Home

One of the most pressing questions that I heard in the short Connect-Exchange video was “how is home connected with identity?”  For me the place I call home is my identity.  In that place I don’t have to worry about assignment due dates, org meetings, grading, or anything like that.  In that place I can just worry about enjoying life, being me.  Home is somewhere where I can truly relax and be my carefree self without a nagging sense of, “you could be working.”  Home is somewhere I need to be from time to time to recharge.  Up until now I’ve been referring to home as a physical space in the Ozarks, but I don’t mean to imply that home is solely tied to a physical space.  In reality, I guess it ties back to an emotional state where you feel comfortable being you in all meanings of the word.

Another question interested me was “what does it mean to be an American?”  This seems like such a simple question, but I’m not even sure how I’d begin answering it.  Is there such a thing as being an American?  I wonder if I find this task difficult because I myself am an American.  Maybe this fact blinds me from taking defining what it means to be American.  I could tell someone what it means to be Texan, but that is only because I have spent time as an outsider looking in.  What seems normal to a Texan becomes abnormal to me, so I pay attention to it.  I may even internalize it as part of my own identity.  In that same vein I don’t think I could define what it means to be a Missourian.  I’ve lived there for most of my life and the norms and I’ve, therefore, internalized the norms and activities of Missouri culture.  This internalization is what complicates my ability to critically define what it means to be American.  

My difficulty defining what it means to be American brings me to another question tied to the study of cultural rhetoric.  Can one study one’s own culture with a critical eye?  Cultural insiders have embodied many of the values and practices of their cultures, but seek to isolate many of these values when studying them.  Is that possible given that the culture given the degree to which culture affects thought patterns and epistemologies?  This observation makes me think that critical study of another culture requires an outsider perspective. Then again, I might just be influenced by my own epistemological background where objectivity is essential.  I don’t know, but it’s a thought that I had as I began writing a response to this post.