I recently attended an academic conference on English teaching in Phnom Penh.
It was the stereotype of academic conferences: plenary sessions by imported invited experts, parallel session by local presenters, panel discussions, etc. Participants know exactly what to expect. I’m not knocking it – there were some interesting and thought-provoking sessions, and I came away full of new ideas.
Later that night, my wife and I went to meet my old friend Stu who sings and plays the guitar down in the Girly-Bar district of town. Rows of sexily-clad girlS sitting out front on the street, while inside the bars, white-haired and white-skinned geezers sat in the low light with their floozies, drinking and listening to the live music. You can be sure that they were not discussing sustainable educational development.
Typical girly-bar scene
Both the conference and the girly-bar scene followed rather stereotyped rules in their formats, but wow! Were they different! It boggles my mind that the human psyche can embrace such disparate scenes. In fact, to say that you comprehend the girly-bar scene is quite a different kind of ‘comprehension’ than you feel from the conference. They can write the ‘Proceedings’ of a conference, and you will have an general understanding of what it was about. However, you could not read a description of the girly-bar scene and ‘understand’ what it’s about in any real sense of the term.
The girly-bar scene must be experienced first-hand, because it is a holistic experience of sights, sounds, smells, and general atmosphere. In other words, you experience it with your right brain, whereas the conference is mostly a left-brain phenomenon: rational analysis, evaluation of arguments, sequential programming, Venn diagrams, and new ideas.
The two types of understanding are so radically different, it makes me wonder whether a sociological analysis of the girly-bar scene is even possible. An academic paper or study may analyze aspects of the scene, but it will fall far short of conveying the ‘meaning’ of the scene, whatever that means.
For me, my weekend was eye-opening, in that I could witness myself engulfed in two completely different experiences. My brain was operating at two radically different levels, as though I were a split personality. It is to the credit of humankind that such variety of experience can be appreciated, just as the composer Johannes Brahms could play the honky-tonk piano in the 1850’s German equivalent of girly bars, and then go home to write ethereal symphonies and sonatas on a completely different level.