Associate Professor
CB 147 (Office)
2121 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland State University
Cleveland, Ohio 44115
Phone: (216) 687-2167; Fax:(216) 687-9384
Email: p.aspelin@csuohio.edu

Research Interests:

When I was a junior in high school over forty years ago, I spent nine months as an AFS foreign exchange student in Brazil. It was like stepping into a movie without knowing the script. My Brazilian family spoke Portuguese and German and had a small factory that made vinegar from grapes they bought from the Italian colonies we visited in the hills outside of town. The languages, the countryside, the culture, were all so very different from the Southern California I had known. Girls were not allowed out without chaperones, horses still clattered over the cobbled streets carrying fresh milk and produce every moming, and when I turned on the radio for the first time (there were no televisions) and heard a live broadcast ofa Brazilian soccer match, it sounded like pandemonium had broken loose. Not too many hundreds of miles away there lived isolated native peoples who were just then being contacted by our world for the first time. I was invited to go see them, but the trip sounded too hard and I was afraid to go. Still, we heard about them and they were in the papers all the time. Such was my informal introduction to cultural anthropology, though I didn't know then that that was what it was called.

In college and in graduate school, I was formally introduced to anthropology, not only as a way of increasing our understanding of other cultures but as a practical tool for doing something about the problems that so often had plagued us due to misunderstanding cultural issues and differences. At the time, the United States was at war in Vietnam. Nobody could seem to figure out how or why things had gotten so bad, nor what to do to make them better. I thought maybe cultural anthropology might offer some clues. So I went back to Brazil to study the native peoples of the frontier and their contact and conflicts with the modem world. I spent considerable time on the practical problems facing them, on applying anthropology to native land rights or health crises, or economic change, and to attempting to mitigate their conflicts with the outside world. I continue to think that there are keys in that experience to the general problems of conflict among nations, that cultural issues, broadly defined, can be seen to be at the root of a lot of this. Like many of us, I guess I set out to try to save the world, in my own small way. And, I would like to think that I did make some difference again in my own small way.

Today, when I teach cultural anthropology, I try to introduce others to the complex and vibrant bombardment of the senses that cultural awareness produces. I try to create or to recreate that atmosphere of surprise and excitement at the discovery of the differences and commonalities we all share that I experienced myself in Brazil for the first time decades ago, and to encourage students to seek out those same experiences themselves, through text, film, and travel. Most importantly, I try to keep foremost in our vision that we have the opportunity to use our knowledge of culture and cultural processes wisely and moreover, that we have the obligation to ourselves and to those around us to do so whenever we can.