Although my flight from Suvarnabhumi International Airport touched down at MSP (after a layover in Seoul-Incheon) seven months ago now, I feel like I just had my first breakfast in Bangkok. My time in Southeast Asia was part of Dr. Tun Myint’s Political Ecology and Economy of Southeast Asia, a Carleton-sponsored Off-Campus Study (‘OCS’) program. While this OCS was done through the political science department, it departed from many of the traditionally quantitative aspects of political science, and was largely grounded in qualitative methodology and observation rather than strict reliance on graphs and csv files.
This OCS focused in part on the relationship, contradictions, and interplay between marketization and rural Southeast Asia, seeking to understand the relationship of the market to wider society. Of course, these issues are not solely present in Southeast Asia, they manifest here in the United States, too. This program allowed me to create a framework to analyze marketization’s impact on various facets of life here, including organized labor and technological displacement, which has allowed me to better understand the current political and social moment.
However, It would be a disservice to my experience to solely talk about “frameworks” and “relationships” as while discussions about capitalism and markets were an important aspect of the program, it was less than five percent of the learning and experience that I had while in Southeast Asia. The other 95% came from activities such as working on a farm, spreading concrete to help repair a temple, cooking food, or going fishing. I do not think that I will ever eat food as fresh and filling as the food that I had in Ban Naxay, the small village in Laos that I called home for the better part of two weeks. It would be the experience of living in a broader community that still largely looked out for one another, and that was deliberately working towards a better future for all that is what still sticks with me.
These experiences, which were referred to collectively as “learning while doing”, reflect the necessity of getting dirt underneath your fingernails (often literally) to fully and concretely understand the current sociopolitical moment. While we had no shortage of great secondary scholarship to draw from to help contextualize the moment and locale (James C. Scott and Janet C. Sturgeon’s works come to mind), we truly could not learn without investigating or living in rural villages in Southeast Asia. Of course, we didn’t navigate these experiences alone or solely with other group members. Many translators, from our program assistant, to local translators, workers, and people eager to extend a hand to help. I could not have understood 1% of our time in Southeast Asia without their help, and for that I would like to extend a sincere thank you. In a way, it is these relationships that were the most important thing gained from this experience.
To anyone reading these words who is considering visiting Southeast Asia, or going on an OCS, I would state that my experience of learning while doing made me a better scholar, thinker, and human being, though that process was not given to me. Rather, that process was earned through hard work, relationships, and truly keeping my mind open to what was going on. The experience was well worth the difficulty of thought that was required to get the most out of it. If you are prepared for hard work and critical thinking, and want to learn more about the world outside of our Carleton bubble, then both of these experiences are absolutely worth considering.
