Pichincha Volcano—a green colossus by day, a light-encrusted shadow by night—filled my window frame and unsettled my sense of place. Like a swarm of bees, black clouds of diesel smoke stung my nose and marked my memory of crowded, noisy, vibrant streets. My tongue tussled with the consonants of a new language, clicking them against teeth, and rolling them clumsily over my lips.

The Peace Corps—for many months imagined—quickly became the smells, sounds, and tastes of Quito, Ecuador after I moved there in 1983. We were like most volunteer groups, I assume, in our cultural disorientation. Some quickly tired of tripping up, and soon left. Those of us who stayed eventually found rhythms, patterns, and a pace that—while never totally familiar—at least felt good enough in its own funky way. The chunk of my life that was Peace Corps Ecuador forced me to think about confusing, irritating, and totally new questions that came to affect my decisions to work as a journalist, and later as an anthropologist.

Children in La Calera, northern Ecuador. Photo courtesy Frank Hutchins

Cultural Mirror

I was raised in rural Kentucky, and I volunteered in the Afro-Ecuadorian province of Esmeraldas. I had to refigure race. I learned my Catholicism largely by rote memorization that came with education in parochial schools. But in the Andes I was forced to consider the contrast between colonial churches filled with gold, and a countryside filled with poor Indians. An imagination stretched just so never snaps back into place.

This reordering of reality made it harder to find “home” after two years, but easier to wrap my mind around the possibility of a career in anthropology. Cultural relativism was a new road, not a roadblock. The holistic perspective was more inspiring than daunting. The exotic other was a theoretical question, not a touristic novelty. Two years on the equator helped me begin thinking anthropologically.

The Peace Corps is filled with tentative first steps, similar in many ways to toddling into “the field.” But once done, the ground seems a bit firmer on the next go-round. This applies especially to the psychological and emotional stresses of living under intensely trying, and exhaustingly different circumstances.

To its credit, the Peace Corps provides a cultural bubble wrap—at least for a couple of months. It trains new volunteers in language, technical and cross-cultural skills. But one can never be fully prepared to step off plane, bus or donkey cart into a world previously created by stereotypes and imagined geographies. Travel, as Mark Twain opined, is fatal to prejudice. But prejudice dies an ugly death, gasping and gulping just when you thought its dark heart had long quit beating.

Transformation

Mary Catherine Bateson, perhaps better than any other anthropologist, reflects with eloquence and wisdom on the transformational potential of cross-cultural experiences. In Peripheral Visions (1994), she reflects on how out-of-culture explorations introduced her to different constructions of the self, alternative experiences of community, and infinite ways of eating, grieving, dancing and believing.

In this hodgepodge of humanity, where there is surely rhythm if only we are attentive to detail, we find other models for the good life. These are more than quaint curiosities; they may in fact be necessary survival skills.

“In a rapidly changing and interdependent world, single models are less likely to be viable and plans more likely to go awry,” wrote Bateson. “The effort to combine multiple models risks the disasters of conflict and runaway misunderstanding, but the effort to adhere blindly to some traditional model for a life risks disaster not only for the person who follows it but for the entire system in which he or she is embedded, indeed for all the other living systems with which that life is linked.”

Certainly I went through stages in the Peace Corps where any models I may have observed were romanticized, cursed, and then finally pilfered. The shameless borrowing of other ways of being comes with the liberating realization that no, despite what social conventions tell you, every article of clothing, every sacred musing, every political stance doesn’t have to be “just so.” Improvisation becomes a life strategy, and it serves one well in the company of difference and uncertainty.

Language

There is a chasm between real Spanish, and rote Spanish. From my experience, Peace Corps language training programs were exhausting, but effective. After two years, the results were measurable, and gave me a skill that I cherish.

A second language is the ultimate travel ticket, not merely for covering geographic space, but for entering new social worlds. An outsider may look and behave in unusual ways, but familiar words can build the decking for a cultural bridge, and much can happen from there. I wonder how many fewer enduring and special relationships I would have, how much smaller my world would be, without language skills.

Settling into my Peace Corps field site was ideal for practicing and expanding my Spanish in such a way that words and phrases really stuck. Dance cumbia and salsa with an Afro-Ecuadorian family until sunup and you will remember the verb bailar. Chase spiders across walls and floors with a rubber boot and you will remember both bota and araña, and a few unprintables. Drink a few shots of cane liquor and you’ll remember…well maybe you won’t remember that one.

The point is that language, like many things learned in new cultural contexts, is more than instrumental. It has the power to be an olive branch, a window, and a magic carpet, all at the same time.

Relativism

In our own country, contemporary politics can be infuriating. Economics, depressing. Established religions seem to self-inflate and burst with regularity. It’s easy to see self-absorption and self-interest as the most enduring qualities of both the young and the old. But it’s also possible to analyze this as but one more realm of difference, with a potentially common core.

The wisdoms of Peace Corps and anthropology can, and should, be nurtured as well at home. We have no kindnesses for one another, no common causes, if our language, values and sense of propriety are drifting apart. The tasks of making community are near, I have to remind myself, and not just out in “the field.” Zygmunt Bauman sums up these challenges in Liquid Modernity (2000):

“The ability to live with differences, let alone to enjoy such living and to benefit from it, does not come easily and certainly not under its own impetus. This ability is an art which, like all arts, requires study and exercise.”

My formal training in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison moved me much closer to meeting Bauman’s challenges. But I would never have reached that point had I not first survived the Peace Corps. Its development model has been criticized by anthropologists, and it is seen by some as a soft extension of US foreign policy. But it has also pried many a person from the clutches of a familiar culture, and allowed that person to walk and live and think anew.

Frank Hutchins was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador, 1983–85. He is currently associate professor of anthropology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. His research areas are cultural change and globalization in Andean and Amazonian Ecuador.