Case studies | 1. Kind Owl
“What is a rite? — said the little prince. — It is also something too much forgotten,” said the fox. It’s what makes one day different from other days.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The first object in this collection is a small stone statue of an owl. Approximately 20 centimeters tall, 10 centimeters wide and weighing about 3 kilos, it has been with the family for about 20 years and now rests in the library of the house. It wasn’t until a few months ago, when I started working on this project, that I took an inquisitive interest in this object, and this began by asking my mother “what is this?”, and she said “that’s Grandma’s totem”.
Having lived in a household with my younger sister, mother and maternal grandmother, one learns about their lives, their likes and dislikes, interests, dreams and experiences. While I had a general idea about what my grandmother has experienced in her 92 years of life, it was when I began the analysis of this object that the image about a particular period in her life became clearer. When in the interview I asked her about what she feels when she sees the statue, she answers: “Santander, my home, the countryside where we lived”, referring to where the family was founded when her parents got married in 1925. On the other hand, this object also represents the stage of life in which she served as a guide of the Girl Scouts group of the German School of Cali, this explained by her eldest daughter, my mother. Although this object may represent these two moments in my grandmother’s life history, this does not occur in the same proportion or in the same way.
There is no exact date as to when the statue was purchased; it was a gift to the interviewee from a relative when he went to visit Santander. When he gave it to her, both she and her daughter remember that this person “brought it to her personally, because of the symbol it has”. This symbol she mentions refers to her totem, given to the Girl Guides of the Girl Guide movement at a national meeting of Girl Guide leaders held in 1993.
This movement had its origins in 1909, when the founder of the Scout movement, Robert Baden-Powell, held a Boy Scout rally at Crystal Palace in London: “He was surprised when a group of girls introduced themselves as Girl Scouts. He decided that, if they wanted to participate, they should have their own name and movement, a program suited to their needs.” (Emearos & Emearos, 2019). It was from this event that the Girl Guide movement began to be shaped and in 1910 it was officially founded and led by Baden-Powell’s older sister named Agnes, but even before the Association was made official, several organized groups of women scouts were being formed and all with the same goal of giving: “the opportunity (for girls) to develop physically, mentally and spiritually” (Emearos & Emearos, 2019).
The totem is a tradition that was promoted by the founder of the scouts and they consider it as a “second identity”: “Baden-Powell was already totemized after the siege of Mafeking, when the natives called him <Impeesa> (wolf that never sleeps)”. (The Totemnization., 2009). This ceremony varies depending on the national organization, in some cases the totemized choose the next to go through this ceremony, in others it is the same person who chooses the animal with which they want to be identified, but in the case of the national organization to which my grandmother and my mother belonged, the totem is built by the group from the moment the person becomes part of it, through different exercises that the members perform and that show different personality traits of the members of the group and thus come to the surface. An example of these exercises are the camps or meetings that are organized at a national level and for which each member of the group is responsible for some element such as tents, sleepings, food preparation, activities, etc. Their level of commitment, execution and the way they perform are evaluated by the guides who take notes. These traits are put into words with which they identify the companion and are then associated with animals that represent them. In the case of my grandmother it was owl: for the wisdom she represents as the oldest and founding member of the group of the German School of Cali, and the distinctive trait assigned to her as a surname was kind for her personality and affection with which she treated each member of the group.
Looking at the trajectory of this object it is clear that it is intimately linked to the experience of its owner, as well as the process she underwent in founding the guiding group and being involved in its activities directly or indirectly for more than 50 years. This could be considered a liminal process: in the sense of Turner et al. (1995) who describe liminality as a state in which the individual experiences a significant transition or transformation in her life and moves from one condition to another within a group. The interviewee recalls the moment when she suggested to the school rector to create a Girl Scout group arguing that “there is already a scout group, why isn’t there one for girls?” and the rector replied “you take care of it”, even though at the time she had no experience and was not a member of the Asociación de Guías Scouts de Colombia (Colombian Girl Scouts Association). This process of transition and change in which she was finding her position as a guide is also applicable to the object itself and the way in which it was filled with meaning both for her and for the group that gave her her totem and identified her as such, since as both my grandmother and my mother remember: “it is hard to understand at first why they give you that name and surname”….
On the other hand, the reflections of Douglas (2002), on how objects manifest meaning in the way they are made, used and discarded, and applying it to this case, it can be seen how the statue from the moment it was acquired already had a particular symbology generated by the role that its owner played as a guide of the group. In addition, the object manifests that meaning in the way it is used as a decoration and indicator of the space it occupies in my home. This Owl statue marks the section in the library where all the books, magazines and photocopies that my grandmother collected and kept on guidismo are kept.
This symbolic dimension, as Geertz (1973) explains, is a cultural product, a social fact through which cultural relations and structures can be read, which in this case is given by the social recognition that the owner obtains for having founded this group and having guided it for more than 40 years of service, impacting the lives of hundreds of girls and young women in the city of Cali who still remember her and maintain contact with her.
