Alumni

FACULTY  |  OUTSIDE THE BOX

Drive to Learn
Road trips, auto shows, and water taxi rides lead students on an exploration of cultural anthropology through an unlikely object - the car.

By Lindsay Beller

(From left) Emilie Vrbancic '10, Alexandru Moisi '10, Kendall Clements '10, Morgan LaPorte '09, and Jordan Davis '10 road tripped to the Route 66 Hall of Fame Museum in Pontiac, Ilinois, to conduct ethnographic research for the class The Anthropology of Automobility. (Photo courtesy of Emilie Vrbancic '10)

On March 8, a group of Lake Forest College students convened in downtown Chicago at the corner of Adams Street and Michigan Avenue, also known as the start of Route 66, the historical highway and great American symbol of freedom and mobility that stretches nearly 2,300 miles to Los Angeles.
 
They drove southwest through small Illinois towns full of roadside kitsch and historical pop culture icons. Stops included Berwyn, at the car spindle made famous by the movie Wayne's World, and Wilmington, at the large fiberglass statue of Gemini Giant (a 1960s "muffler man" who wears a space helmet and holds a rocket ship, signifying the country's fascination with space travel during that decade).
Throughout the trip they sang Beatles songs, swapped stories, and bonded over shared experiences at the College. After a meal at the 1950s-themed Polka Dot Diner and a visit to the Route 66 Museum in Pontiac, Illinois, they turned around and drove back to Lake Forest. 
      
Several days later, they reported on the road trip for the class The Anthropology of Automobility.
      
Yes, their drive was an assignment for a class.
      
But the course is not about road trips at all, says Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology Holly Swyers. Rather, she uses the car as an entree into cultural anthropology, which is the study of tradition and change and how people are shaped by human interaction. "This isnÕt really a class about cars, but I'm using the car to teach anthropological principles," Swyers says. "By using the car as the focal point, we can think about much bigger questions."  
      
Throughout the semester, the class explored issues like power, colonialism, gender, and race, and they addressed questions such as: What is culture?; Do economics and technology determine culture?; Do humans resist change?; and Do cultures have power?

The idea of using an automobile to learn about cultural anthropology came from part of Swyers - dissertation research on the suburbanization that occurred in the 1950s and the building of the interstate system to accommodate the transportation of weapons during the Cold War. "I started to think, how else can we think about cars?" she says.
      
As the Route 66 trip showed, we think about cars in various ways, she says. "You start to see what's important to our culture," Swyers says. "It's connected to our sense of freedom, which is an American value. Those ideas are hard to talk about in the abstract, but not if you have something concrete."
 
Emilie Vrbancic '10, a student in the March 8 road trip group, says the experience of driving with her classmates prompted her to explore the notion of progress. "I thought about how we live in a progress-driven world and how we take those values and bring them into the car," she says. "Our group got the furthest down Route 66 because we wanted to beat the other groups. We were always looking for something new on the road." 
 
The road trip also highlighted how humans interact and behave toward each other when they are confined in a car for a long period of time. "We were able to bond and talk more freely," Vrbancic says. Adds Swyers, "A lot of times, we think a road trip is about being on the road, but it's not. You have these conversations you would never have. There's something about being trapped together and not making eye contact that lets people be honest with each other.

By exploring the relationship of the road trip to American culture, she says, "you start unpacking these complex dimensions of culture."
      
Like the road trip, many assignments required the students to conduct ethnographic research - the main research method of cultural anthropologists that involves participant observation, informal interviews, and other experiential techniques to better understand culture. "Anthropology is a qualitative, experience-driven field, not statistically driven," Swyers says. "It looks at small groups in a person-to-person, face-to-face way." 
 
She planned several other outings for students to conduct field research and explore different aspects of cars and culture. The class attended the Chicago Auto Show and had to go downtown, where they could only use alternate forms of transportation, like a water taxi, a horse and carriage, and a bicycle, to get around the city.
 
Another assignment required observation of the pedestrian crosswalk on Sheridan Road, where hundreds of Lake Forest students cross the street each day to travel between Middle and South campuses. Among other things, this highlighted how choices about technology affect ways that humans interact with each other. To Vrbancic, it showed how humans tend to ignore the driver and focus on the car. "You say, 'that car waved to me' or 'that car didn't stop,'" she says.
 
Swyers hopes her students came away from the class with a new perspective on the car, and the world. "You can look at something so ordinary like the car, and it reveals the secrets of the universe," she says. "I want the class to give them the opportunity to look at the world with fresh eyes and recapture or shore up the sense of wonder they had when they were five. That's the way you should live your entire life - to keep that excitement and realize nothing is too trivial."

Lindsay Beller is the editor of Spectrum.