MUWCI's community structure

MUWCI is a very special community. Every year half of the students exchange and 1^st years become 2^nd years. I felt a change in my “social role” in the community, when I came back to this campus in August. Especially when the 1^st years came, I realized that I am a 2^nd year now. And I developed the feeling that some students from my batch took over certain roles of my 3^rd years. And when I started thinking about this feeling I came to the conclusion that community structures do not change - at least their overall organisation.

When we were 1^st years our 2^nd years had certain roles for us. For example there was the group of people who would party every weekend. Others were the ones who would always talk in college meeting, student meetings or Global Affairs. There was “the artist” or “the joke-teller ” and many more such “roles”. How you name these roles does not matter and no role is better or more important than the other. But I think there are such roles and they are taken over by the 2^nd years of the next generation. Who will take them over depends on who meets who through out the year and this might only be decided by the fact, that you live in the same Wada or not. I think my 2^nd years probably influenced me more through out the year than I like to admit. How they treated me and what they told me about their opinions and experiences of the place had - I guess especially at the beginning when I was new and did not understand anything that was happening to me – a great impact on the opinions I have now and the experiences I made and how I will pass these on to the next 1^st years. When I talked about this with some MUWCI people and gave them examples of “who became who” according to my feeling, people often disagreed with me and said that these two persons were still very different and anyway our 2^nd years were too unique to be possible replaced by someone from our batch. But I think this might feel so for us, since our 2^nd years were the one, we “admired”, who would give us advice, but I think the 1^st years perceive again the same roles in certain persons as we did, since they cannot compare them with our “unique 2^nd years” and for them they are just by themselves now the “party-person” or the “joke-teller”. Some roles necessarily have to be taken over such as the roles of the CI-coordinators, but I think this “role-passing-on” is also happening in our social life.

This would mean, that the community structure of MUWCI does not change. There will always be “the trouble maker” and “the nerd” and “the caring person” and “the bitch” and “the gossip informer” to use very stereotype-like-names.

I think this is not only true for MUWCI. When I went two years ago to a summer camp such roles developed within two weeks! I hesitate to argue that all communities will always have the same set of rules, since different communities clearly develop under different conditions and hence different social rules might be needed and I hesitate even more to say that human beings will always take the same social role in a community. Since the latter would clearly link to Hosper and his determinisms and it seems rather unfair to build an argument on a dogma, but nonetheless, this idea is linked to questions of identity. When our identity is made up of the roles we play in life, the different masks we wear when we are a sister or a student or friend, then our identity is decided by the community we live in; the people we meet, who influence us to take over a certain role or not.

I actually hope someone can prove me wrong, because I personally do not like the idea that the fact that I lived in Wada 3 last year might have decided what defines my identity now at least in the MUWCI context.