Living within tangent worlds
Parallel realities can be an exciting topic for sci-fi enthusiasts and new age gurus, but how is that useful for a Social Scientist?
In my short history as a researcher, I’ve gone through different fieldwork environments that ranged from semi-rural towns with no more than 500 people to cities populated by millions of people. Honestly, I can say I’ve seen some crazy stuff going on all over Perú and Latin America.
In this context, parallel realities translate into our capacitiy as species to build complex belief systems that enable the growth of shared truths. Ultimately, this systems configure how people relate to each other and how they understand the world.
Peru’s high concentration of cultural diversity interacts with the effects of market integration and fights against cultural homogenization everyday. Nowadays, most people aspire to accumulate material goods instead of forming a family and actively participate in the collective activities of their communities. We cannot anticipate the effect that this shift — in terms of goals and values — will have on people, but it is clear that there are some interesting cultural adaptations.
In this sense, it is quite complicated to define the limits between modern-western ways of thinking and Perú’s traditional worldview. I’ve met three generations of people living under the same roof with radical perspectives on reality: while a grandfather is still sure that giant snakes live inside mountains and and float up in the sky every once in a while, his grandson is more aligned with contemporary notions of development (and buying a plasma TV also). Even if it sounds like a contradiction, people in the rural altiplano seem to be Ok to have different points of view about reality, and partially integrate them into their current collective narrative and rituals.
For example, and as the photo shows, people regularly throw bottles of cheap champagne to ‘sacred’ rocks in order to be more successful in whichever business they’re in. In this particular case, the rock has the shape of a frog, an animal that symbolizes abundance and good fortune, which is also very convenient for all the thousands of miners that live nearby and dig for gold everyday.
So, how am I supposed to come with some surveys and start trying to make sense of a world so full of meanings, and yet so distant? A rock will always be a rock for me, but for others it can represent a god or better opportunities for them and their loved ones and there’s no point in discussing who is more congruent with the laws of Physics and Science. Living in a fascinating world has many challenges; but its beauty resides in its people, who organically carry information and turn it into traditions and keep cultures alive.
To be clear, this is by no means a hate letter to academia, but I would encourage to question the purity of objective observations and self-report studies that don’t dig into the rich reasons and motivations of human behavior. No longer academic research practices will remain as my main tool to approach and connect with people, but instead empathy seems like a better option. That is a valuable lesson I will keep in mind for my present and future projects.
