Avatars I am Taking to India

I have already mentioned in my blog intent my plan to use different avatars of my personality to document my experience in a variety of ways.  This is a way that I generate a variety of material to offer a more holistic representation of my experience.  The name, I feel, is very suiting, especially since this time around I will actually be in India where the name originates.  However, I think it would be beneficial to explore my Ghana avatars a little bit more.  Since I am hoping to do more with the connect aim of my statement, I would like people to read this and know that Myra, Adela, and Virginia are all a part of me, so do not freak out if you see one of their signatures at the end of a blog post. 

My first avatar, Myra, is going to be the name I use for all of my photography.  I did a lot with this avatar during my field research in Ghana last year, and since it was so successful I decided to keep the name the same. 

My second avatar, Adela, will be the romantic anthropologist in me.  She is a variation off of Ava, another avatar I explored last year.  I decided to change her name to Adela for a number of reasons.  First, I think that she reminds me a lot of Adela from A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, a kind of thoughtful but also naïve character I think I resemble a lot in the “romantic anthropologist” state of mind.  Adela is also the name of a main character in La Dama Del Alba, a Spanish play that I just finished reading.  The character in this play was at an interesting point romantically where things were either going to go really well or pretty terrible.  I can also relate to this.

My third Avatar, Virginia, is going to be the postmodern travel writer in me.  She is a new and improved edition of Gipsy, another avatar from Ghana.  My more aesthetic writing will be under her.  Her name is Virginia because I am hoping to implement a more stream of conscious style, like Virginia Woolf, one of my favorite authors. 

Sometimes I will be all of them.  Sometimes none.  But every so often I will be just one, and exploring that mindset is always a beneficial experience for my kind of project. 

Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India by Diana L. Eck

This book was a short read, but it was packed with interesting information that could relate to my avatar approach for field work (trying on different lenses and experimenting with different mediums to see how different my experiences can be).

The word "darśan" means "to see" in Sanskrit.  It is about "seeing the divine image, and it is the single most common and significant element of Hindu worship" (preface).  Yet, the author does not stop there, she says that we all do this, and makes devotes a lot of attention to the mediums of film and photography that relate directly to my project.

She says that "it has sometimes been claimed that the photograph is a kind of universal 'language,' but our reflections here make us question such a claim.  Every photograph and film raises the question of point-of-view and perspective- both that of the maker and that of the viewer."  It also "raises the question of meaning" and of "obstruction," and that we have to understand the context to really know.  A picture may "be worth a thousand words, but still we need to know which thousand words" (16).

This will go great with some of my previous literature such as Walter Benjamin in his collection of essays Illuminations that look specifically at the medium of photography in regards to an original and authenticity.  Super fascinating!  It is nice to have a source looking at India that can back it up.  Even though it is not specifically about Dharamsala, I think that there are a lot of similarities when it comes to looking at something so exotic of Westerners. 

Eck, Diana L.  Darśan:  Seeing the Divine Image in India.  New York:  Columbia University Press, 1998.  Print.

January 26, 2011: Learning Journal 2

It really has been quite the week in developing my creative writing project in Dharamsala, India for this spring and summer field study.  In many ways I feel like I am experienced in what field work looks like, but at the same time this new project I am constructing is so different from what I was studying last summer in Ghana (looking at attitudes towards literature).

What I am most excited for is that unlike my experience in Ghana, McLeod Ganj will be less structured.  Before I was waking up everyday to go to school where sometimes my time was spent well, and other times it did not do much.  Because looking at the different stories that make up the community will be so much more broad, I will have the freedom to spend my time hunting down the stories that will be most meaningful to me.  Do not get me wrong, I think that structure is good in a variety of cases, but for me, this time I think that going with the snowball sampling is really going to be most beneficial.  At the same time, without that structure getting access to the community and finding my audience could be a lot trickier than it was in Ghana.

So here is where I am at.  After reading Emily Bell's project proposal and final project after doing a creative writing project in the same location I will be going to, I am confidant that this is what I want to be studying.  The most heartening thing I got from her papers was that the Dalai Lama has encouraged newcomers to the community to share their stories with the world.  In Emily's experience, Tibetans were more than willing to share their personal stories.  This is good news for me, but there are also others people dwelling in Dharamsala that I want to include in this portrait I am doing of the location.  I do not know how willing they will be to share their stories, and of course, ethics are going to be something I have to keep in mind the entire time.

Also, as far as my avatar method (different lenses and mediums I experiment with to show the nature of narrative), I will have a different experience this time around.  In Ghana, I had five that were looking at different aspects of my own personality.  The first three worked out really well.  They were a photographer, a romantic anthropologist, and a postmodern writer.  However, my native avatar and "experiencer" avatar were not quite so successful.  I think that my "experiencer" has some potential, I am just not sure what to do about it yet.  Here is a basic sketch of what avatars I think I will bring with me to McLeod Ganj, India.  I won't take them all, I just have to get my ideas out there.

The Photographer (though may need to do some modifications based on type of photography)
The Romantic Anthropologist (because someone needs to tackle the student portion of the project)
The Tourist (could be very effective, especially with being in a tourist community and being a foreigner myself)
The Postmodern Writer (someone with my own voice who will tell stories creatively)
The Poet (a new one! but I think it could be very viable)
The Experiencer (can I work it to make it worthwhile?)

Any other ideas out there?  I am so excited to get started!  Maybe a methods practice will be beneficial for me....

Here We Go Again!

I should have started this blog awhile ago.  It is a continuation of the research I began in Ghana, Africa with the field studies program at BYU experimenting with different mediums and methods in travel writing while exploring the authenticity of experience.  My time in Ghana was amazing, and that project can be found here.  This time, however, I am continuing my research in a very different part of the world.
McLeod Ganj, a suburb of Dharamsala, India.

This is a town nestled between the ridges of the majestic Himalayas.  It is the home of His Holiness the Dalai Lama along with the Tibetan government living in exile, still trying to win their homeland back from China.

After completing my first field study I recognize just how much I do not know about this community.  Going as a field facilitator also makes that experience a little more interesting.  I am, however, anxious to learn more and to have yet another great experience abroad while exploring my topic of interest.

Here is where I am at so far... just to document the exploration phase of my project.  I am going to stick to my avatar approach where I looked at how different mediums and viewpoints altered the my experience as a single traveler.  My framework will essentially be the same (except I will polish it up based on my conclusions from Ghana), but this time I am exploring a different topic while in the field.

At first I wanted to look at how both Tibetans and Hindu's maintain their religious identity while in a tourist community.  After reading the book Nine Lives In the Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple, however, I am looking at two other topics that could be of interest.  First, what is the literacy culture like.  So many of the stories found in this book looked at poetry, ancient texts, and story telling, and I am curious how those play a role in raising awareness for the Tibetan cause.  Another idea, based on the format Dalrymple wrote this book in, would be to have a creative writing project as my final product in addition to my blog.  What I think would be interesting would be to get a kind of portrait of Dharamsala-just talk to different people and hear their stories and get a sense for this community.  It was only after reading the chapter on Dharamsala in this book that I was really able to stop objectifying the Chinese invasion of Tibet.  It made it more personal, more real, and it ignited something in me that I would like to take a part in.

So that is where I am at the moment.  Stay tuned, because like field work, the project always tend to evolve the more you dissect it and put it back together again.