Inquiry Student Cross-Cultural Field Research

THE JOURNAL OF INQUIRY STUDENT CROSS-CULTURAL FIELD RESEARCH VOLUME 8 • SPRING 2014 CONTENTS Breanne Ackerman, SOCIOLOGY Interaction and Identity: A Community of Practice’s Impact on Social Cohesion in Multilinguial McLeod Ganj, India Richard A. Bruner, HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Mr. ______, From Masaka Hill, With a Missile: Who Assassinated Rwandan President Habyarimana? Michael Patrick Curry, LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES How Money Grows on Trees in Peru: Agroforestry as a Solution to Poverty in Granja Porcón Carter Martyn Newey, EXERCISE SCIENCE Choices and Barriers in Rural Mexican Healthcare 1 THE JOURNAL OF INQUIRY STUDENT CROSS-CULTURAL FIELD RESEARCH VOLUME 8 • SPRING 2014 CONTENTS Interaction and Identity: A Community of Practice’s Impact on Social Cohesion in Multilinguial McLeod Ganj, India Breanne Ackerman, Spanish translation ............................................................................................ 3 Mr. ______, From Masaka Hill, With a Missile: Who Assassinated Rwandan President Habyarimana? Richard A. Bruner, history and international development ............................................................. 19 How Money Grows on Trees in Peru: Agroforestry as a Solution to Poverty in Granja Porcón Michael Patrick Curry, Latin American studies ............................................................................. 37 Choices and Barriers in Rural Mexican Healthcare Carter Martyn Newey, exercise science ............................................................................................ 49 Interaction and Identity: A Community of Practice’s Impact on Social Cohesion in Multilingual McLeod Ganj, India by Breanne Ackerman, Spanish translation In 2010, I explored the patterns of social interaction in McLeod Ganj, India. Through a case study there I saw how the communities of practice formed around different social domains of interaction and transaction and the impact they had on the cohesion of those groups. When different ethnic groups form communities of practice across language barriers and social identities, their focus on common goals and interaction may strengthen social cohesion. However, habits and customs set distinct patterns of interaction in different social domains. In McLeod Ganj, in domains (such as education) where interaction brought an understanding of shared identities, as well as a respect for differing identities, communities of practice often made room for more friendships and understanding between ethnic groups. Domains that focused more on functionality (such as business) did not encourage the same cohesion. The closeness of different ethnic groups could be related to the nature of the social domains where they usually interacted. Introduction As we sat in his shop looking out on the colorful streets of McLeod Ganj, India, my Kashmiri neighbor Suresh1 boasted to me that he could identify most people’s nationalities with just a quick glance. He would call out to them the appropriate shalom, namaste, good morning, tashi delek, or greeting in whatever language he guessed their mother tongue to be. Even if Suresh knew little of his customers’ language besides that initial greeting, he said those welcoming words were good for business, because they caught people’s attention and gained a little bit of con- fidence. Suresh told me he knew he could communicate through pantomime if he could just get that first step in the door. His words not only showed me the impor- tance of language as a primary identifier among people, it also showed me that individuals are willing to work together in many ways if they are brought to step across their initial ideas of limitation and difference. As I spoke with Suresh, I thought how in my hometown in the U.S. people do not have the same knack as the locals of McLeod Ganj to pantomime with perfect dignity in order to communicate. My neighbors at home were not as used to dealing with obvious cultural differences either. McLeod Ganj held a completely new pat- tern of social interaction and cohesion because, in order to operate, the individuals in McLeod had to cooperate. In this community, I wanted to learn if these people who were used to working together across differences in language, ethnicity, and culture also chose to build relationships together as friends and neighbors across 3 INQUIRY those same lines. I wanted to understand if the increased contact between these groups, and the way they crossed over what other cultures viewed as strong social boundaries, had strengthened social cohesion. McLeod Ganj, India McLeod Ganj is a small town in Dharamsala, stretched along the arms of the Himalayan foothills in northern India. It has been a refugee town since 1959, when the Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama, felt it necessary to flee his home after China had claimed sovereignty over the Tibetan region. The Indian government accepted the Dalai Lama and the other Tibetan refugees, designating the Dharamsala area for the Tibetan government in exile. English was decided upon as the lingua franca there, in order to enable better communication with the Indian people in the local area, as well as with those is the United Kingdom and the United States (Gyatso 1990: 150). Throughout the intervening years, Tibetans have flooded to the area. Coming from the distinct regions of Tibet, they brought with them cultures that were markedly different and dialects that were not always mutually intelligible. These Tibetans gathered to McLeod Ganj in order to preserve their culture and religious freedom. More recently, Westerners have also gathered there to learn more of the Tibetan culture and religion, for tourism, and for education. The presence of so many Westerners has brought Indians from other states to join the local Indian population in doing business. All of these groups and a few other nationalities have combined in this small mountain town to create an environment where people are accustomed to mingling with others quite different from themselves. From an Original Hypothesis There are many ways to identify oneself with social groups. People are born into some groups, they are assigned to other groups, and they learn and choose still more groups. Three possible groupings are speech communities (Ruiz 1984), e.g., Eng- lish or German speakers; social identities, e.g., Christians or Haitians; or communities of practice (Wenger 1998), e.g., members of a soccer team or work crew. Because mem- bership in a community of practice may be learned and does not always require a set identity or language, people can cross barriers that other methods of social grouping cannot. For example, an American, Christian English speaker could join the community of practice of the Tibetan Women’s Association, even though she is not of the same primary speech community or social identity. With so many different peoples living together in McLeod Ganj, I felt that how individuals participated in communities of practice would be an important way they identified themselves in addition to their speech communities and social identities. I expected to find that residents of McLeod Ganj participated more frequently in interracial interactions because they were part of many different communities of practice that included different languages and social identities. I expected that this flexibility in crossing language and identification lines would bring about more social cohesion between ethnic groups. 4 ACKERMAN Through the course of my research I found that the residents in McLeod Ganj did interact across barriers of language and social identity to form many strong communities of practice, but there were distinct patterns in how, when, and why different ethnic or language lines were crossed to form these communities of practice. Established norms and some prejudices largely directed how people chose to group together in different social domains. The nature of the social domains where ethnic groups interacted often affected how strong the personal relations were between the groups. In this small town of so many cultural groups, people were still very aware of how they interacted with those around them and with whom they chose to group themselves. Methods and Limitations In order to understand more about the community of practice’s impact on social cohesion, I conducted a three-month qualitative case study in McLeod Ganj. I conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews with members of the community, including Tibetans, Indians, and Westerners. I also led focus groups with students, where they discussed social topics together. I recorded most of these interviews and discussions in order to analyze and understand them more fully. I also attended many community events and recorded and analyzed the functions and interactions in which I participated in a daily field journal. I gained valuable understanding of the culture by living with two Tibetan families, one that had lived in India more than thirty years and one that had come from Tibet five years before. This allowed me to understand some of the differences in lifestyle between the Tibetan newcomers and the more established Tibetan residents. I built rapport with Indian shopkeepers in the area. My participation in Hindi classes also gave me valuable access to the Indian community through the friendships I formed with my teacher and her friends and family. There were naturally limitations to the depth and comprehensiveness of my study due to the brief length of my stay and my own language barriers.

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