Engagement: Mind, Body, and Soul: The Fall 2010 Humanities Institute Series and Seminar

“…all bodies, despite imperfections, have something to say about the world around them.”

–Rachel Weiner ‘13

Every semester, for the past 24 years, the Scripps College Humanities Institute offers a seminar attached to a program that includes lectures, performances, symposia, workshops, exhibitions, and films on a selected theme. Students participate in the seminar as Fellows of the Institute and attend all events and some dinners with guests. The sustained interaction with emerging and established scholars, artists, and activists through formal and informal conversations is the highlight of an Institute Fellowship.

This fall, we have explored the impact of thought, action, and belief on social change with the theme of “Engagement: Mind, Body, and Soul.” The Institute has been examining two main questions throughout the semester: what does it mean to be engaged mind, body and soul, and how does engagement occur? Additionally, we have been examining engagement’s shadows: apathy, boredom, and indifference, and asking if these, too, can be productive states.

Writing this article at mid-term, we have learned from world-renowned Claremont Graduate University Professor of Psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term “flow.” Flow is the concept that challenges must increase and be met with equal skills to maintain optimal experiences; in other words, flow is a state of total immersion in an activity where attention is so focused that time seems to stand still, the body moves so skillfully that actions seem automatic, and the self feels blended with one’s environment. We are led to ask: do flow experiences give life meaning, strengthen empathy, and teaches us life lessons, or does having a meaningful activity, heightened empathy, and a quest produce flow?

“Engagement is contagious.”  –Alyssa Boyle ‘13

We’ve also examined a variety of non-violent ways to be engaged.  In the documentary No Impact Man that takes the form of daily consumption choices to reduce, reuse, and recycle.  For Ruth Beaglehole, Founder and Director of the Echo Center in Los Angeles, it’s “raising children with care, raising children to care”, which is the Center’s motto.  She and her staff works with a diverse group of parents and care-givers to help them connect with children through observation, empathy, and compassion.

“Sustainability does not have to mean deprivation.”  –Marnie Hogue ‘13

“[Beaglehole’s] talk was so powerful that I did not speak because I felt I was going to cry.”

–Lindsay Gutierrez

While we have mourned the end of big ideas as we watched Utopia in Four Movements, a live documentary performance by Sam Green and Dave Cerf, we have also acknowledged that the deepest engagement may be “submitting to something larger than the self” (Jess Rosenthal). After Professor Rogers outlined the biopolitics and economy of attention, its surplus and deficit understood as potential human capital to be managed, self-managed, and medicalized, some of us now yearn for a time when we were not so preoccupied with staying busy; a time when we can be creatively bored without being perceived as lazy, strategically apathetic without seeming callous, and indifferent as in all things being equal, undifferentiated, one part of a whole.

“Without periods of engagement, periods of boredom cannot even exist.”  –Jess Rosenthal ‘13

As the Institute Fellows and I review the past seven weeks, we find that we struggle harder than ever with honesty, in the sense of self-revelation. Intrinsic motivation as seen in the film Whiz Kids and the dance performance Gimp inspired many of us to take stock of our lives: what are we passionate about and how are we making a difference? Gimp confronts the stereotypes that differently-abled bodies can’t dance, challenges standard notions of beauty, and reminding us that “dance is more than just bodily movement, it’s the expression one gives them.” (Stephanie Park). We witnessed through these dancers that habituation through exposure and training increases opportunities for bodily engagement.

“…creativity, engagement, and activism are interdependent.”

—Tara Contractor ‘13

The students and I find now that we care more about imminent engagements that can be sustained, unify our sense of self, and enable us to transcend the self by connecting to a larger community. As we approach further study of engagement, topics of embodiment, gender indifference, faith’s impact on activism and social change will help us consider what it means to be engaged and how such engagement occurs.

“We are all we have and that is both a glorious declaration and a wake-up call to embrace honesty and allow people to brush up against the corners of our lives.”  –Jesse Klekamp ‘12