Contact Zones between Greeks and GDIs

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Mary Louise Pratt’s, “The Arts of the Contact Zones” challenges the simplicity of a standard community as she relates the difference between multiple cultures through her idea of a contact zone. Although many stereotypes with negative connotations exist, having Pan-Hellenic influences on campus help to build a stronger Santa Clara. Entering college is a big deal in itself, but my choice to rush into a women’s fraternity allowed me the exclusivity of a smaller community, within the Santa Clara campus and on a national scale. Upon joining Delta Gamma (DG), I realized that my efforts to make friends was simplified. Within my society, there were girls that naturally clicked and we were fostered into strong relationships without questioning our motives. According to Delta Gamma’s official mission statement, the fraternity’s “primary purpose is to foster high ideals of friendship, promote educational and cultural interests” while providing us with rewarding college experience (www.deltagamma.com). It dives deeper into saying that we are a group of women from various backgrounds that come together to make a sisterhood. I find myself recollecting on why I chose a specific fraternity over the other. Looking at it now, being part of Delta Gamma has not only put my in the community of DGs but it has automatically placed me into the community of Pan-Hellenic sister around the Santa Clara campus. On one hand we are separate young women who come together to create one strongly unified group, but looking at DG as a community in the sense that is conveyed through “Arts of the Contact Zone” allows for people to assume a standard criteria of it’s members. Pratt quotes Benedict Anderson as he states that many members of a community, "will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion," which

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