BA in Individualized Studies Program
What is real? This is the question I have been trying to answer since I was quite small. My assumptions were shaken when I moved from my insular life in Lincoln Nebraska to Lahore Pakistan at the age of 12. My father took a job with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In Pakistan, I was aware of the colonial lifestyle of my family and yet another side of that at a boarding school primarily for the children of missionaries in India.
In the 60's and 70’s I was so consumed with my questions about reality and the political/social unrest of that era, that the "normal" course of adult life eluded me. I spent many years in many jobs pursuing the life of a starving clay sculptor in NYC. I became a Polarity/Massage Therapist. Later, I studied Art Therapy and Psychology and practiced psychotherapy before returning to college in ‘midlife crisis.’ My Ph.D. is in Anthropology with a focus on South Asia and a minor in Women's Studies. My ethnographic research in North India was made very personal by the presence of my then five-year-old daughter, whom I had adopted as an infant from India. Our lives became interwoven in my research and most definitely affected its course. I became a living example of "situated knowing". The resulting dissertation was on indigenous concepts of family dynamics, suffering, and healing and involved a three generational family feud over an adopted child in a community of lower caste potters. One thing that fascinated me was how men used India's great epics for identity construction and to maintain their honor in difficult and changing times, and how women use their traditions of ritual storytelling to resist oppression.
After completing my dissertation, I received a fellowship as a consultant for USAID for a women's empowerment project in Nepal. My task was to design an orientation for the male family members of the women enrolled in the program. (What was I thinking?) I was both fascinated and appalled at how little the "colonial lifestyle" had changed, how political it is, and how profoundly it affects the efficacy of international development.
My interest in folklore and storytelling is still a passion. Particularly, I want to know more about the relationships of traditional and personal storytelling to identity construction, spirituality, and resistance. My lifelong spiritual quest has led me to study the world’s religions and I am pondering questions of human suffering and the failing of the world’s religions to adequately answer them.
Currently, in addition to my Goddard gig I am the minister at the Center for inner Peace in Pueblo CO. If you had suggested I would become a minister when I was in my 20’s, I would have thought you were crazy. I never did know what I wanted to be when I grew up. That is probably why I have been a NYC taxi driver, peddler of food in Central Park, starving artist, massage therapist, art therapist, South Asian Cultural Anthropologist, applied anthropologist in Nepal, and anything else I could get away with. I am interested in folklore, story telling as resistance, religion, culture, politics, and I want to write my memoir.
Educational Background: M. Div., 2003, and Ordained Interfaith Minister, 1999, at the Interfaith Theological Seminary/Prescott College; Ph.D., Anthropology, Syracuse University, 1997; A.T.R., M.A. Psychology and Art therapy, Antioch College/Seattle, 1984.
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Neema Caughran, MA, M.Div, Ph.D