Concentration

William and Mary, being a good liberal arts school, had rules, when I was there, which tried to make sure all students got a "rounded" education. (I assume it still has rules along those lines, but I've heard they've changed since my day.)

At the time, they lumped all subjects into three categories -- Arts and Languages, Social Sciences, and Hard Sciences, to be generic about it. Along with various other requirements (Writing 101, at least 4 semesters of a language, at least one lab science, etc.) each student had to take a certain number of classes (well, credit hours) in each of the three categories. Your major, obviously, filled in most of the necessary hours for one of the categories, though they required at least two different subjects in each of the categories -- well-roundedness, and all. I used Computer Science to fill in my off-subject Hard Science classes, because my one Chemistry class convinced me I wasn't interested in pursuing that any longer.

Then they required you to take what they called a "concentration" in one of the other categories. It was about two classes shy of the credit hour requirements for a minor degree. And in the third category, you only had to take a handful of classes.

When I moved into my dorm room, my intention was to major in math (that had been my intention from somewhere around the first quarter of my senior year of high school, when I literally had my mind blown by my calculus teacher, and it was a drug I desperately wanted more of) and to take my "concentration" studies in English literature, to indulge my love of reading.

My throw-away category was to be the social sciences, which I had never really cared for, and learned to despise when I was in high school -- I am not good at rote memorization, and my history-major mother was forever disappointed in my barely-adequate grades. A perusal of the course catalog led me to Anthropology, which was at least new. Anthropology 101: Archaeology, and Anthropology 201: Cultural Anthropology, and Psych 101 for my "roundedness", and then I could focus on my math and my reading. An excellent plan.

So I showed up to sign up for my first semester of classes and found I had to stand in line for hours before even seeing the inside of the building. By the time I got to the Anthropology table, all the seats in both sections of Anth101 had been filled.

The person sitting at the table (a grad student, perhaps? I never knew, and now I don't even remember if it was a man or a woman) must have seen the disappointment on my face, and said, "Can I make a recommendation?"

"Sure."

"Try this course. Four-seventeen." They pointed to a line in the book: "Anth 417: African Experiences in the New World."

"But... I'm a freshman. I haven't had 101 or 201 yet!"

Shrug. "There's no prerequisite for it. And it's a visiting professor, and she's really great." I hesitated: 400-level classes were, at least in theory, for seniors. Could I handle that level of difficulty? "If you don't like it, you can always transfer out. Some spaces are bound to open up in 101 after the first couple of days."

So that's what I did.

Except I never did transfer out. It turned out to be a tiny class -- seven students (three of us white, two of us freshmen, and all of us female) and the professor, whose name I've long since forgotten, even though she completely changed my life.

It was not my first experience with education, distinct from memorization, but it was far more intense than anything I'd ever done before. We read five books, and they fascinated me so thoroughly that I'd devoured them before the first month of school was done. We studied culture, and the adaptation of culture. We walked into Colonial Williamsburg for a specialized version of the "Slave Life" tour. We wrote papers -- analyses of the books we'd read, and a free-study paper that I researched harder than I'd ever had to research anything in my life before (mine was on a comparison of voudoun and winti, tracing elements of each back to their parent religions in Africa). The black students in the class encouraged questions from the white students in the class about their own lives. We listened to music. At the culmination of the course, the professor had us all over to her apartment for a meal of authentic foods.

I fell in love with cultural anthropology that semester. I loved its elegance -- the way all the pieces fit together. It was exactly as mind-blowing as that moment in calculus had been, but meatier, more real. It made me understand how a person's surroundings affects their culture in a visceral way that seemed obvious, once it had been pointed out to me, and it made me look at my own culture with new eyes. It forever affected my writing, too, since I can no longer consider individuals as distinct from their cultural surroundings, and I feel the need to understand the cultural imperatives of each person or society before I can write about them -- and that has, I believe, given my characters a depth they never had before.

And these are the kinds of things that I think about when I don't have a talkative five-year-old in the car with me on the way to work, when I actually am allowed to have my own thoughts for half an hour or so, and when the radio plays "What A Wonderful World," which was analyzed by the other freshman in that class for her big paper, and which will always remind me that rhythm and spirit count for a lot more than people give them credit for... at least in our culture.