My Group as a Mediator

I think I have come to terms with one thing. This blog, and this making sense of my experience in Ghana process, will NEVER END!!!!!

I forgot a serious part of my experience in my conclusions on the authenticity of travel documentation. My group. My six obruni brothers and sisters. Without them, my experience would have been incredibly different. We all act and behave differently when we around around different people, and so much of my analysis of the day to day events were because I talked them over with Chase, or vented my frustrations with Maggie. Things also tend to be a lot more funny when someone is there to witness it. Pretty much everything you currently see on my blog would all be different if I would have set out for Ghana solo.

It helps that we all love each other. I still see them all on a weekly basis. No doubt they have been a positive influence on my field study, but I can't help but wonder how much more I would have immersed in the culture had I been alone. Maybe picked up more Twi? Made more friends? Won't know now, but it would have made for a different experience altogether.

Conclusions

This summer I set out to Ghana with an idea.  An experiment.  A crazy out there theory based project that I struggled to describe in one single sentence.  I wanted to know more about the nature of experience and the authenticity of travel documentation.  It was frustrating to see how European explorers like Henry Morton Stanley and Joseph Conrad had contributed to the stereotype of a “dark continent” of Africa based off of their limited interpretations of their experiences.  As a writer myself, I understand the desire to experience and the need to try to express these experiences as a personal kind of truth.  Still, how often do we consider the nature of how we experience a world foreign to ourselves, or the “truthfulness” or consequential effects of these accounts in regards to their cultural authenticity?  Whether these truths are more “truthful” than what really happened, we could find a copious amount of arguments stemming as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics, but truth was not what I was questioning here.  I was more interested in authenticity.   These questions were the fuel of my project proposal.  A lot has happened since I wrote my objectives, but I have been pleased to see that my project was a success.  Our experiences are indeed significantly subjective based on the way we see the world and the mediums we chose to record it in.