No Land�s Man

By internalizing experiences, we come to know, understand, and be inevitably transformed by our
experiences.

I can apply this assertion to my social and cultural experiences. When I do an analysis
of my self-concept, I do not readily see any major changes that have taken place over
time. These changes are not easy to identify because cultural change is very subtle, as
well as the fact that a self-analysis is often biased and ethnocentric. I am confronted
with a similar challenge when I try to analyze my culture of origin.

Who am I?
I often ask myself who I really am, and how my experiences with people from other
cultures have affected my individual culture. I used to consider myself to be an
outsider (tourist, observer or ethnologist) that visits places, observes people and their
cultures, and walks away with nothing but a memory, and at most a positive or
negative reaction to what is observed. This reaction is very important because it is a
manifestation that the observed activity and culture has been internalized. At times, I
feel a sense of assimilation to the American culture while other times I have a
passionate rejection for those elements of this culture that contradict my core beliefs
and attitudes.

Background Culture
I have always perceived my individual culture and that of my immediate group to be
different from the general culture of the social units that I have been part of. At the
root of this may be the fact that I come from a family with a strong sense of norms,
beliefs and traditions that dominate when in conflict with the more general values of
society. As a young boy, I observed and experienced different perspectives to
discipline and hierarchy among my brothers and sisters within the family power
structure. The ‘chain of command’ was determined by age rather than gender. I am
the lastborn and in my family, the girls are all older than the boys. Therefore, not only
am I at the bottom of the power structure, but all the male children in my family are
subordinate to the female members of the family. In many families at the time of my
childhood and even today, gender played and continues to play a significant role in
determining the roles, ambitions and career paths within families. To make the
difference between the general social and my family’s power structure clearer, unlike
the general atmosphere in the society at that time, the girls in my family held and
have continued to hold the positions of power within and outside the family.
Academically, the girls reached higher levels of academic achievement before the rest
of us. As such, there were ready examples of a different social structure compared to
what was characteristic of the larger social community where women’s ambitions
were limited. This demonstrated that any factor that limits achievement and success
needed to be ignored. This attitude helped me overcome limitations that could have
otherwise prevented me from achieving what I wanted as I grew up. Success stories
of this kind were often used to explain why giving up was never an option and why
hard work always had a reward.