Goulet.pdf

Jeanne Simonelli, Erin McCulley, and Rachel Simonelli
the obvious sense of self-worth, it lets others see we are willing to
learn what it is to be a part of their communities, both physically
and mentally. Just as the people and cultures we observe have gifts
to give us, we have gifts to give them in one way or another. The
only way to know what gifts we can give is to have involvement
outside the normal classroom world, to learn and observe, to both
teach and be taught. With what we learn outside the classroom we
can better teach our own peers; even our professors can learn from
the knowledge and experience that we gain. The classroom is the
manual, the guideline to what you will see and feel. The actual ex-
perience outside the classroom is when you learn firsthand how to
operate your own mind and adapt to the world as a young adult. It
is only with these skills that we can be scholar–activists, having the
courage to use our anthropology to make a difference.
Our students may someday go on to be anthropologists, using their
experiential learning as part of further research. But more than likely,
like the veterans of both the Southwest and Chiapas Projects, they
will be lawyers and social workers, teachers and nurses and doctors.
Or they will have learned, like Elanor, to take pride in being stay-at-
home mothers; the Maya wrap the baby rides in is not just a fancy
rebozo but a wrap of learned cultural values that put hope into our
own sometimes dismal American future.
Our presence in fieldwork settings remains positive only if it does
not create more problems than our activities are worth. Though the
1999 Chiapas program only nibbled at the edges of Zapatista Chi-
apas, all that we learned in those initial experiences made what fol-
lowed with Zapatista communities possible. Trust, like the informa-
tion gleaned from anthropological fieldwork, is cumulative, and it is
expressed in many ways, as when the Zapatistas approved our pro-
posal to write a book about them after six months’ considering our
proposal. The Chiapas project has opened doors to other exchanges
with Zapatista communities, a shared learning process in which each
finds out more about the other. We receive formal commentary on
the value of the exchange: “We appreciate your valiant cooperation
for the resistance of our pueblos and for having considered autono-
mous education as one of the priorities of our communities. We send