Foundations Discussion #2: Vocational Awe
13 September 2023
We all love libraries but the author Ettarh cautions us about a "vocational awe" trap suggesting that our feelings of awe may sometimes blind us to how our practices, collections, and spaces might privilege some and exclude others. How does the Sanchez (2018) article speak to this interpretation of vocational awe?
I’ve always thought it was kind of strange that libraries never got as much flak as other professions do for, well, just about anything. Book publishers, (chain) bookstores, universities, community centers, the government—all the other institutions that libraries are adjacent to have their own collection of common complaints that I can vaguely associate with each. And yet libraries have always been regarded as perfect, pristine, sacred places by almost everyone I’ve heard talk about them, their slate free from common criticism.
As such, without much to dissuade them, this notion has become one that’s internalized by the librarians themselves. In “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” Fobazi Ettarh (2018) gives a name to this phenomenon by identifying the cultural caches built up around libraries over the centuries. Vocational awe “refers to the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique” (Ettarh, 2018, Introduction). Since libraries were associated with religion since early in the history of western civilization, librarians are seen as “priests” who “educate and save” their patrons (Ettarh, 2018, Librarians as Priests and Saviors section); and to live up to that ideal, librarians toil to pick up the slack and do every task asked of them with little support—almost certainly due to the ubiquity of white women and the associated mantles of purity and motherhood (Petersen, 2020).
And while librarians maintain the so-called “sacred” facade, the less-than-pristine mechanisms hidden within the blueprint from the beginning remain obscured. Such is the case with the institutionalized racism remaining within the majority Latinx high schools across the southwestern United States, as explained by Dr. Joe Sanchez (2018) in “‘What Are They Doing, Like, In a Library?’: Mexican-American Experiences in their High School Library.” Originally constructed in the 1930s as “assimilation schools” with “goal[s] of “producing a skilled, English-speaking workforce” (p. 27), that original intent has been unaddressed through the changing times. In one, despite regularly interacting with a librarian that many students regard as “nice” and “chill” (p. 28), the mandates for the library they work within leaves them with the confines of undecorated “bare white walls” used only for testing (p. 28)—debatably educational, but certainly as pristine as originally intended. The librarian does the best to meet their students’ needs despite the limitations, while the students are still left with assimilation’s original implications: To be a good reader is to read classical western literature; to be a welcome library user is to be a studious, “smart,” English-speaking student; to be a good Mexican-American is to excise the “Mexican” parts of your identity until it is all-American.
References
Ettarh, F. (2018, January 10). Vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves. In The Library With The Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
Petersen, A. H. (2020, September 6). Vocational awe. Culture Study. Retrieved September 13, 2023, from https://annehelen.substack.com/p/vocational-awe
Sanchez, J. (2018). “What are they doing, like, in a library?”: Mexican-American experiences in their high school library. Young Adult Library Services, 16(4), 26-29.