Semester at Sea Fall
2006 Voyage
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Serendipity in IstanbulBy Robbieana
Standing inside a carpet and tile
store in Five
minutes earlier, Inga and I had walked by the store on our way to the
Blue
Mosque, Hagia Sophia and Cistern. A Turkish man smoking by the entrance
immediately
began the typical conversation starter we had heard all day, “Konichiwa. Anyong Hasayo. Where are you
from?” Intrigued that we were Chinese, yet spoke “perfect
English”, he said,
“Please come in, have some apple tea and meet my friend. He is very
interested
in Responding
to several of his questions, I explained to the calligrapher that each
Chinese character
is a one syllable word, albeit sometimes two words are combined to form
a
single “compound word” with an entirely new meaning. To illustrate my
point, I
wrote the word, ni hao. Ni means
“you” and hao means “good”, so together they mean how
do you do. Next, I
wrote ai, and urged him to try
writing it. Picking up the pen with a childlike fascination in his
eyes, he
duplicated ai. Looking back
intermittently and forth between his trial and the original, he
carefully
composed a character that looked a somewhat recognizable as ai.
“Very different than Arabic. This is
how you would write it in Arabic,” he suddenly said as he began to
rewrite ai, with his own spin. Each pen
stroke in the character grew longer, and the ends flipped delicately,
swiftly
taking on an appearance of English cursive. The final product looked
neither
Chinese nor Arabic, but instead a fusion of both languages. It was my
turn to
be filled with childlike excitement. I had never anticipated that my
day in Theodore C.
Bestor mentions in his article, Inquisitive
Observation, that his anthropological site found him, “sometimes
spontaneously,
sometimes by design” (316). He notes that the most effective way to
find a site
is not to attempt to find the “ideal project” but instead allow
serendipity to
take its course. Bestor says, “I realize now that networks choose me
much more
than I can possibly select them…the trick to fieldwork is figuring out
how to
harness networks that present themselves, as well as how to expand upon
them
(316). Never planning to enter the shop, I was about to dismiss the man
outside
as just another Turkish storekeeper, who imposes attention grabbers
upon
tourists by incorrectly guessing their ethnicities. Until I had met the
calligrapher, I have never felt so connected to the wisdom that “often,
seemingly unlikely people will turn out to have incredible amounts of
information” (Bestor, 328). This experience taught me that fieldwork is
about
wandering around with an open mind, and “taking advantage of chance
encounters,” which provides unexpected opportunities that leads one
closer
towards lessons of great magnitude, that not only enrich our
anthropological
findings but also our lives (Bestor, 328). |
Return to course home | Send me your comments: robbieanaleung@yahoo.com |