Anagnorisis & Peripeteia

I've recently become wildly obsessed with TED talks. I've watched plenty of them before, but literally for about a week I watched TED talks pretty much 24-7 in the office. I have a very legitimate reason for this. I'm developing a leadership program for sophomores involving personal narrative and developing the self in order to lead. It builds on the first year seminar that we developed last year that covers the Social Change Model. This follow up program is intended to go a little deeper on the "inner work" aspect of the SCM (consciousness of self, congruence, commitment). You can find out a bit more about the model itself by googling it. It's the most widely used leadership model among US universities. Getting back to TED talks though, the reason I'm watching so many is to find a few that deal specifically with a life story or a life-changing story to model for our students what that even looks like in hopes that they will formulate one themselves.

In my research, I came across Mike Rowe's TED Talk. I couldn't retell his story of lamb castration to do it justice if my life depended on it. You need to watch it. It's only 17 minutes long.

Sure the story itself is outrageous, but the part that was most interesting to me were his reflections on what he learned from the experience. He uses two words with which I was not previously familiar: Peripeteia and Anagnorisis

Peripetaia is best defined in this scenario by the Oxford English Dictionary (online of course... quite possibly one of my favorite and most visited websites) as "In classical tragedy (and hence in other forms of drama, fiction, etc.): a point in the plot at which a sudden reversal occurs. In extended use: a sudden or dramatic change; a crisis."

Anagnorisis is defined by the OED as "recognition; the dénouement in a drama." Wikipedia gives possibly a better interpretation of the word for this particular scenario: "Anagnorisis originally meant recognition in its Greek context, not only of a person but also of what that person stood for. It was the hero's sudden awareness of a real situation, the realisation of things as they stood, and finally, the hero's insight into a relationship with an often antagonistic character in Aristotelian tragedy.^[1]

Now, these two terms seem completely abstract, but in the context of Mike Rowe's story, they're quite powerful. Mike Rowe, the host of "Dirty Jobs" on Discovery Channel, has made a name for himself by doing the "dirtiest" jobs existing in the world. He spends his time as a roadkill cleaner, a sewer inspector, avian vomitologist and a host of other supposedly dirty and undesirable jobs. The turning point, as the title of this post suggests, was in his experience of having to castrate a lamb... not by using rubber bands which he thought (based on information given to him by the SCPA and PETA) was the most humane way but rather by biting them off with his own teeth. In all of his experiences he has never stopped and said "hold on wait a minute... you want me to do what?!?" Not only did this sound absolutely disgusting, but it also seemed to him inhumane. The sheep farmer with whom he was shooting the show promptly put a rubber band on another lamb's testicles and the lamb started shaking and curled up in a corner of the pen, nearly immobilized, while the lamb recently castrated by mouth was frolicking around as if nothing had ever happened.

In Mike's experience of peripeteia with the unexpected (in) humanity of various different castration techniques, he came to anagnorisis in reconceptualizing what even made up a "dirty job." The entire show was all about showcasing these jobs which were deemed undesirable or somehow unworthy for the vast majority of people to do, when in fact this one single, humane but in our eyes terribly gruesome method of castration made him realize the nobleness, the respectability, and particularly the importance of these jobs to be done well. The mere fact that these jobs were on his show reinforced the stereotype that he was trying to combat. Ultimately, his argument was that Americans have gotten themselves to a mental/emotional state where we feel that there are certain kinds of jobs that Americans don't and shouldn't do, and instead are more appropriate for immigrants and low-paid workers to do instead. He mentioned how hard it is to find a decent, experienced, highly skilled carpenter. That's because we've made it into a job that is for the less educated. If it were more desirable, people would be more likely to devote themselves to that kind of job for a lifetime, gaining the skills and experience to be a "master artisan" of his craft. His call is to Americans to reclaim the concept of work, vocation, and the common every-day job.

I'm fascinated by these two terms. They have such depth and meaning and make me wonder where I've experienced them in my own life. That sounds like a post for later...