Fulbright Labyrinths: Wandering the In-Betweeness Emerging Transculture Person

By Virginia Hall-Milhouse

In this provocative work, Virginia Milhouse demonstrates how autoethnography combines creative and analytical practices to help bring to consciousness some complex social and political agendas hidden in narratorial writings. It demonstrates how an arts-based qualitative research method (narrative inquiry) can be fused with a scientific-based quantitative method (DMIS-IDI) and compliment, support and or correct each other. It also demonstrates how "writing as a method of inquiry" can be a viable way for researchers to learn about themselves and their research, as well as features standards for evaluating creatively and analytically constructed text. Further, the author's examination of the aesthetics of "inner-readiness" and "in-betweeness" will be very helpful to people doing this kind of self-reflexive fieldwork. The reader will also appreciate this author's recognition of the importance of combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies--something not many writers can do with great success. Also, this book will be a real contribution to sojourners and others traveling or living abroad. The work is very smart; and, is, beautifully and clearly written. The 'labyrinth' quote at the beginning of her work is very fitting and certainly promises to illustrate those words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Nov 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466901889

Virginia Hall-Milhouse

Virginia Milhouse is an Oxford in Residence and Fulbright scholar and Professor of Intercultural Studies. She has authored and or co-authored some 10 books and approximately 20 journal articles. She has taught intercultural studies and related courses for 20 years in the United States and in more than 6 different countries including South Africa where she completed her Fulbright program. She is the mother of one daughter Raquel Miranda Milhouse and currently lives in Roswell, Georgia.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Section 1

Conceptualizations

and

methodology

Chapter 1

The fullbright experience: hybrid of performances,

walking the labyrinth, living in the in-betweeness,

emerging transculture

2

Performance autoethnography: writing self as other, as transcultural person, as citizen of thee world

3

Research methodology

Section 2

Quantitative

results

Chapter 4

quantitative results

Section 3

Qualitative

analysis &

interpretations

Chapter 5

Language learning: a labyrinth of pathways in morocco

Chapter 6

Wildlife movement and assemblage patterns along the wetlands of the chobe-linyanti-zambezi rivers: a poetics of an ecological identity

Chapter 7

Tilting at myths: an interpretative narrative

Chapter 8

Feminine spirituality: a different voice

Chapter 9

Disparando camaras para la paz: shooting cameras for peace in bogota columbia

Chapter 10

Writing the ‘self’ on the pages of a south african sojourn:an auto-ethnographic montage

Chapter 11

John hope franklin’s one america

Chapter 12

The dance of dialogue: where we should but don’t meet

Chapter 13

In-between american and macedonian cultures

Chapter 14

If david could’ve brought the depth and breath of his fulbright experience back home to the u.S.: What might he have told us?

Chapter 15

Putting it all together

Section 4

auto ethnographic narratives

Narrative one

Narrative two

Narrative three

Narrative four

Narrative five

Narrative six

Narrative seven

Narrative eight

Acknowledgements

A number of people have made this book possible, though I take full responsibility for its contents and methods—its bricoleuric, metaphoric, evocative and creative-analytic forms. Yet it is rare that a book, even a collective work like this one, has earned so great a debt of gratitude. Indeed I took inspiration from the narratives included here—refusing to impose method or strategy where their form didn’t warrant them. So to repay, I begin with the contributor whose intellectual generosity and wise counsel, very early on, played an indispensable role in the shaping of this book, the late and renowned scholar-historian John Hope Franklin. Professor Franklin, I owe you a debt of gratitude for your wise counsel in which you said to me: "Write your book and the publisher will come".

In fact I could not have written this book without a special group of Fulbrighters—students, scholars, professors and artists—Lizzie Buckner, Alex Fatal, Mary Herian Schmider, Jerry Siegel, Dick Arndt, John Hope Franklin, Kira Murphy, David Allor and Gaston Roberge—who believed in it and enthusiastically and thoughtfully contributed to it. Thank you; your stick-to-it-ive-ness helped shepherd this book to completion.

Also a debt of gratitude goes to Harriet Mayor Fulbright, who not only agreed to read but graciously listened to the reading of earlier drafts of some of my chapters and through whom I had the privilege of viewing the heartfelt documentary, Fulbright the Man, the Mission & the Message, released in 2006 by the Fulbright Center.

I also want to express my profound appreciation to Nancy Mergler, Senior Vice President and Provost at the University of Oklahoma whose approval of my 2006 semester-long sabbatical which launched the first phase—the qualitative phase—of the research for this book.

Also a very special thanks is owed to my research assistant, Srikanth Barathan, whose service and professionalism was un-precedential.

My deep gratitude also goes to a remarkable pal and adviser Richard T. Arndt, a former board member of the Fulbright Association, and a 24-year veteran of the US Foreign Service and co-editor of The Fulbright Difference, 1948-1992. Thanks ‘Dick’ for your friendship, intellectual and instructive support and enduring encouragement.

Everett Penn, member of the Board of Directors for the Fulbright Association, you went beyond the call of duty, traveling all the way from Houston, Texas to Oklahoma City to meet and consult with me, my research assistant and Patricia A. Bell, Professor and Department Head of Sociology at Oklahoma State University.

I continue to value the letters of support Jane Anderson, Executive Director of the Fulbright Association and David Levin, Fulbright Liaison at the U. S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs provided at the outset of this project. Thank you both for your support.

I am also grateful for the work of many special and gifted poets including Rita Dove’s, On the Road to Damascus; John Fox’s, Poetry; Langston Hughes’, Dreams; Emily Dickinson’s, This is the Land; and Suzanne Moody’s, Walking the Labyrinth: One Step at a Time.

I also have to thank D. Soyini Madison, whose work exemplifies the possibilities of performance ethnography and champions’ clarion calls for social justice, inspiring students, teachers, scholars and activists alike. Soyini, indeed, your work helped me hear the calls and see the possibilities of writing as performance and performance as writing—because of it, I was able to write throughout my book relationally, evocatively and embodiedly.

Finally to my daughter, Raquel, and family, thank you for the support you always give; support, which has deepen my personal and professional narratives in ways too many to count. And, of course, how could any of us ever write anything without that divine potential which dwells deep within all of us.

Prologue

The labyrinth awaits the sojourner-almost calls her name-Will you enter my boundaries and walk my ‘circular’ paths; travel my narrow rows, moving forward and backward again as the trail winds in and out. Will you pause to discover new perspectives and ponder fresh worlds? Emerge to a world of wonder with steps unencumbered as your transcultural pilgrimage rewinds one Step at a Time.¹

Why I wrote this book?

I wrote this book because the Fulbright Story moves me? It moves me to ask new questions and try new research strategies; questions such as why so many Fulbrighters return from their host countries extolling the virtues of the Fulbright Program? Why they say it changed their lives’? It doesn’t matter where in the world they go or what they do when they get there; whether it is studying Arabic in Morocco; teaching children to shoot cameras for peace in Bogota, Colombia; coming face-to-face with Markham’s ‘Man with a Hoe’ in the Burgundian hills of Dijon France; counseling women with no-names in Northwest, China; walking the ‘velds’ of Nelson Mandela’s beloved Sikelel iAfrika; participating in multi-university travelling seminars in India; studying ‘cinema’ and ‘theatre’ in New York City; or living as bush-girls in the wilds of the Chobe-Linyanti, Zambezi wetlands—the herald is still the same: My Fulbright experience changed my life.

What is it about the Fulbright experience that causes some Fulbrighters to say it changed their lives? Why some say, even, that it altered the course of their lives? As you will see in the stories (auto ethnographies) presented in this book, the Fulbright experience seems to produce, at least for some, a kind of stock-taking, a kind of looking inward. And, at the same time, acts like an ethnographic wide-angle lens refracting the abundant evidence of the effects of a persuasive and appealing look outward.

The Fulbright experience seems, thus, a kind of labyrinthine (e.g., in-betweeness) experience. Like the labyrinthian, who walks the labyrinth by first going inward and then outward, Fulbrighters, through lived experiences, walk their own labyrinth inwardly and outwardly; traveling to metaphoric centers’ or in-betweeness places. As I explain in Chapter 1, the in-betweeness place is synonymous to living in-between two different cultures. There the Fulbrighter battles with the pull and push of enculturative and deculturative processes. Like any battle, the battle between ‘old ways’ and ‘new ways’ of knowing produces a stress-adaptation-growth-dynamic. That is, an ongoing process during which stressful conditions (internal disequilibrium, cognitive dissonance, a sense of disorientation, feelings of rejection or antagonism towards the new culture) cause a change or shift in the person’s thinking and behavior toward the new culture. This change activates the growth process; one that performs not in a linear incontrovertible fashion, but in a draw-back-to-leap" forward type action:

The stress-adaptation-growth dynamic plays out not in a smooth linear progression, but in a cyclic and continual draw-back-to-leap representation of the present articulation of the interrelationship among stress, adaptation, and growth. [Sojourners] respond to each stress experience by drawing back, which in turn activates adaptive energy to help them reorganize themselves and leap forward. The process is continuous as long as there are developmental challenges.²

This ‘draw-back-to leap’ forward action continues until the Fulbrighter is able to establish and maintain a relatively stable, reciprocal relationship between h/his internal conditions and the intercultural environment. At the core of this ‘transformative learning’ is the aim of achieving an overall ‘person-fit environment’, integration between the Fulbrighters’ internal conditions and their environment.³ Thus, the Fulbrighter, like the labyrinthian, emerges from their stress-adaptational-growth experience with a greater sense of clarity, self-efficacy, self-awareness and inner-readiness.

Having experienced this kind of transformation some Fulbrighters say they will ‘never again look at their lives, professions or countries in the same way’; some leaving old professions-the ivy halls of academia, Fortune 500 companies, straight-lined American seminaries, corporate boardrooms and high powered blue-chip law firms—and joining the diplomatic service, the peace corps, and other foreign and national service works? Others take up the cause for social justice, helping others or simply doing the right thing right where they are, in their existing work and or fields of study.

But all come to know in their souls what they know with their heads-that the true essence of the Fulbright experience is to live it by being there! Being there, as in being-in-the-world. As in becoming who they are, their authentic selves; then emerging as transculture persons, citizens of the world and other oriented individuals. Such keenness and depth of perception can be seen and heard in the variety of voices, perspectives, and points of views strewn from one end of this book to the next. In fact, you will see one of the oldest principles of being versus doing—77r/saHO—played out on the pages of this book; Fulbrighters committed to the ‘work of the world’ instead of a ‘world of work’. You will see people who view service not as a flash in the pan or a fly-by-night trend but as an ever-increasing, ever-growing way of life! You will see, thus, what ‘being-in-the world’ versus ‘doing-in-the world’ looks like.

Preview of the Book

The book is divided into four sections. Section One consists of chapters one, two and three. In Chapter One, I introduce the purpose of the book and some experiential practices associated with the Fulbright experience. In practice, the Fulbright experience is a hybrid of learning performances-metaphorically conceived of as walking the labyrinth, living in the ‘in-betweeness’ and becoming transculture.

Chapter Two addresses some of the theoretical and practical claims of autoethnography. Some researchers claim, for example, that autoethnography is a way of writing about one’s self as other, as citizen of the world and transculture person.

In Chapter Three, I describe the research methods I used to collect data and analyze and interpret the scholarly narratives/performance autoethnographies. First, I sculpted an arts-based and a science-based methodology, one that allowed the fusion of art: narrative inquiry and one of the few scientific methods that blend the ‘cultural’ and ‘moral’ dimensions of research: the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) using the Intercultural Development Instrument (IDI). Second I used a bricolage of evaluative methods for analyzing and interpreting Creative Analytic Practices [CAP) such as scholarly narratives/ autoethnographies. In fact, I interlocked the evaluative strategies of CAP with a module of methods used to classify and organize different types of narrative analysis: The Holistic Content Reading mode, the Holistic Analysis of Form Reading mode, the Categorical Content Reading mode and the Categorical Form Reading mode. But above and beyond all of the methods, I took my cue from the narratives themselves—refusing to impose method or strategy if the narrative form didn’t, itself, call for it. To analyze the quantitative data collected with the IDI, I used area charts, bar charts and graphs.

Section Two presents the quantitative results of the data collected with the Intercultural Development Instrument (IDI).

Section Three presents my analysis and interpretation of the original scholarly narratives/autoethnographies. As stated above, to determine the creative-analytic practices (CAP) of the original narratives, I analyzed and interpreted them for (1) Substance: Does the narrative contribute in a substantive social scientific way to our understanding of social life? (2) Aesthetic Merit: Does the narrative succeed aesthetically? Does the author’s use of creative-analytical practices open the piece up and invite interpretative responses? Is the narrative artistically shaped? (3) Reflexivity: How has the author’s subjectivity been both a producer and product of his or her text? (4) Impact: Does this piece affect me intellectually and emotionally? Does it generate new questions or move me to write? Does it move me to try new research practices or praxis? I interlocked these creative-analytic practices with the analytical reading methods described above. Thus, Chapters 5 through 14 of this section is my Interpretative Analyses of the original narratives. In qualitative research, interpretative analysis is sometimes referred to as interpretative bricolage; "that is, an emergent construction of a coherent interpretation of the complexities of the author’s subjective and intersubjective experience.

As emergent constructions, the interpretative analyses present both a rigorous (analytical) and a flexible (creative) grid of fabrics, colors and textures imposed and superimposed upon each other. The reader will see, thus, an intricate merger of the creative and the analytical instead of a wholly linear, sequential or incontrovertible pattern; a pattern which is first captured, metaphorically speaking, by the interpretive-labyrinth foregrounding each of the 10 chapters in this section.

Foregrounding, Dick Arndt’s narrative (Chapter 7), for example, is a labyrinthine representation of the Burgundian hills of Dijon France where Dick came face-to-face with a peasant figure reminiscent of the character Markham’s Man with a Hoe. This artistic and somewhat enigmatic rendering demonstrates the success of the original narrative to invite interpretative responses; and, at the same time, satisfy the aesthetic merits of the narrator’s voice; what he voiced as meaningful about his Fulbright experience? As this labyrinth depicts, Dick’s encounter with the old-peasant marked a change in his world, a careful peeling away of myth, which he confesses had to be done before getting anywhere near French realities, near the honest stone under the flaking surfaces. It was, thus, in the rolling hills pictured in this artistic rendering that Dick began knocking heads with myth, to find the path that led out of the ivory tower’s maze, to learn the pain of démystification. The old man reminded him of the plural roots, which reached deep beneath an elite society-a presence, which hinted at the rich growth that could spring up in France and that could ultimately create another nation. «I cannot say that France taught me, as David Woo puts it… to prefer real hell to any imaginary paradise,» Dick said, «But it did its best, and I began to learn. «

The labyrinth bracing the threshold of Mary Heian Schmider’s narrative (Chapter 8) interpretably echoes the constellation of voices emerging from her story; some the voices of her female students—at Sts. Cyril and Methodius University in Macedonia and Lanzhou University in Northwest China—which had been shaped by these «traditionalist» societies. Others came from poets, feminist writers, and other literary voices she consulted to write her narrative. But above and beyond these voices is Mary Heian’s own voice—emerging and crystallizing out of her own questions surrounding the «feminine». In fact, what the reader sees here is an interpretive depiction of a labyrinthic experience in which the narrator self-consciously represents a semblance of her own voice through the voices of her students and the literary sources she consulted.

Aesthetically successful narratives amass a wide-spectrum of interpretations; hence the labyrinth of ecology awaiting the reader a-top-the-opening of Kira Murphy’s narrative (Chapter 6). This ecological rendering evokes the aesthetics and natural terrains of the Chobe-Linyanti-Zambezi Wetlands, consisting of streams and tributaries beckoning an assemblage of wildlife-elephants and hippos, lions and cheetahs and warthogs and rhinos. Having lived and embodied the movements and assemblage patterns of the wildlife associated with this wilderness place for a number of years, it became symbiotically rich and sacred to Kira—so much so that I, though never having physically engaged this culturally indigenized land, was able to sense the intense social and emotional identification she has with it.

Canopying the opening of Alex Fattal’s narrative (Chapter 9) is an artistic rendering of a seven circuit labyrinth whose narrow rows and circling pathways shout loudly: ‘shoot cameras for peace’. Alex’s work with 30 displaced youths squatting on the extreme outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia eclipses his own. He taught these youths to document their lives with photographs and ‘spoken’ narratives. Creating the project «Disparando Camaras para la Paz (DCP) (or «Shooting Cameras for Peace») can also be interpreted as an «in-betweeness» or a «stress-adaptation-growth» experience, in that, as Alex tells us, ‘it was difficult work’, work during which he lived that «draw-back-to-leap» forward experience.

The reflective drawing enriching the pages of Virginia Milhouse’s narrative, invites a bounty of interpretive responses; responses about time, dreams and Tirisano. Milhouse went to South Africa at a time when an ocean of times was at play. Bodily time moving slowly. Mechanical time ticking hurriedly. Circles of time, moving forward, sometimes backward, but at all times, time kept moving. The country had just elected its first black president, Nelson Mandela. A time when the people were both exhilarating and precarious; exhilarating in the sense they were resourceful and spirited, sensing a change in the air and readying themselves for it; precarious in the sense that they had both a measure of hope and anxiety about the changes that were taking place. It was a time that inspired ‘trust in’ and ‘dependence upon’ the good will and care of the people for the people. There was, thus, a tremendous spirit of Tirisano, a nation at work for the better of all—mobilizing communities, towns, cities and people to tackle enormous projects. People worked, not just with their heads and hands, but also with their hearts. One quickly got the impression that ‘service’ was more about who they were than what they did. I tried to capture this spirit in the illustration at the beginning of the chapter, which depicts a pair of ‘grateful’ hands framed in a rainbow of labyrinthian colors; colors which also depicts the spirit of a little country calling itself a rainbow nation; a nation upon whose pages I was privileged to scribble, even dream, a montage of aesthetic forms.

The illustration at the beginning of John Hope Franklin’s piece (Chapter 11), One America, is indeed the depiction of the walk of the proverbial labyrinth. As Franklin walked the long pathways of his Fulbright journey, he saw an America of many faces; faces arrayed in the ‘full spectrum of colors’—black, brown, red, yellow and white. And when you contemplate the symbolism of this Fulbright labyrinth, you get the feelings that all these faces are also painted upon the face of this warrior; armed with tools of scholarship that ‘strove’ him to triumph in ‘a world constrained by laws defining race; a world that created obstacles, disadvantages, and even superstition about race’. I believe the people in the countries serviced around the world saw a scholar-historian using the tools of his scholarship so that those who would come after him would continue the trek he started for a One America.

The illustration at the beginning of Roberge Gaston’s chapter, (Chapter 12), depicts the labyrinth as the ‘dance of dialogue’. The labyrinth as the dance of dialogue embodies the elements—understanding, perceiving and meaning—of universal language. What better way to learn about others than to learn the steps, movements, and rhythm—metaphorically speaking—of their dance? Pittman McGeehee says we also learn something about our own dance ‘steps’, ‘movements’ and ‘rhythm’ when we learn the other culture’s dance: If [we] don’t know other people’s [dance] we don’t know our own [dance]. Listening and dancing to the rhythm of the other culture taught Fulbrighters about themselves. A corollary of learning about their host culture was self-discovery and self-realization. It changed them and inspired in them a desire to make a difference. In other words, they emerged from their Fulbright labyrinthine experience ready to do the work in the world.

The labyrinthic symbol introducing David Allor’s narrative (Chapter 14) depicts a large Johari type 12-pane window-six panes leading inward and six panes leading outward. The panes leading inward are represented by a set of large question marks signaling the types of questions-open, hidden and unknown-David sought answers to as he traveled the intriguing pathways of his Fulbright journey. In that the labyrinth field shows a continuous circle of harvested illuminati, it also suggests a place of resolve or congruence between his stress-adaptation-growth situations. Thus, as he follows the six panes that lead outward, David gains a heightened sensitivity to other perceptions, other interpretations, and other justifications. For him ‘perception’ became more than a simple casual recording of appearances, but rather ‘a way of seeing’ that required a mental tolerance for diversity. Interpretation became an exercise in hermeneutics requiring him to look always for something else, to examine, to evaluate, to figure out.

In Chapter 15, Putting It All Together, I demonstrate how I put the analytic-creative strategies laid out above together. This chapter also demonstrates how an arts-based qualitative research method (i.e., narrative inquiry/autoethnography) can be fused with a scientific-based quantitative method—i.e. Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) using the Intercultural Development Survey Instrument (IDI)—to support, compliment and or correct each other. Chapter 15 is also the epilogue to the book.

Section Four consists of the original narratives. I include the original narratives so the reader can see the relationship between my interpretive comments and the author’s original words. For this reason, I didn’t edit or change the content of the original narratives in any way. In fact, as an intercultural ethnographer, I couldn’t do that. Nor did I want to. So you will see in this section their raw stories as they told them to me. In giving them the freedom to write their stories; they, in turn, gave me the freedom to imagine, embody, intuit and interpret theirs. Also two narratives were not given titles by the author. To maintain the authenticity of these narratives, I have not given them a title in this section. However, I do provide the authors’ name. The reader will also notice that the author of this book does not present a narrative in this section. This is because my authorial and narratorial comments (interpretative analysis) were combined and included as one chapter in the Qualitative, Analysis & Interpretation Section (Section 3). John Hope Franklin’s narrative is also not included here. As pointed out in Chapter 11, when I sat down to interview Professor Franklin, he strongly recommended that I read his book, Mirror to America. So with his written permission (signed consent), I drew from his book and wrote Chapter 11, which I titled One America. The reader is encouraged to read the book, Mirror to America, for an original account of my interpretative analysis. Finally, three of the chapters included in this section are reprinted with permission of the authors and publishers: Richard (Dick) Arndt, Roberge Gaston and David Allor who has since passed-on

References

Suzanne Moody’s, One Step at a Time, http://www.lessons41iving.com/poem.htm, 1999.

Kim, Y. Y. K, Becoming Intercultural An Integrative Theory of Communication and Cross-cultural Adaptation, 2001.

Samovar, L. A., and R. E. Porter, Intercultural Communication: A Reader, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication, 2011.

Section 1

Conceptualizations

and

Methodology

Chapter 1

The Fullbright Experience: Hybrid of Performances,

Walking the Labyrinth, Living in the In-Betweeness,

Emerging Transculture

The genesis for this book evolved from discussions with colleagues at the 2005 Annual Conference of the National Association of Fulbrighters in Baltimore, Maryland. One day, after a session entitled Increasing Diversity within the Fulbright Program, I facilitated a roundtable¹ on how to reach out and make the Fulbright experience more widely known to diverse populations in the United States. Although there was some trepidation that this type of effort might require a similar, if not the same, level of commitment demonstrated during our outreach and community service abroad, I was also aware that a corollary of our (e.g., Fulbrighters) service abroad is a personal commitment to outreach in the United States—that is, to bring that inner-readiness for service discovered during our Fulbright programs back to the U. S. and release it into communities, towns and other environments. But I would later learn that getting Fulbrighters involved in a dialogue about reaching out to diverse groups in the U. S. was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out how we would go about engaging in this effort without interfering with the Fulbright arm of the State Department’s normal outreach program to diverse groups in the United States. After agreeing to seek support from the Fulbright Association and the State Department, to better explain the point of the roundtable²,1 started on somewhat of a personal note, sharing my experience as a recent Senior Fulbright Scholar and Lecturer to South Africa where I learned to reach out and embrace a people whom I had been taught were not only forbiddingly alien but injuriously ethnic.

Though my original goal was to stimulate discussions about how to capitalize upon what we learned abroad as Fulbrighters—reaching out and promoting understanding and acceptance of the ‘other’—and transport the depth and breadth of it back to the United States, the roundtable proved to be much more than just a discussion. It was a celebratory event during which individual stories unfolded. The validity of previously held presuppositions and beliefs were challenged through critical self-reflections (i.e., reflexivity), enabling the reformulation and integration of fragmented moments, memories and lived experiences into performance autoethnographies: that is, performative writings³ such as the sample presented here:

Performance Autoethnography

Just prior to my departure, a colleague with whom I was having lunch said, You don’t want to go to that university (e.g., the university where I would do my Fulbright work) … it is the bastion of conservatism. He went on to explain that the University of Potchefstroomse (Potch) had the dubious distinction of being F. W. de Klerk’s old alma mater and that the AWB (or Woerstandsbeweging)—a right wing para-military Afrikaner organization—champions its prejudice by parading through the town of Potchefstroomse regularly to show solidarity and to mobilize resistance to the new South Africa. I had recently purchased several books on South Africa, which I had not gotten around to reading. But in light of this colleague’s most poignant questions, I decided to move them to the top of my reading list. I started with the book, De Klerk: the Man in His Time, written by Jonathan Ball in 1991. At one point in his book, Ball seems to suggest that both the university and its favorite son, if not dubious, were somewhat duplicitous in thinking and behavior. The book indicates, for example, that the University of Potchefstroomse taught its [law] students to both reverence the law and to exploit it for their own ends… and no one was better at this feat of doublethink than F. W. de Klerk.

During my stay, I got to see one of the parades of the AWB (or the Afrikaner Resistance Movement) when Professor Charles Viljoen from Potch, who was also my faculty associate, rushed over to my place and dragged me downtown to see this group he equated with the Ku Klux Klan. What I saw were an army of men dressed in pro-Nazi regalia and paramilitary bravado, parading around on black horses that pranced and galloped frenziedly about the town’s main square. Needless to say, that image was indelibly imprinted in my memory.

Despite this unfortunate event, I said to the group, my Fulbright experience was still the most transforming educational experience I have had. For me, it forged a direct relationship between intellectual knowledge and my day-to-day personal, social and moral actions. As such, my experience was what Denzin describes as a type of ‘performative ethnography’; or what Paulo Freire called ‘liberatory education’—transcending, in ways, even that of three purely conventional academic degrees. While the Fulbright program does not take away from academic education, it does heighten one’s awareness of conventional education as education without experience. Viewed from this perspective, the Fulbright experience brings education and experience together in a seamless-like manner—stitched/knitted together in such a way one is not able to tell where education stops and experience begins. It was thus this intricate interweaving of formal and informal educational venues that make explicable my reference to the differences in my Fulbright program and conventional forms of education.

Though, initially, I had to re-assess old presuppositions and move away from a worldview of us versus them—us versus otherness, which came after some honest attempts of self-reflexive cognitive reframing and behavioral code-shifting and, at the same time, seeking to serve and understand the other. In doing so, I came to understand myself better and why some define service as being synonymous with self-discovery in extension. The more I extended myself in service to others and engaged in community development projects, the more I learned about myself and my capacity and potential (e.g., inner-readiness) to serve. In turn the people at my host institution reached out and included me on both a collegial and friendship level. This was also affirming. Research shows that affirmation is a key component of self-discovery in transculture emergence. My Fulbright program also enabled the cultivation of lasting friendships and collaborations during which my faculty associate from Potch was hosted at my university for six months.

At this point I realized I had been doing all of the talking. I stopped. And as I looked around the table into the faces of the people sitting there—hoping that someone else would want to tell their story—I gotboth a sense and a sound of a group who had not just been consumers of my story but producers of it as well. They identified with the particulars (e.g., the in-betweeness, push and pull of the enculturative-deculturative and stress-adaptation processes) of the story and, as a result, began to self-narrate. That is, to speak about them in a self-recognizing or self-representative manner. I was conscious of a profound interconnection happening; the kind that narratologists⁴ say happens when stories resonate with their listeners or readers. When stories are constructed so as to articulate an appreciation of the essentially personal, coherent and ‘real’ nature of individual subjectivity as well as the linguistic and discursive structuring of self and experience they resonate with listeners in such a way that it is virtually impossible for them to render unimportant particular social or moral issues⁵. This seemed to be true for the members at this roundtable who, narratorially, entered my story and wrestled, as I did, with the social and moral issues presented in it. Because stories, metaphorically, contain a galaxy of signifiers, there is no special order for enteringthem—one only need the inner readiness to do so.

Thus, the roundtable members entered the story at the signifier most inviting to them. Some entered at the beginning of the story where I talked about the colleague who sought to warn me about the school I had been assigned to serve at. Others went directly to the middle of the performance and focused on the ‘AWB and KKK". And still others entered at the end where I talk about the act of ‘service’ as being synonymous with ‘self-discovery in extension’. One member of the group, for example, said: It [e.g., self-discovery as a result of her Fulbright] was a rewarding journey through which I learned to take risk and bump into my own fears and biases. As I did, it became easier for me to extend myself to the people I worked with in Finland.

Before long every person at the table had chimed in on how the particulars of the story had resonated with them. And when they began to suggest ways we could bring the breadth and depth of experience and understanding gained abroad home to the United States, this was the clearest indication that narratives—whether they are a rare form of storytelling or an avant-garde specimen of them—are transformative and connecting. Stories (or autoethnographies) are capable of capturing the hearts and minds of [listeners] in such a way that they are drawn into….[them] and, in turn, make it virtually impossible for the listener to render facile ethical decisions [about serving others].⁶

LABYRINTH and PURPOSE

Needless to say this event had a profoundly insightful impact on me. In fact, it rekindled in me an idea I have wanted to pursue every since my South African experience; that is, write a book about it. But it did more than this. It engendered also a sense of connection and kinship among the participants of the roundtable. And yet it wasn’t the roundtable so much as it was what the roundtable represented—a ‘space’ where we tapped into our individual and collective Fulbright experience. A space where our distinct individuality widen to embrace a ‘circle’ of persons ready to co-create and connect with each other and the energy (e.g., spirit, harmony, unity) hovering at the ‘hub’ of the circle. That is, a space where our inner readiness worked in tandem with this Fulbrightroundtable event.

My book focuses, thus, not on my singular individual Fulbright experience but the shared collective experience of Fulbrighters. I was especially moved by what sounded and felt like a new-found inner-readiness—an efficacy that moved me to write, to ask new questions and try new research practices. Questions comprising moral and cultural level variables. What is inner-readiness? How do Fulbrighters become aware of it? Is there something about the Fulbright experience that make Fulbrighters aware of their inner-readiness? If so, what is it? Finally, does inner-readiness contribute to our understanding of’otherness’? If so, can it help us become ‘transculture’ persons? Although these questions are inextricably intertwined, they comprise different multidimensional level values, beliefs, epistemological orientations and expectations; and are conceivably defined by a range of potential levels of analysis. Thus, to examine them, I needed a holistic research approach; one that allowed for the integration of the human (e.g., subjective) and cultural (e.g., intersujective) elements. I sculpted, therefore, an integrated arts-based (e.g., narrative inquiry) and science-based (DMIS-IDI) research method. This method is discussed in Chapter 3. I provide, here, a conceptual explanation of inner readiness.

Defining Inner-Readiness

To generate a conceptual understanding of inner readiness, I explored a montage of creative and poetic works—an action necessitated by the unavailability of contextually suitable constructions; one that required the stitching and patching together of bits and pieces of poem, prose and intuitive wisdom. In other words, the full essence of it could not be expressed in simple prosaic language alone, but necessitated the verisimilitude of expressions analogous to the poetic voice that comes from within.

I pulled, first, from the poetic works of the geneticist, Brian Sykes,⁷who tells us about the ‘seven daughters of eve’ with whom we share a common heritage—a built-in relational gene. A similar bit of research suggests the relational gene might have multi-relational capabilities.⁸As I point out in Chapter 11, One America, the relational gene is the gene that makes us want to relate; that makes us want to use what Reynolds-Benns calls ‘the language of the soul". Language that helps us reconcile problems with differences (e.g., dialogue, reflexivity, authenticity, creativity, imagination, contemplation, truth, love and forgiveness). This language, as I state in Chapter 11, can help expose ‘stuff’ that shouldn’t be in the soul. It can help us confront unacceptable actions and attitudes we are individually responsible for; like the times we have willingly overlooked the effects of antipathy on others even when we could see its consequences. When I read, for example, what John Hope Franklin said about Theodore S. Currier—his mentor and professor at Fisk University-that Currier was one of the most generous people he had ever known; and that it was because of Currier that he made the decision to become a scholar-historian. Thinking out loud, I said ‘Wow’! ‘What would make a white man take a young African American male under his wings and mentor and support him at a time in history when the laws of discrimination and segregation were at their pinnacle? History tells us that not only did society discourage this type of behavior during the era of Jim Crow; it severely punished whites that demonstrated such behavior. If Currier’s generosity wasn’t backed by society, where did it come from? And what does it say to us today? First, through his behavior—Currier is saying, ‘I will not be one of those individuals who willingly overlooks racism and its consequences’! Secondly, it says people, regardless of differences, can form solidarities and can create ways to combat unacceptable actions and attitudes toward differences.

But mostly, it tells us that Currier had a deeper understanding of our human connection? That unlike many in his and in our day, who chose/choose to concentrate on the differences in skin color, eye color and hair color, weight and height, he chose to listen to the voice of the ‘gene’ thattells us how ‘astonishingly close’ we all are! If Currier found a way to allow this ‘relational gene’ to work in his relationships in the height of the Jim Crow era of the early 1900s, what hinders us from doing so in 2012—a whole century and a half hence?

I also pulled from the work, Pearls of Wisdom: Pure and Powerful, by Peacock and Pilicy. This book does just what it says. It offers the reader pearls of wisdom-poetic, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and intuitive wisdom. Therefore, I pulled from it to help construct a definition of inner-readiness. I especially found the poem, That Something⁹ helpful. I recognized in it the qualities of the pearl-luminosity, clarity, depth and brillance—all hidden deep inside a fertileness, ready for extraction. Metaphorically speaking, this is what inner-readiness is like. It is naturally luminous, insightful and brilliant. Having no need for polishing, cutting or refining because, inner-readiness, like the pearl, is already ready to be brought forth.

I also pulled from the works of M. Scott Peck, who describes the ‘wisdom of the collective unconscious’ as the inherited wisdom of the experience of our ancestors.¹⁰Peck bases his argument on the archetypical theory of the well-known analytical psychologist,

Carl Jung. Recall, Jung was one of the first to say the collective unconscious is a part of the unconscious mind, shared by a society, a people, or all humankind; that it’s the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion and morality. Some question the plausibility of Jung’s theory. But if Brian Sykes’ theory of a relational gene is valid, then a collective unconscious is quite plausible. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Eve actually had seven daughters. And she passed this marvelously connecting, energy giving-relational gene on to them. Let’s say one of those daughters is a great, great, great, great, great, great, great ancestor of mine. Let’s call her Ursula, Eve’s oldest daughter. When Ursula grew up and got married she and her husband started their family, which also passed on the teachings, principles, practices and traditions of the familial society. Let’s say one of those old ancestral practices was Tirisano.¹¹I, a distant-distant relative, was introduced to this practice upon my first visit to Africa. And though I had never had any personal experience with it—or consciously thought of it—I identified with it when I first heard it. Or as Peck would argue ‘I recognized it’. I recognized it because ‘it was already there’! That knowledge and wisdom, which was first, planted in Eve and passed on to Ursula—through the relationship gene—was passed on to me. Though when I first heard it my conscious mind perceived it as something new. When in truth, I was discovering that something which existed in me all along. I pulled, thus, from Peck’s work to help construct a conceptual understanding of inner-readiness—that something, that wisdom, that knowledge that is already there. We just need the right type of environments to ‘bring it out’ or ‘lead it forth’.

Finally, I pulled from the works of a poem-maker who gives preeminence to poetry over prose when it comes to ‘experience’ of an intrinsic nature. One who believes our ordinary exterior experience is generally equivalent to prose and our internal experience is equivalent to poetry.¹² Using layers of poetic allegory-’rambling rose’, ‘winding rose’, ‘rose in the middle of a rose’-when describing things of an intrinsic (divine) nature, this poem-maker tells us that, "Within every rose [human being] is a miraculous place [human potentia] where the essence of roseness lives—like a rose in the middle of a rose. In fact, this is where the rose bush drinks from the source [e.g., Spirit, God, Jesus, the Tao, the Divine Mother], and where, moment-by-moment, roseness transforms into roses. Which is to say: at the core of our humanity exists an inexhaustible well of divine potential (or inner-readiness), and moment-by-moment we work to bring it forward into the everyday activities of our lives—including Fulbright ‘roundtables’. Furthermore, this poem-maker tells us that, It is not words that make poetry sacred, but the sacredness of poetry is made when the roseness that lives within a particular rose [human being] speaks to us and we listen to it. Thus, the poem-maker wants us to know that it is by connecting and listening deeply to the particular that we reach out to the universal and begin to hear the sacred message available to us."

So what is inner readiness? Inner-readiness is a spiritual, creative, emotional, intellectual, and intuitive inner-resource waiting to be brought forth. Once we become aware of it, we recognize it as a passion, vocation, calling, or life purpose. It is, then, combined with technical know-how and reconstituted into transculture skills and practices which are then used to achieve intercultural goals. This is essentially what Owen Barfield means when he says inner-readiness is an awareness of something coming not from out there but something drawn from the inner resources of our soul to be reconstituted in meaningful ways in the outer world such as in intercultural or transcultural contexts. Thus, inner-readiness, is like a brilliant pearl; slumbering in a bed of fertile ripeness waiting to be extracted and worn as a piece of fine jewery. Below I talk about ways, in which, Fulbrighters can become aware of this inner resource.

In-Betweeness mimics the Labyrinth

The performance autoethnographies in this book suggest Fulbrighters experience their Fulbright as an in-betweeness experience. As I attempt to show in this chapter and those that follow, this experience is capable of awakening the Fulbrighters’ inner-readiness. When living (in) the in-betweeness, Fulbrighters stuggle to integrate the deep structural values—ways of knowing, worldview, identity, religion and spirituality—of their culture with their host culture. This is a difficult stuggle because our deep-structural values are based on our inner and outer passions, morals and loyalties. As a result, we oppose different ways of knowing, thinking, believing and behaving. To protect our values, we deny, defend against, and minimize the values of others. In other words, a battle pursues between our ethnocentric (enculturative) and ethnorelative (deculturative) worldviews. This pull and push of the in-betweeness experience mimics the labyrinth. Like the labyrinth, in-betweeness awaits the Fulbrighter as he/she enters its pathway. Here the Fulbrighter’s journey begins; crossing treacherous borders and boundaries inhabited by different others. But the Fulbrighter pushes onward slowly, pausing to ponder new perspectives then moving forward along narrower pathways; but with the same determination circling and counter-circling, back and forth. The Fubrighter follows this winding trail to the center of their in-betweeness experience-that place of deep learning, where a fusion of enculturative and deculturative processes are integrated, establishing a new horizon. But this level of equilibrium can be achieved, only, by resisting the temptation to embrace the ‘one’ culture and rejecting the ‘other’. Thus, the Fulbrighter, after developing a heightened awareness of the host culture’s worldview, must integrate it with his or her worldview.

Eric Voegelin describes the in-betweeness struggle as the type of’pushing and pulling’ that goes on in-between the poles of man and of the reality he experiences.¹³ Rather than seeking to reside at one pole or the other, Voegelin suggests that we explore the in-betweeness experience. Question it. Probe it. Delve into it and leave no stone unturned because this can be a miraculous time of learning.

Indeed, if one were constructing allegories, in-betweeness might be called the allegory of Juilliard—a place where consciousness is born, where budding performers, playwrights and other artists go to discover their potentia, e.g., inner-readiness. Or the allegory of the University of WASEDA—a place where independent learning is promoted, practical knowledge is given precedence over theoretical knowledge and people learn to transcend the limitations of culture. Just as these performers get to watch themselves—in the splendid mirrors of song and dance and the hallowed halls of conquest—people in in-betweeness spaces also watch themselves—in fact, ‘see themselves’ developing, changing, moving forward, and performing possibilities. In other words, human beings can learn about themselves when they can see themselves in someway—through the lens of a camera, in the feedback from culture, and in the reflective pages of performance autoethnographies.

Thus, as illustrated in chapters 5 through 14, a lot happens to Fulbrighters during their stay in a different culture. Often they are forced to turn the ‘lens’ of the camera on themselves—even when they don’t want to! Let’s face it when you are in a space or culture where everything and everyone are looking at you, you are compelled to look at yourself-’see the self seeing the self’. For example, when Lizzie Buckner, a Fulbright contributor to this book, says:

"When I first came to Morocco two and a half years ago I had tried to place Morocco within the framework I knew from the US-trying to racialize a society that insists there are no races or ethnic differences, and demands to be seen as simply ‘Moroccan’. For my Fulbright, I knew I couldn’t do this. Quite simply, I realized that my assumptions, my categories for understanding social affiliations, don’t work over here. They just don’t-and if I wanted to understand Morocco, I had to adopt their way of looking at things. The problem with adopting a Moroccan worldview is actually more logistical than mental-1 can see differences in skin tones; my Moroccan