"Mythical realities": college students' constructions of the South Pacific

College Student Journal, March, 2007 by Carmen M. White, Mensah Adinkrah

In 2002, the geographic knowledge of college-age students in the North was highlighted in a survey sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Students in the U.S. ranked second to last among those surveyed on questions assessing basic knowledge of world geography. That many young adults got "the facts" wrong about particular places was clearly demonstrated by the survey results. What is less clear, but equally worth engaging, is what young adults glean about the rest of the world, in lieu of factual knowledge. For example, to what extent is the vacuum of concrete knowledge about the South Pacific filled by stereotyped visions of a magical, mythical paradise beyond the ambit of modernity? This article provides an analysis of data compiled from surveys administered to 149 students enrolled in a general education area course on the South Pacific at a Midwestern public university. The data suggest that most students bring a received wisdom on the South Pacific to the course in the absence of substantive information, confirming that this lack of factual knowledge has not been devoid of any content but, rather, harnesses both specific notions of a tropical paradise and generic notions of native "others" created by popular media.

INTRODUCTION

In the North, "globalization" and references to the world as a "global village" have become the catchwords and catch phrases of the times. Yet, the results of a National Geographic-Roper 2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey designed to determine the level of general knowledge about world geography among young people (ages 18 through 24) in nine countries (1) suggest that the language of globalization neither necessarily reflects, nor has generated, an interest in young adults in the North to discover the world beyond their national boundaries. The survey questions sought to measure such basic geographic knowledge as the ability to identify continents, regions, countries and other geographic markers, including oceans, on a map, as well as general familiarity with a number of facts of historical and contemporary political relevance on the global scene. Of particular concern to the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the survey, was the performance of the lowest ranking countries, including the United States. Young adults in the U.S. answered an average of 23 out of 56 questions correctly, ranking 8th overall, with Mexico in last place. While reportedly "young people in Canada and Great Britain fared almost as poorly as those in the U.S." ("Survey results," 2002, p. l), the performance of Mexico and the U.S., particularly in comparison with the highest scoring countries of Sweden and Germany, was attributed to relatively lesser levels of international travel, a largely monolingual population, and insufficient emphasis upon, and valuation of, geography in school curricular in the two countries ("Survey Reveals Geographic Illiteracy", 2002).

The survey performance of U.S. young adults impelled the National Geographic Society to mobilize a panel of representatives in education and mass media to spearhead proposals for policies that would promote greater levels of knowledge of, and interest in world geography. Of course, the concerns of geographers go beyond the need to generate an interest in their chosen field. At a minimum, the wider implication of what the National Geographic society defines as "geographic illiteracy" is a population that lacks identification or any sense of connection with, and appreciation for, a wider world that exists beyond their immediate environs.

The authors of this article both teach undergraduate courses at a Midwestern public university in the U.S., regularly instructing students that fit into the demographic profile of those surveyed by the National Geographic Society. One author is an anthropologist and the other a comparative sociologist/criminologist and so both have experience teaching courses imbued with international content. Both have also conducted social science research in the South Pacific and Africa while their years of research experience inform the courses they teach. Thus, they have been in the position to gauge the type of geographic knowledge and interest that young adults bring to a course designed to facilitate students' discovery of a world well beyond the borders of the Midwestern U.S.

Perhaps there is little wonder in the finding that young adults polled by the National Geographic Society, particularly those in the lower performing countries, tended to have less geographic knowledge about places physically distant from their own countries. Yet, physical proximity alone, or a lack thereof, cannot explain differences in the degree of factual knowledge that young adults have about particular places, particularly knowledge that is readily available from an atlas or other media. That many young adults get "the facts" wrong about particular places is clearly demonstrated by the survey results. What is less clear from the survey is what young adults glean about the rest of the world in place of those facts. For clearly, such lack of knowledge is not completely devoid of content. Power imbalances continue to define international relations on every level, notwithstanding discussions of the equalizing effects wrought by globalization. Hence, those in the wealthier industrialized nations, or North, remain in the position to dismiss, or perpetuate entrenched stereotypical notions of, the people and places of the "developing world," or the South, in lieu of substantive knowledge while those in the South are enjoined to not only learn about and orientate themselves toward the nations of the North, but to regard them as their measuring rod for "development." The implications that follow from these imbalances include notions in the North that there is little to be gained in amassing facts about strange and irrelevant places. Moreover, the survey cannot discern nor explain the persistence with which the lack of factual knowledge about "other" places is mediated by the patterned images or "othering" so often invested in representations of different regions throughout the South. And so we have "Darkest Africa" as well as Orientalism. And as Said (1978) demonstrated in identifying how Orientalism constructed the Middle East as a consummate "other" in Western thought, fascination with particular places derives from varied motivations with corresponding representational imagery assigned to specific regions. Meanwhile, much of the discourse on the Middle East in media discussions on the "war on terror" is filtered through with Orientalist themes. In short, the National Geographic Survey and similar surveys intended to measure basic geographic literacy alone simply cannot, nor are intended to, tap into the ways that a lack of concrete knowledge about people and places is, itself, culturally and politically constructed. In this article, we will show how the absence of substantive knowledge about the South Pacific by no means represents an empty slate in the minds of young adults. To the contrary, these college respondents' notions of particular places could be considered a litmus for the ways that entrenched stereotypes, transmitted through various media, about people and places become the received wisdom of the society.