senior thesis
It Will Always Be There
My Purpose for this Project
In choosing to study my RHP class, my first motivation was a selfish one. With graduation looming, I wanted to renew connections with the people who had been my primary social group during freshman year. I missed my friends, and studying them was a good excuse to spend more time with them.
Beyond a desire to reconnect with friends, I have always known that this is a unique group of people, and also a unique social formation. Everyone has their own personal theories about how and why the “family” came about, but I was interested in going deeper, connecting everyone’s stories to see if I could illuminate some underlying truth about our group.
On a practical level, I decided it would be best to study a group with which I had a prior connection. As an insider, I already know the personalities within the group (including those who have moved away), I am familiar with the group’s history and dynamics, and I have access to social gatherings.
The downfall of being an insider, however, is that I came to this project with my own opinions and biases. Throughout my research, it has been a challenge to step back and look at this group with the objective eye of an anthropologist. In shifting from a role of participant to participant-observer, I have seen patterns and series of events which I had been unwilling or unable to accept before. I get the sense sometimes of being the sneaky volunteer in a magician’s show, pulling back the curtain to reveal the secret workings of a magic trick. I am part of the magic, yet I am unsatisfied until I understand what lies beneath the surface. In this case, though, understanding the RHP family does not negate the sense of wonder with which I approach the study of the group. On the contrary, analytical thinking has deepened my admiration for this group and its members.
Throughout this year, my ideas about the essential structure of the group have not changed much. However, when I began in September, I believed that the group had moved on a relatively smooth path from complete unity towards more distant connections. Through interviews and observations, my perspective changed dramatically. I learned about the fissures in our “family” that I was too busy to notice freshman year. My idealistic vision of our group was broken to reveal a truer, more complex picture. Suddenly the group’s extraordinary feature was not seamless unity, but rather the ability to endure under difficult circumstances.
Four years have passed and many of the wounds of freshman year have healed. The result is gossip, discomfort, regret, forced good behavior, and perfect hindsight -- in other words, we’re more like a family than ever. There is also nostalgia, intense love, and the security of knowing that even though we do not spend every moment together, the family still exists. This is what I find personally fascinating and anthropologically important. Many groups start off strong, but lose momentum and fall apart completely. RHP has faced conflict, lost momentum, and been challenged with demographic and social changes -- but it persists as a strong and affectionate group.