It’s All About the Context

A book I came across called "The Anthropology of Justice", describes Moroccan society about 60 years ago.  In this society it was absurd to describe someone, their position or achievements without also describing the context of their surroundings.

Our context is who we are as much as our individuality is. I recently had the good fortune of listening to some very intimate stories about people I see everyday. I got to hear them speak about the families they come from, what it was like for them growing up and the very personal challenges they face. Without this context I would be blind to who they really are.

When we meet someone we don’t introduce ourselves as so-and-so, studying such-and-such, who was raised by a single-mother, with an alcoholic father who was emotionally and/or physically abusive. We’re not told the stories of mothers who failed in attempts to abort their babies, out of the mouths of these babies now fully-grown profoundly shaped by the context of that single experience.

Not all contexts are difficult and painful, some contexts are privileged, some are blessed and these stories are also worth knowing, these contexts are also worth describing – if for no other reason than to inspire the types of stories we want told about us by the contexts we exist in.

What we do have is a CV, or an academic transcript. We have our Matric results. We have business cards. These are supposed to represent who we are. We all acknowledge that they can never paint the full picture but to a large extent we rely on them to paint a pretty accurate picture, or contribute in a significant way to the picture we have of someone we don’t know.

We represent ourselves “objectively” through these tools, we show a self that is easy for people to read and categorize. But, the de-contextualized versions described encourage us to actually live a diluted version of ourselves. We are well aware that others will never have full knowledge of us and, if this is the case, why not tell the simple story of ourselves in the best way possible despite the truth it hides?

But in this truth is us, in this truth is us. In the context that we leave out is the depth of our human experience with all its complexity and contradiction. Yes, we can never be fully unpacked because there is always more to unpack, more to examine, more to understand. Our contexts and the way they shape us through our own reading of them are dynamic and infinite – in this way the subjective is divine.

It sucks that unless I picked up that book and interrogated the idea of context-specific descriptions of individuals I might never have fully appreciated that our lives are ever complex and never truly represented in their complexities. I now accept this and try a little harder to understand every person I meet in his or her context, and complexity. This recognition makes it easier to understand, to forgive, to communicate, to appreciate, to love, to accept.