People’s overwhelming desire to be happy is what makes them so miserable. In the concluding chapter of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Robert D. Kaplan downplays the significance of the U.S. army relative to the impact of the settler vigilantes. Kaplan states “a race to innocence” occurs when when individuals assume they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression. This quote represents potential ideological falsehoods present in the belief of the sense of self being fixed in time.
The constant adaptation of the self to satisfy immediate personal needs was reinforced this quarter through the exploration of assigned texts in the context of Dr. Alan Watkins’ visual representation of how the body physiologically supports conscious thought. As shown in Conroy and Allen’s article regarding the perception of self identity, the visual aid of The Iceberg Systems Thinking Model of Intervention shows “problems” as a symptom of a hierarchy of unseen mechanisms. The conceptual similarities of these two ideas in relation to varying subject and their correlating scale of focus encapsulates the necessity for introspective reflection of the exposure to certain systems and its effect on a person’s subconscious.
The visual aid of C.S. Holling’s The Adaptive Cycle in combination with a self-produced 2D linear model based on Lanza’s theory of Biocentrism provided a framework to imagine the effects of social systems on an individual’s subconscious within a larger context. Various scientific peer reviewed articles helped outline a careful approach of an individual’s assimilation into a group identity and how a group can provide a moral framework for a smoother transition of individuals with good intentions, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and varying moral centralities into a shared group space. The scale of this information alone does not yield desired results unless an attempt is made to think through the least-bias perspective of how to understand the impact of a small scale group on larger surrounding social systems. The versatility and simplicity of The Adaptive Cycle and the sketched visual aid allows for simple, yet complex ideas to be more easily connected.
Kotomi’s tea tasting labs inspired the utilization of tea as a method to neutralize the varying moods of individuals attempting to comprise a group. Tea houses ask people entering their space how they feel rather than what they want. Using Dr. Alan Watkins’ explanation of how physiology affects conscious thought to understand the effect of a subtle change in language In the context of Conroy and Allen’s adaptation of DiClemente and Prochaska’s The Stages of Change Continuum, it becomes clear that the tea house encourages guests to accept a tea picked specifically for their mood to more easily process emotion and channel natural energies through intuition and creativity rather than temporarily fulfill biological and psychological needs with the extraction of emotion through the consumption of what the person desires in that moment. If an individual were to be unaware of the subtle change in self, the chances a person would revert to old habits rather than maintain the new behaviors would decrease because (depending on how the tea master’s role is revealed to the group) an individual might assume they are supporting the change of another person (respecting the space, or potentially the tea master’s learning process), reducing the risk of adding toxicity to the space through the introduction of previous coping mechanisms or habits of reversion into the shared space. The tea master could also be in a position to share the general state of the group to the person in charge of daily activities.
Information gained from course materials in addition to An Indigenous People’s History of the U.S. can be better understood through the lense of C.S. Holling’s The Adaptive Cycle. The social systems that were designed in the exploitation and conservation phase can transform the goodwill of an individual to match the integrity of the social systems their goodwill passes through. If an individual is not consciously aware of the implications of widespread commodification of shared interests, a person might think through a quantitative perspective, unknowingly assuming a priority in quantity, creating an assumed inferiority to the quality of the quantity. One might even consider the commodification of a shared interest a sacrifice for a gain as presented as the most efficient way to get what you want (how unenjoyable is work? Who benefits the most from you?), but so often you are unaware of the qualitative sacrifice, and in this case the common interest is of your well-being and the qualitative state of who you are as a person can become lost in how and what you decide to do. Can you agree that people’s overwhelming desire to be happy is what makes them so miserable? Over time the good intentions of a person can become locked into a filter of the metaphoric mind of an alcoholic writer’s palimpsest.
Aiming to achieve 12 out of 12 credits attempted
Proposed Credit Distribution –
3 – Commodification of Food in the context of Racism and Sexism
1 – Tasting Labs
6 – Independent Learning Contract
2 – Internship
Narrative Self-Evaluation
I could not convey my thoughts through the proposed format so I decided to explain my academic progress this quarter and go back and describe how it matches the credits I seek to obtain. While I read excerpts from the Winona LaDuke Chronicles I do not seek any credit for reading that text because of the limited credit distribution and the incredible amount of knowledge gained from Racial Indigestion. Tompkins beautifully illustrated in simple, yet complex rhetoric, the subtle differences in daily interactions that are blind to several members of our culture despite it affecting us all on a very personal level. The concise description of references found in other literature regarding the social structures implemented on members of our culture within the context of long term societal implications provided enough information for me to know what to look for and study through my independent learning contract discussing the implications of how to remediate this issues on a larger scale. As described in a paragraph in Tompkins’ conclusion,
“Might these discourses find origin in earlier modes of biological racism and nationalism? In what ways does their need to rationalize the pleasures of eating continue to work as a technology for reproducing whiteness? How might the study of eating, of the mouth as a “dense transfer point of power” in the production of the biopolitical life of the nation, be put to work in denaturalizing racial formation and, equally relevant, class formation?”
Tompkins addresses the why and what happens next after making her arguments. Another excerpt from the conclusion that comes a paragraph later,
“I have argued in Racial Indigestion that eating has a messy and promising history to tell about the dialectical struggles between pleasure and disgust, affect and aesthetics, dominance and resistance, and the interpenetrations of all the above.”
beautifully describes in concise rhetoric the subtle differences in daily decisions that can lead to long term behavior and as previously mentioned “a technology for reproducing whiteness”.
I seek one credit for my participation in the Tea Labs because I was able to connect why they were so affective for my learning in the context of urban farming social matrices.
The other requests for credit should be clearly articulated in the narrative self-evaluation.