*Countdown Reflections 2: Background

After my initial proposal was deemed unfeasible with my present status (if I pressed it, inevitably arduous labour and absurd bureaucracies would have been in store - which also meant pushing my connections, my parents' connections, and finding the right people to talk to so that I could get through these hoops; something I definitely did not want to go through), I had to rethink what I was going to do and it had to be soon. Time was precious and even though, at least, 3 years were ahead of me, I didn't want to waste any of it without a dissertation topic. The block to my initial proposal became an impetus to retrace the steps in my thinking/intellectual history, the process, and re-hash my fascinations with religion; all the while chuckling to myself with the irony of being in a theology and religion department.

I won't go into my personal background growing up as a 1.5 Korean-American (born in Korea, migrate to U.S.), oscillating between two distinct countries, although - to be narcissistic - if I took my self as an object of reflexive study, it would be pretty interesting! Catholic yet still participating in the customs of "filial piety", tradition, and rituals. But I digress, identity is complicated and warrants much more than a blogpost.

Before college, I became quite curious with how and why people think the way they do. If we evolved to be the way we are with specific capacities that enabled the diverse expressions of being human across different cultures and yet maintaining a singularity as a species, then how do we approach the human as a subject of inquiry. I gave it thought, and my limited exposure to what I could study, my conclusion was to study the brain. Without the brain, we were not much and it seemed that we understood very little about it. So I enlisted as a Biology major with specialization in Neuroscience (and to quell my mother, like a good son, I enrolled in pre-med). After a year or so, however, I dropped pre-med real quick; I had no intention of becoming a medical doctor and prolonging people's lives was not something I was interested in. I'd rather work towards bettering the quality of life and change the structures of society that prescribe the inhibiting parameters for human flourishing and human thought. So, to make a long story a bit shorter, I changed my major to psychology and then again to a joint major in philosophy and psychology. This allowed me to read a lot of philosophy and psychology on the subject while giving me enough space to do lab work in neuroscience. During this time I was influenced by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment (and as the major demanded, I went through the typical readings in ancient and modern philosophy), and would go on to develop a strong desire to learn more about East Asian thinkers - there wasn't much room to do this, so I did what I could on my own (<insert comment on white curriculum>). I also read quite a bit of work in psychology (social, personality, developmental, cognitive, and neuropsychology). Somewhere during this time, I began reading evolutionary anthropologist/psychologists. Pascal Boyer's 'Religion Explained' (2001) was illuminating and I was captivated by this line of thought, which led me to read more on the side. But before I could understand religious identity I wanted to understand human psychology in general. I wrote a thesis on the self and the emergence of identity through the accumulation of memory.

As an MA student in philosophy, I would continue to work on trying to understand the self and the construction of identity. My thesis argued that philosophers only got half the picture. Because they argued from a phenomenological perspective, their constructions and reflections were, by default, limited. I took David Hume, Richard Rorty, and Galen Strawson and compared their accounts of the self with, what was at the time, contemporary "science": a combination of genetics, twin studies (identical twins separated at birth and then re-united), developmental psychology, primatology, neuroscience, personality psychology, memory studies, lesion studies, etc. In this sense, I argued against those who said that the self was an illusion: a centerless social construction. The philosophers, I mentioned above, argued this position and Rorty, in particular, argued for us to create a new vocabulary that would change the self; within this argument was a real bastardization of Nietzsche and Freud while obsessing over this emphasis on being "original." I reacted against it. Genetics played a bigger role than we thought in creating the parameters for how our personality, intelligence, and more would manifest. Not in a deterministic manner but it also wasn't all just due to culture either. In a sentence, there was a biological individualized (historically unique) center and from that center a socially constructed personalized identity emerged via experience. In this sense, I argued for what is now recognizably a dual-process model of self; using the horrific terms of an "actual" and "metaphorical" self, the argument was a nature via nurture view of the self. And it was this side of a nurtured perspective that gave reign to the construction of an identity relevant to one's social and cultural structures comprised of social relations. I know many have an aversive reaction to the term "human nature", which tends to be equated with essentialism - racism, sexism, and colonialism. But I would argue that these are two different things and, in my mind, I provided a naturalist account against essentialism. In retrospect, I suppose it is somewhat of a Boasian perspective: we all shared a biology that plays a significant role in our development but we have to understand persons within their cultural and historical contexts. 

After the MA, I applied to doctoral programs in anthropology but to no avail. I returned to my parents place with a humanities degree and no prospect or idea for the future. I just followed where my mind went and blazed it through academia. Ended up getting a job in a psychiatric hospital (worked as a mental health worker), worked in a criminal defense law office, became a philosophy adjunct, worked as a janitor for Energy Solutions Arena - somewhere in this timeline I enrolled at the University of Utah to do more in anthropology and really focus on religion. Work and school. In earnest, I didn't really like most of the courses in anthropology, but there were a few that really drew me in and the courses on the Anthropology of Mormonism and Native American Religions were probably the two that really did it for me - I might have learned the most in those two courses and they have certainly impacted my thinking in ways the other courses did not. Being the way that I am, I also took courses in psychology and philosophy. Both of which were not as impressive, but I learned from them nonetheless primarily in the way of being exposed to interesting literature. The theory of cognitive dissonance - something I didn't pay much attention to previously - became a point of interest and I developed an interest in combining psychology with anthropology: did interviews with Mormon missionary sisters in Temple Square (which would ultimately get me kicked out lol), spent two to three months attending a Korean Mormon church, and did interviews with gay Mormons in Salt Lake City. Each was an attempt to blend the methods from anthropology and psychology. My interests began to snowball in this overlap and the relationship between individual and society increasingly became an interesting area of study for me.