Place is a necessary method to view world. It is something that must exist to explain or even define an experience. Through this lens, place becomes a deeply personal connection between a person and a location. Yet, it is still ignored by the vast majority of people. This phenomenon is explored in Keith Basso’s ethnography, “Wisdom Sits In Places” which presents a strong argument for place as an area for anthropological study by showing how vastly different Apaches experience place compared to Americans. Basso explores Western Apache culture and demonstrates through anecdotes how place can take on many different layers of meaning for different people. For them, place is representative of history, morality, meaning, and, most of all, wisdom. Similarly, for the modern Lewis and Clark student, place also takes on specific conceptions. In particular, The Bon cafeteria represents morality in the same manner as Apache place-stories.
Keith Basso describes how the Apache use place as a way to reinforce values instilled by stories that are intrinsically tied to a place. Specifically, place-names “stalk” people by reminding them of moral stories told by Apache elders whenever that place is seen or mentioned. He writes, “Ultimately, it is a model of how two symbolic resources – language and the land – are manipulated by the Apaches to promote compliance with standards for acceptable social behavior and the moral values that support them” (41). Similar sentiments of morality tied to place and language are ever present in modern culture at Lewis and Clark College, and it is incredibly evident in “winning” the Bon.
This story takes place 7:15 PM Thursday September 24, 2015. We are sitting around a round table in Fields Dinning Hall at Lewis and Clark College. However, only official documents ever call the cafeteria by that name. To everyone else, it is the Bon, named for our food provider, Bon Apatite, and it is simply a better name. The Bon is quick, catchy and easy to turn into a verb. Boning, lone-boning, and long-boning are all commonplace in the lexicon of Lewis and Clark students.
This night was a long-bon and we found ourselves in a very familiar situation. The six of us sitting around the table were all cross-country athletes, and we had all done mile repeats, one of the hardest workouts of the year, earlier that day. After the exhausting workout in the heat, we showered and came straight to the Bon to refuel with piles of carbohydrates, veggies and protein. We arrived around 5:45, an hour and a half earlier.
The bon had served some typical Bon faire; veggie stir-fry, falafel on pita, and chicken with potatoes, but we had all finished eating long ago and they had stopped serving as well. Some of the team members eating with us had already left to go study or do other classwork, but the five of us still remained, just sitting and talking. The remaining people included Kelin, Evan, Ivan, Boo, and myself, four sophomores and a senior.
Topics of conversation mostly revolved around the workout and upcoming race, but also included talk of music debates and mathematical theory. It’s the only time of the weekday where we are all in the same place and not working in practice, the only time where we can just relax with friends. At peak Bon hours, the cafeteria can get hectic and overwhelming, but it’s much nicer now that only a handful of people remain and the staff have began cleaning tables. Right around this time though, there was a lull in the conversation. Kelin began stacking her dishes.
“Ahhh, welp it’s about that time, gotta get going on that essay,” she remarks.
“No Kelin, you stay” Evan retorts.
Ivan chimes in, “Yeah, we can’t break our winning streak now!”
“Ughhh, I really shouldn’t…” says Kelin before she goes to drop off her dishes in the dirty dish collector. She walks toward the exit while the rest of us resume talking about the latest gossip. Kelin sits back down with us after making herself a cup of tea and grabbing another cookie.
This is where we stay for another 15 minutes talking while the few remaining people slowly exit the Bon. Soon, we are the last remaining table and a student worker comes up to us to tell us that it’s that time of the evening again. Before we leave though, Boo takes a quick Snapchat of us captioned “Bon Winners 2015”; it had been the third day in a row we had won the Bon by being the last to leave. We all drop off our dishes, grab bananas to go, and shuffle on out. Boo and Kelin head back to their dorms to do work and the rest of us head to the library.
“Winning” a place by being the last remaining seems totally arbitrary, and it is, especially considering the workers would be there long after we left. Nevertheless, for us highly competitive runners, it is a goal to be accomplished. More than that, it is an excuse. Besides devoting 2-3 hours everyday to our sport, we are all academically driven students and challenge ourselves in our other passions from music to math theory. Many of us, myself certainly included, deal with a lot of stress in our daily lives balancing everything we do, but at the Bon, none of that matters. We can just enjoy each others company in what is, for the most part, the entire extent of our social lives during the week. The Bon is a safe place for conversation and good times.
Yet, the Bon can be deceiving as well. Talking to Kelin afterwards, she explains how the Bon holds a certain allure. It is so easy to stay for longer then intended and end up procrastinating on work to do. Within the Bon is a constant conversation about the balance of social life and hedonistic desires with work and obligation in the rest of our lives. The answer is to this problem is never clear and as much as I love being in the Bon, there is always a voice in the back of my head telling me to leave and get to work. That voice is not unlike the “stalking” done by the Apache moral place-stories. It is easy to imagine a place-story about someone who never leaves the Bon and the consequences of abandoning his or her responsibilities come back to spite him or her.
In addition, language also holds expectations of morality within this example. Though it would have been perhaps more responsible for Kelin to just leave and get to work without being heckled, we still put pressure on her by reminding her of the Bon and our expectations to win. Our language was loaded with the expectation for Kelin to obey our moral standards of staying at our table while ignoring her obligations.
Morality is held within language and places in both Apache and Lewis and Clark cultures. This similarity is evident in “stalking” with Apache stories and “winning” the Bon. While we perhaps do not perceive place as important as the Apache, there still exist strong correlations in conceptions of place between the two cultures. This suggests that there may be more similarities than initially seemed. For instance, there could be further examples of deeper meaning and even wisdom sitting in places in modern Lewis and Clark culture as well. Other cultures surely also share some of these conceptions of place. There is so much more to explore now that I am aware of some of the deeper connections to place and language. Moving forward, it is important to be aware of the significance of place.
Citations:
Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits In Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico, 1996. Print.