Thesis: Untitled Collection of Essays

Abstract

University of Washington Abstract Thesis: Untitled Collection of Essays Margaret Chiavetta Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Guest Advisor Robert Gluck Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences My thesis is a collection of personal narrative essays. The process of examining my life has activated my anthropological lens, which led me to dissecting a perplexing duality that affects my poetics: subjectivity and objectivity. I was introduced to this conflict when I was an undergraduate, during an anthropology class on animal behavior. Basically I was told that scientists had come up with strategies for quantifying behavior but that the data produced are still susceptible to the investigator's subjectivity, so as researchers we just have to do the best we can. Examining my life with the objective lens has helped me to unfold the complicated aspects of the human condition but it hasn't simplified it into reductive pieces. Using objectivity to contradict or dismantle my subjective experience seems counterproductive. Applying objective formulas to my experience results in relatable insights but there is too much human variability to be able to uniformly account for our condition.