In Monday's class we did the Parable Activity. We were given a brief story about the interactions of five different characters and then asked to rank those characters from most approved to least approved. This was a very interesting activity - it was hard to judge the characters just with the bare-bone facts that we were given. None of them were terribly likeable. This activity raised many questions. How much did our culture influence the way we ranked the characters? There was one group in the class who used LDS theology to rank them into the three kingdoms of Heaven - clearly they were highly influenced by the culture of BYU. But one of the girls in my group was disgusted at how all the men treated the sole woman character - she is a declared feminist, so clearly her ideas and values affected how she would rank the characters. I am curious to know how South Africans would have ranked the people in the parable...would their rankings be similar to our prep class or completely different?
On a different note, I have been thinking about my project and how I will benefit from doing this project in South Africa, as opposed to a library, or a zoo in the U.S. Some of the benefits of actually going to a zoo are: seeing how the zoo attempts to educate the zoo goers; how the zoo brings in the entertainment side; I could survey zoo goers in person and see how they feel about zoos, if they feel like they are learning, if they even care about learning or just want to see a lion eat something; I could observe captive behavior first hand and see how zoo enclosures are designed to work with certain species; I could talk to the zoo managers and keepers, see where they get their animals from, if they have breeding programs, how they deal with animal health.
So why do I need to go to a zoo in South Africa? Besides just being a great chance to travel and interact with people of a completely different culture, going to South Africa would allow me to research or work with their conservation groups close up and personal; I could go do stuff at the Lion Park as well as the zoo, and maybe other parks as well; is there wildlife in the zoos or parks that is completely unique to that area, hard to find in other zoos? As I mentioned in my Statement of Intent, going to South Africa would be a great way to start networking, and a great way to get used to working with people and organizations from other countries, something a wildlife biologist has to do a lot.
I think I have a good argument as to why I should go do this project in South Africa.
I feel like one thing the parable activity revealed was how much diversity there can be in a group that presumably shares the same culture (for the most part). I noticed the same influences you did—LDS doctrine, feminism, etc—but it's interesting how differently these influences affected each individual person. So while I agree that it's interesting to speculate how a group of people from another place, like South Africa, might have ranked the characters in the parable differently from us, it's just as interesting to speculate how much their rankings might differ from each others' and why.
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