Our Obsession With Labels

I’ve been having a lot of fun with labels lately. And no, I do not mean that I’ve been running around like some obsessive-compulsive personality gleefully slapping name tags on everything in sight (although that is a rather amusing picture). But I have been noticing how our world seems to come to a crashing halt when we do not know what label to put on something, or someone, or some idea. It seems that we do indeed run around like crazed obsessive-compulsives desperately trying to create some order in our world; to find some elusive connection that will help us make sense of it all. To know how to talk about it, we have to know what to call it. 

Blogging is a perfect example. Most blogs have a label that reflects a particular sphere of ideas: gardening, wedding planning, health and nutrition, economics, cultural awareness, and on and on.  These labels help us to connect with people that are interested in what we are interested in. But these labels also limit us. So at the risk of breaking the cardinal rules of labeling, I refused to give this blog a proper label. Since I do not wish to be perceived as a complete heretic, however, (none of us are exempt from the power of labels) I will at least provide some of my personal labels. I recommend that you brace yourself.

I am an interpretive, critical, ethnographic researcher. Wait! Before you roll your eyes and click that “x” at the top of the screen (the personal nightmare of every blogger), let me elaborate. Those labels are just fancy terms used in the world of academia to describe simple ideas and perspectives. Interpretive simply means that how you perceive something depends on, well, how you interpret it.  This is a vastly different label than objective, which usually refers to the need to prove something with concrete terms like evidence. Critical does not mean that I am like a nagging mother-in-law (although I do have my moments). Critical as I am using it means challenging the assumptions that we take for granted. In other words, I look deeper than the face value of labels. Ethnographic is a label I chose to adopt just because I liked the sound of it. All it means is “I like to be smack dab in the middle of whatever I’m experiencing,” participating, asking questions and learning new stuff. And researcher is another academic term that attempts to legitimize being curious, investigative or just plain nosy. Are you still with me? Good.

You may be asking at this point, “what does that have to do with this blog”? Well, as you may have guessed with all of those academic labels, I am currently spending a great deal of time immersed in the world of higher education. This affords me access to a great deal of variety in topics, ideas, and lots of labels to mess around with! Hence the label of this blog, “I don’t know what to call it, do you”? I am open to suggestions. What do you think we should call it?