11 April 2006
Symbolic Interactionism goes to "Nam"
Posted by Bob Keith at 4/11/2006 1:30 AM
Categories: Vietnam meets academia
South Vietnam in L.A.
Surfing the Web in grad school looking for relevant stuff on Vietnam I stumbled on a seminar being held at the University of California - Riverside, east of Los Angles. It would be held in April of 2005 on the campus to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon and South Vietnam. I did a quick check on Expedia and low and behold there was an airline ticket deal. A couple hundred bucks got me out there and back. A reciprocal arrangement allowed me to stay in a visitor's dorm on the cheap because I was after all, a student too. A cheap rental car capped off he deal.
After I got through a couple lectures at Riverside it was obvious it was important to drop in on Little Saigon. It is a Vietnamese district not far from Disney Land. I had read about it before I headed out there but its constant referencing by the speaking guests validated its importance.
Immediately I was struck by all the old South Vietnamese flags lining the streets of the Vietnamese community. It was like seeing all the waving flags on the light poles during the Fourth of July only these flags were symbolic of a country that no longer existed.
The assignment of meaning
Then it hit me like a brick. Those flags were assigned meaning. It was basically old South Vietnam in exile, and just down the road from Micky Mouse to boot. And then I thought about Dr. Lanny Neider.
One of the first classes I took at UW-Whitewater after transferring in from tech school was Social Psychology. The professor of the class was Dr. Neider. He was the head of the Sociology Department - one of the perks of a small college is professors actually teach the classes (as opposed to teaching assistants) and as I found out the department heads do as well. He was salty, well traveled in academic politics, insisted on knowing why things ticked, insisted on knowing how real life applied to the "crap" (his words) we were studying, and probably should be described as old school.
Dr. Neider's attack of the subject of social psychology came from the perspective of Symbolic Interactionism. Basically in a nutshell - the assignment of meaning. I am mindful of a communication theory class I took in grad school that also discussed Symbolic Interactionism. It is poetic that both the fields of sociology and communication use the same dead theorists as their base. So sociology as an undergraduate pursuit and communication as a graduate endeavor was not all that big of a leap of faith after all. But I digress.
The symbols still linger
So there it was, thirty years later and the symbols of the Vietnam War still had meaning to the Vietnamese in America. And for America as a whole all the symbols and signs we assign the Vietnam era have meaning as well? - The Huey helicopter, the scenes of dense jungle, the GIs ducking behind olive drab sand bags to avoid a stray bullet during a skirmish between the Americans and the ever phantom Viet Cong, the jets strafing with napalm, and the evacuation of Saigon in April of 1975. Many of these images are standard backdrop in the templates of around a hundred Vietnam War movies from 1968 to present. A neigbor of mine flies his Vietnam Veteran's of America flag under his American flag on the pole in front of his house. The V.V.A. flag looks a great deal like the old South Vietnamese flag. Using the L.A. model, a piece of old South Vietnam is just a couple streets over from mine here in my small town in Wisconsin.
So Dr. Neider you connected the dots in retrospect. I told Dr. Neider as he was teaching his last class before retirement from the university that it was as shame a guy like him was leaving. He almost seemed to have a perturbed look on his face at the notion someone might think he should stay. "Look," he said. "I've been in college for 35 years, I'm headed up north to try some blue-collar stuff." I hope you made it Dr. Neider.
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