“Where is Colgate again? Upper New York?” a dad with his high school daughter asks. Being caught off guard by the unexpected question, I glanced down at my shirt and then responded, “Yeah, I think its in Hamilton, New York. But I don’t actually go there.” He then laughed, because in his mind, he thought it was absurd that I was wearing a shirt of a school I didn’t attend.
The man had innocently mistaken me for a Colgate student. Since I was vacationing in an area not too far from Colgate, his assumption was not a stupid one. It could have been true. But it obviously wasn’t. In class last week we discussed why our biographies of the “Death of Mr. Bolos” might be inaccurate. One reason for inaccuracy is interpretation. When we look at artifacts left behind, such as those from Mr. Bolos’, we cannot draw conclusions solely from what we see. It would be wrong to make inferences about who he was and what those objects represented only from what he left behind. For example, in Mr. Bolos’ case, he left behind a rubber mouth. From that object we cannot just determine that he was a speech therapist.
Artifacts do not tell the whole story. Therefore research, collaboration, and corroboration are key steps that must be taken before any conclusions can be drawn. I mean, how do we as individuals have a right to make assumptions based only on materialistic items? After all, I do not attend Colgate and Mr. Bolos is not a speech therapist…
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