or not, professor, father, brother, friend, or stranger – and an equally strong desire not to eliminate the ambiguity that made possible a cultural encounter in the first place, where an experience that is not predefined unfolds” (p. 220). While I hesitate to assign a desire to preserve “ambiguity,” most of my informants/friends agreed that the questions stemmed from some desire to ‘get to know them better’ or to figure out where they fit. It was an attempt to see if they fit into preconceived notions about ‘Americans’. To quote one friend, “Oh you’re from Detroit, so that’s near New York? Ummm, not really. So it’s near Los Angeles? No.” While the questions could become a bit tiring (once while out with a friend who is from California and was constantly asked if he was from ‘Laguna Beach’ he simply replied “yes”), they also are very normal, and not limited to the other. For example, ‘where are you from’ or what do you do is one of the first things we ask when we meet someone new, because by getting some information we have a better sense of where they fit into the world (whether or not that sense is correct).

There is a psychological term (which anthropologists also sometimes use) – schema – meaning one’s concept of a category. For example, I have a schema about chairs – I have an idea what a chair is, and then I can recognize other chairs, even if I’ve never seen them before or they’re kind of weird looking chairs. Similarly I also have a schema for Americans, women, teenagers, lawyers, and many other categories that you could put people in. A lot of people guessed that these preconceptions about Americans came from the media, hence all the New York/ California references. One friend, Emily, who has been in both Germany and Scotland speculated that there is less portrayal of ‘Americans’ in German media/television than in Scotland which gets almost all American movies and many American TV shows (including the ‘awful’ ones like Laguna Beach), and that might be why Germans seemed less interested in the fact that Emily actually is from California. Although she also notes, “Or it could also be that I suck at speaking German.”

Schema (is that already plural?) are more noticeable when one doesn’t fit into a schema. This is the case with Borneman, when people are asking him if he’s married or not. Since not being married is unusual, he doesn’t fit people’s schema of what it means to be an adult male. My friend’s Bob and Beth had similar experiences when they studied abroad. Bob is in Israel, and although there are plenty of American students studying in Israel, the majority of them are Jewish. Bob isn’t Jewish and he writes that this confuses people and they often want to know why he is there. Similarly, my friend Beth was in Estonia, a country rarely visited by tourists unless they’re of Estonian descent, so Beth writes that one of the questions she was most frequently asked was something along the lines of “what’s your heritage?” – as people tried to get a handle on why she would chose to come to Estonia.

Okay I think that is long enough for one post – phew!