If you read the B-Log because of an interest in cultural anthropology, then you probably also read Savage Minds, in which case Kerim’s post on Albanian Anthropology has made you aware of NewAnthro, a collective blog written by a group of New School anthropology grad students in the field — in Israel, Albania, the UK, and I’m not sure where all else. Makes me homesick for Friends World.

I’ve mentioned Friends World a few times in this blog, so far. Friends World is an undergraduate program out of Long Island University blessed with a name that probably seemed more appropriate in 1967 than it does today. FWeirdos have tried defining the school in different ways (’magical hippie travel college’… ‘more a state of mind, really’), but the basic idea is this: Friends World is an undergraduate program based on the idea of a global, student-centred, experiential education. In practice, this used to mean that students spent the greater portion of their schooling outside of the United States, alternating between theoretically experiential classroom semesters and theoretically educational experiential semesters. The program’s form was not hard and fast, and there was a great deal of mixing. Theoretically, students had a strong voice in school governance, but this has generally been eclipsed by an increasingly authoritarian administration.

In many ways, the education was quite individual — I spent my second semester thousands of kilometres away from any other FWeirdos in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. I spent my fourth semester living near other students and faculty in Bangalore, India, but working almost entirely on my own. I spent my sixth and seventh semesters in rural Adwafo, Ghana, one of two Friends World students on the continent, conducting the research that would lead to my bachelor’s thesis.

But both despite and because of our isolation and dispersion, there was a very strong sense of community — our distance in some ways made us more educationally dependent on one another. One means of maintaining communication, across improbable barriers of time and space, was through our academic and personal journals. This is a practice which finds its origin in the Quakers (the Society of Friends — from whence Friends World gets its humiliating name).

Back in the days before abolitionism and Watergate, Quakers were a fairly wacky minority sect in Cromwell’s Puritan England, and, as minority sects in theocracies tend to be, were persecuted. Many of the early Friends travelled extensively, and were separated from their meetings (congregations) for months at a time. To keep faith strong, and to share the personal experience of divinity which was so fundamental to Quakerism, these wayfarers kept journals of their travels and their experiences, both mundane and spiritual.

This practice translated easily into the (now) secular Friends World Program. I remember sitting in libraries in Southampton and Bangalore, looking through the notes of earlier academic generations, comparing their experiences to my own. Or sitting in front of a laptop in Kanchanaburi and Kumase, writing my own logs with successors in mind.

And, of course, those memories lead to a thousand more of that community — whether immediate or distant.

Blogging is a step toward intellectual community, but… Well… Maybe it just takes time.

This isn’t rational, but perhaps that isn’t important — NewAnthro’s got me thinking more seriously about grad school — a community of people trying to do the same things I try to do, tackling the same questions with which I struggle. It could be nice.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 8 June 2005 at 23:01 and is filed under Becoming an Anthropologist, Blogosphere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.