Traffic lights, implosion and seeing the light

The role of curiousity in forming a more perfect union

This is a post-script to my traffic light post. It turns out the notion of taking the traffic light out of its context, from a corner in Fairfax, VA to a corner in Delhi, India to gain insights is a tried and true ethnographic technique called implosion. Its a thing. My professor, Sarah Besky, walked us through a small group exercise where we selected an object and subjected it to a series of questions that looked at the object from different lenses. She shared two insights I found beautiful:

• Nothing means something on its own.

• In implosion, we ask the thing: "How is the thing in the world? and how is the world in it?"

She explained that, ultimately with implosion, our task was to ask what we knew about the object, ask why we knew it and assess what we don't know. The process itself can be systematic, asking questions about the object from different lenses such as the object's history, the social narrative about the object, how its made, or other angles to help you understand how the object came to be and what it might “mean.”

I loved how this process can reveal, in small and large ways, the very human behaviors and stories a culture has built around the object. The process has the power to reveal the different relationships a group of people or culture has formed with that object. It allows us to explore these connections a particular group has with the object.

I like this because its very enlivening; its like holding something up to the light  that is otherwise an every day object and seeing how the light shines through. My group selected a water bottle, but it could have been a cricket bat or a talking stick. There's no one truth, just layers of insights and what's fun are the ones that surprise you.

One exercise was to take the object out of its natural context to better understand it in that context. I LOVE THIS. Let's go back to the traffic light. By going to a place where the traffic light didn't exist, I got to ask what else was going on in that environment that served the same function. In this example, it helped reveal how a homogeneous culture can organically organize itself to set norms of behavior in some situations for which a non homogeneous would turn to codified regulations. So imaging a situation in Delhi helped supply a sliver of context for and insight into governance in American neighborhoods.

Going back to the water bottle: what does a plastic disposable bottle of water mean in the desert? The bottle offers safety and survival, even functional use as a container. Digging, we realized the water bottle held the most meaning for a person who is distanced from or disconnected to the source of this naturally occurring element. (You could extend the enquiry deeper coming back to a busy street corner in NYC, where people didn't ubiquitously carry around this product 20 years ago. Were they less disconnected than people now?) Remember, all civilizations start by living close to a water source. Ultimately, to us, the plastic bottle of water represented a group of people who have gotten distanced and disconnected from their environment, from the source of this natural resource even to the extent of using a product that pollutes the source itself. Cool, right?

The beauty of this exercise is that it offers us a way to "see" a thing, a system, perhaps even a world from another's context, from their point of view.

We need more of this in our world. Its not enough anymore just to be culturally, religiously or racially sensitive. We must be willing to lose what we know, to see our connections to a thing as just that: "our" connections.

We must be willing to lose what we know.

This immediately frees us up to understand that if we have ours, others have theirs. The important part is that we don't need to fight over which version is more correct or better. That is flawed. They are different and they need to be different--they come from a different place, serve different needs and represent different people. The problem occurs when we  transfer our connections, our meaning and narrative to a place where they don't necessarily apply. This is a humanitarian reason for approaching something with curiosity. We must be willing to lift up a thing we think we know to see the other human stories beneath it. We must be willing, not just to ask how a thing is in the world and how the world is in the thing, but also to be surprised by what we find.