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It is
not uncommon for incoming university freshmen to be advised
that they might change their major once or twice during
their undergraduate careers. For many, changing majors is
the result of negative experiences or unexpected demands.
For the rest, they discover a hidden passion elsewhere that
pulls them away from their original path and in doing so can
define their futures to a great extent.
Dr. Gregory Ruf, a prime example on our own campus, can be
found in the Asian and Asian American Studies and
Anthropology Departments. But he did not begin his academic
career as an anthropologist. He began his undergraduate
years at SUNY Cortland where he majored in political
science. During his time there, he became interested in
Cortland’s study abroad programs, particularly those to
Europe. With those tours being filled and their waitlists
miles long, he instead opted to take his first opportunity
to go to China. So he went along with other Cortland
students as well as some from Cornell.
Study
Abroad students have widely varying reasons for traveling to
a foreign country. Some just want a vacation of sorts, some
want to learn language and culture by immersion (as opposed
to formal classroom settings), and others are looking for an
adventure. No matter the differences, these students all
share the initial exposure to language and cultural barriers
when traveling to countries where English is not the
official language.
Professor Ruf, intending to forestall as many awkward
moments as possible, took it upon himself to learn how to
say and read a few basic words before he left, including the
Mandarin equivalent for ‘toilet,’ ‘bus,’ ‘eat,’ ‘boy,’ and
‘girl.’ His fascination with cryptography was a major
motivating factor in learning more and more of the Chinese
language, with particular interest in the ‘cognitive
semantics’ of the language - the characters, while complex,
tend to have a ‘radical’ that hints at the character’s
meaning and a phonetic component to give the reader an idea
of its pronunciation. As he put it himself, mathematics and
language are ways of encoding and transmitting information;
if you can break the code, you are at a great advantage.
When he returned to Cortland, he wanted to delve further
into the language and also to see more of ‘ethnic’ China –
to look at what is on China’s frontiers. (China has 53
officially recognized minority nationalities!) His
experience in China and in an introductory course in
cultural anthropology galvanized his interest in discovering
the universal themes that can be found in any culture. The
fact that this way of understanding the world was required
to apply across cultures was the main attraction for Prof.
Ruf, and China became the venue for its exploration.
Of
course, this was no trivial enterprise. The language barrier
still presented an issue. At the conclusion of his
undergraduate education in anthropology, he won a
scholarship to study Chinese language in Taiwan. For him,
the key to taming the language in such a way to make up for
a ‘late start’ was to put himself in a truly immersive
environment and, as he says, “leave English behind.” To
further improve fluency, Prof. Ruf suggests a combination of
classroom instruction and exposure to the colloquial use of
the language through watching TV, movies, by listening to
the radio and by talking to locals on a day-to-day basis.
Prof. Ruf spent a two month stretch in Yunnan province at
one point and his spoken Mandarin became fluent enough to
have discussions over the phone only to genuinely surprise
the person on the other end when they met face-to-face.
Although his earlier work on China, which considered the
structure and processes involved in local community
formation, and his more recent work on water quality
management issues have been some of the products of his
research, he notes that none of this would have happened had
it not been for the “singular experience” – the
life-changing event he had when he had the opportunity to
visit China. He went on to get his doctorate in cultural
anthropology at Columbia and its famous East Asian
Institute, then a postdoc at Harvard followed by a Fulbright
to Yunnan U.
Now, almost 7 years since he last set foot in China, Prof.
Ruf wants to make the same opportunity available to Stony
Brook University students at an affordable cost and of
commensurate quality. The goal, as opposed to typical Study
Abroad programs, is not intensive language study. Instead,
students in this “outside classroom” will make their way
through directed readings about certain Chinese localities
and then visit them shortly thereafter to see their social,
political, economic and historical aspects as they exist in
their natural conditions.
This sort of exposure is far more instructive than the
‘biopsied’ displays we see in museums. Seeing modes of
subsistence and how ecology interacts with the humans who
have developed methods and tools to control it (e.g. swidden
horticulture) will help to show how those in rural China can
and do live without much of what we consider vital to our
everyday function (e.g., electricity, the internet, etc.).
The trip will begin in Beijing with visits to those places
in the city that it would be difficult to return without
saying you had been to - the Great Wall, Forbidden City,
Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, as well as the new Olympic
venues. From there its off to Xi'an, the city of thousands
of terracotta warriors buried thousands of years ago in the
Qin Dynasty, and a night in the old city Muslim quarter.
Then the real trip begins. The Tibetan plateau in Qinghai
Province, sleeping in a yurt, visiting a Tibetan Monastery.
Then down to Sichuan, home of the panda, terraced rice
farming, and the Leshan Giant Buddha. Then Yunnan, Prof.
Ruf's "home" in China, with its tropical forests and the
province with over 20 different minorities, each with their
own culture. Then off to Guangxi and Guilin, the famous odd
shaped mountains seen in Chinese paintings.
If you
are interested in participating, and perhaps having your own
life changing experience, please contact Prof. Ruf at
gruf@notes.cc.sunysb.edu as soon as possible. Space in
this program is very limited.
The
month long program, running from August 1st - 26th, will
cost $2990. plus round trip airfare. All hotels and meals
are included. If you want to do it for academic credit too,
its regular SBU tuition credit rate for instate or out of
state students and will depend on how many credits you take.
Six different courses will be offered in both Anthropology
and Asian and Asian American Studies. More details are in
the brochure at the link below.
http://www.aaezine.org/articles/vol21/ChinaStudyAbroad09Brochure.doc
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