Something you learn quickly in college, before the formulas and the theories and the easiest route to the dining hall is how much a good class depends on having a good professor. You can be as enticed as you like by the course catalog description that offers intellectual enlightenment and a free pony for every student at the end of the semester, but if the professor is dry or inattentive or plays favorites, those promises start to feel hollow. The upside, though, is that a good professor, a dynamic and engaged one, can turn a class with a ho-hum description into the most enjoyable three hours of your week.
So it was for me with Intro Anthropology my freshman year. By the first day of class I knew that my student academic advisor had steered me in precisely the right direction when she’d pointed it out in the class guide. The professor, a man who’d grown up in a traditional tribe in South Africa but had then pursued traditional academics in the U.S. and abroad to the great disappointment of his family, had a completely different take on anthropology than you usually encounter.
He used to tell stories about going back to his tribe with classmates in grad school to conduct anthropological studies and how no one would answer his interview questions. When his classmates sat down with these people the professor had grown up with, though, they came out full of answers. My professor would laugh and shake his head at this point, saying that his ongoing disagreement with his mother was about his profession. To her, the greatest honor would have been for him to stay at home and become a village teacher. He would counter, “But Mom! I have a Ph.D.! In other parts of the world that’s a greater honor than being a schoolteacher!” But she would have none of it. He had continual guilt about it.
I loved to listen to his stories and lectures, because he was such a deep thinker while still finding humor in everything. One of the terms he often brought up was “social skin,” in other words how we present our bodies to the world. This includes hairstyles and makeup, jewelry and piercings and tattoos, and–you guessed it–clothing. My professor would finger his rumpled button-down plaid shirt, making yet another accidental chalk mark on it, and explain that it was his social skin, his second skin, a layer of him that functioned as social communication. It wasn’t what he’d have worn if he’d stayed behind like his parents wanted and become a schoolteacher, it was what he wore as a college professor in the United States.
So that’s what I’m thinking about today. Social skin. (Or my limited understanding of it, that is, from just the one semester of anthropology class.) I’m not just cutting out clothes that make me happy, I’m not just drawing up sketches and taping swatches beside them, I’m constructing my social skin.
Armor, almost, these homemade clothes.
