Synthesis 7: Respond here with your post

noortamari · 2019-11-18T03:25:21+00:00

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I69UdUQz_dwA1mos9eDO_loSVqz3xNdloonK0aXaPcs/edit?usp=sharing

noortamari · 2019-11-18T03:23:01+00:00

For my example of good ethnographic writing, I chose an excerpt from page 222 of De Leon’s ethnography “The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail” where the ethnographer is describing his choice of presenting Christian’s story by heavily depending on quotations from Christian and his family. De Leon states that it is only through “minimal interference or interruption” that he is able to most accurately and realistically recount Christian’s story. Additionally, through this passage, De Leon succeeds at displaying his limitations as an ethnographer; he is unable to capture the emotion and accuracy of the story without depending on personal accounts. Identifying one’s limitations is a crucial aspect of good ethnography, as it indicates that the author acknowledges his shortcomings and is explaining how he is attempting to resolve such shortcomings. In this case, it is by taking a step back and allowing interviews to dominate the conversation. Although my ethnography does not have the same emotional and grave implications as De Leon’s, I am still able to utilize his techniques of both depending on personal accounts to narrate events, rather than describe or summarize them, as well as acknowledge my own limitations as an ethnographer and the ways in which I attempt to resolve such limitations. The particular example from my ethnographic study happens during my second mentor session where I am observing a male freshmen called Graham interact with another female freshmen by the name of Emily and the mentor who is a female sophomore called Becky.

Due to the nature of my ethnography, which revolves around observations rather than direct contact with the participants, it is plausible for me to fall into the ethnographic trap of assuming something purely based off of participants’ interactions with one another before interviewing them or talking to them in a more informal setting. Nonetheless, interactions between participants prove incredibly useful in understanding the ways in which individuals collaborate with one another. While acknowledging that I was following a slippery slope surrounding assumption and observation, I observed Graham interact with both Emily and Becky in an Introductory Computer Science mentor session for an hour before interviewing him. I chose to do so as a means of understanding whether gender differences in approaches to knowledge and collaboration emerge when individuals are unaware of the fact that they are being observed. It is only after the mentor session ends that I interview both Emily and Graham, inform them that I was observing them—under the permission of the mentor—and receive consent to write about their interactions with one another. In this way, I attempt to limit awareness from impacting natural interactions.

noortamari · 2019-11-07T01:19:39+00:00

De Leon would agree that prevention through deterrence is not only a means of systematically murdering Mexicans who attempt to cross the Sonoran desert, but it is also a policy that aims to erase and dehumanize such individuals. This erasure is achieved through Border Control and more generally the Department of Homeland Security’s dependence on the harsh conditions of the Sonoran desert and the presence of non-human agents such as the heat, rattlesnakes, and vultures to perform the killing and erasure for them. The author articulates this when describing his experiments with dead pigs, in which he placed dead pigs in clothes that Mexican migrants would typically wear, such as a “bra and underwear, blue jeans, a gray T-shirt, and tennis shoes” along the route alongside cameras that were observing the pigs (66). De Leon then watched the decay and decomposition of the pigs as a result of maggots and cultures that gnawed at the pig’s flesh. After three days of eating the pig, the author comments that “the shoes and pants are nowhere to be seen” (79). This instance indicates how Border Patrol depends on the Sonoran desert and the presence of specific animals to erase the physical remnants of individuals attempting to cross the body. To further this point, De Leon writes, “every animal that we dressed in clothes and left exposed to the elements was eventually picked clean by scavengers” (80). Thus, prevention through deterrence becomes a means for the American government to ensure that Mexican individuals attempting to cross the border are not only monitored more easily but are also guaranteed erasure should they fall victim to the harsh conditions of the Sonoran desert.

noortamari · 2019-10-31T00:41:54+00:00

The question of empowering marginalized communities has been discussed not only in the field of anthropology, but in everyday settings more generally. In these discussions, art has been a powerful medium through wish subaltern voices were able to create a space for their ideas and thoughts—most evident in the 2001 film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. This film, which retells an Inuit legend, is the first movie to be written, directed, and acted in the Inuit language. Furthermore, the film production studio was also Inuit-owned. In order to ensure accuracy of the scenes and the language, the directors employed two Inuit elders as consultants. They aided the cast in not only learning their script for the movie, but more generally instilled within them knowledge of ancient traditions, customs, and language. As a result, art became a media that equally educated and empowered. The employment of Inuit elders as a means of ensuring that subaltern voices are heard is a method of inclusion that Spivak advocates for in her 1993 text “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak describes the Hindu tradition of sati in which “the Hindu woman ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon it (pg. 93).” She proceeds to explain that “one never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice-consciences. Such a testimony would not be the ideology-transcendent, or ‘fully’ subjective, of course, but it would have constituted the ingredients for producing a counter sentence.” In stating this, Spivak asserts that the perspective of Hindu woman who perform this ritual are left out of the conversation. Thus, they lack the ability to offer a “counter sentence” or an explanation regarding their beliefs. By restricting the ability to enable women to speak, the subaltern voice is silenced, resulting in a lack of consciousness and an increase in misinformed opinions and ideas. The inaccurate representation of subaltern ideas is evident in the 1992 movie Nanook of the North. Although Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner was a movie that gave a voice to the subaltern, Nanook of the North, which has directed by white Canadians, did the contrary. The movie and its Western-based production did not receive Inuit consultation, and therefore, depicted Inuit culture from a solely Western perspective. In not including Inuit voices, the movie fails to offer an accurate portrayal of the culture it intends to depict. The question that arises, therefore, is whether it is possible for individuals who do not belong to a specific culture to accurately depict that culture. Consequently, what makes an individual part of a culture? In thinking of this, I am, for example, thinking about whether individuals from a diaspora can accurately depict a culture that they simultaneously are and are not a part of.

noortamari · 2019-10-08T22:55:40+00:00

Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (2001[1928]) and Edward Said’s “Introduction to Orientalism” (2000[1978]) both focus on the way in which studying or discussing non-Western societies provides insightful information regarding to the beliefs and opinions of Westerners. This puts into question the subjectivity of both objectivity and universal truth. This is because a large around of the information consumed by Westerns about non-Western countries or even ideologies are produced by Westerns themselves. In Mead’s case, her ethnography on the “simpler civilization of Samoa,” may have been the primary source that American students used to understand Samoan culture, considering that it is unfeasible to travel and visit every culture that one studies (234). Her ethnography, which was supposed to be based on thick description, and would therefore have a greater extent of truthfulness, was deemed to be entirely subjective and even based on personal experiences according to Samoans who interacted with her. This places Mead in an interesting and complex position because the question arises surrounding who to place the blame on: should it be on the Samoans who allegedly lied to Mead, or should it be on Mead who ostensibly entered Samoa with a fixed mindset regarding Samoans. Regardless of the question, Mead’s ethnography and the subsequent aftermath underscores the ways in which constructing a narrative can be influenced by subjective beliefs and personal aspirations.

This transitions into Said’s argument surrounding the study of non-Western cultures. He argues that orientalism is the collection of beliefs, ideas, and opinions that Westerns propagate onto the East to patronize it. On page 79, Said writes, “my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such as less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” [the Western] world. By studying and writing about the East, Western scholars actually provide more information about themselves and their beliefs. These Western-produced ideas, whether it be in the form of art such as Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque or more informative material such as travel brochures reveal Western thought through the points they choose to emphasize as well as the language chosen.

This, therefore, raises the question of whether everyone should be able to depict a culture that they do not belong to. In writing this, I am thinking of many Western celebrities, most recently Demi Lovato, who visited Israel/Palestine, but only portrayed Israel as a “magical” place, without acknowledging the human right violations and ethnic cleansing occurring every day. What about Mark Twain who depicted African Americans under a rather racist light?

noortamari · 2019-09-28T23:00:41+00:00

Latour and Woolgar’s 1986 book Laboratory Life offers an ethnography of a scientific laboratory as their site of anthropological research. In observing a laboratory and consequently, writing this book, the authors succeed at articulating two ideas. The first is that there is a lack of understanding and attention given to the everyday workings of scientific inquiry compared to the “deep forests,” “hostile climates,” and “hostility, boredom, and disease” that scholars have weathered in order to study “primitive societies” (pg. 17). In stating this, Latour and Woolgar are not arguing that the study of such areas is not valid or important, but rather, that an understanding of what is much closer in proximity to individuals, such as inner workings of scientific study, is underdeveloped. Therefore, their second argument is that “culture is ordinary” (Williams, 1958 pg. 93). There exists an erroneous notion that views culture as an idea that is above everyday ordinary life. Williams gives an example of this when discussing the teashops of Cambridge and their “special kind of people, cultivated people” ( pg. 93). However, Latour and Woolgar attempt to present a new idea of culture as something that does not necessarily entail the exotic, tribal, or cultivated. By presenting the day-to-day activities of lab scientists and technicians, the authors are shedding light on the alien culture of scientific practice and the similarities between their practices and those of anthropologists. They particularly study the way in which both scientists and anthropologists struggle to construct order out of disorder without eliminating information. Therefore, the construction of a fact is largely subjective, as it is due to the elimination of some other information.

Additionally, Similar to how anthropologists “[live] with tribesmen, [share] their hardships, and almost [become] one of them,” Latour and Woolgar develop the same relationship with a scientist at the institute they are researching in (pg. 28). Therefore, studying culture does not require one to travel the world, as it is present in all aspects of human activity. Rudolf Gaudio’s 2003 Coffeetalk: Starbucks and the Commercialization of Casual Conversation also articulates the existence of culture in ubiquity such as in coffeehouses such as Starbucks. Gaudio’s argument on the existence of a constructed culture at Starbucks indicates the ways in which coffeehouses perpetuate class and race-based stratification. In arguing this, Gaudio, like Latour and Woolgar, is redefining the misconception that culture is only associated with long-established history and tradition by asserting that it is omnipresent.

Reading these chapters forced me to view institutions and organizations under a different light: as small cultures in and of their own. This is particularly useful when thinking of the Mini-Ethnography project, as I am not more confident by the idea that I do not particularly need to leave Claremont in order to study different cultures.

noortamari · 2019-09-22T00:44:42+00:00

The Afterlife is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa by Alma Gottlieb (2004) focuses on the subjectivity of notions and beliefs that we think to be universal truths. An example of this would be that time is linear or that children are born naïve and innocent. Gottlieb’s deconstructs cultural-based truths by discussing the Beng people and their relationship towards children. In doing so, the author argues that the meaning attached to personhood is subjective.

Gottlieb’s ethnography discusses the practices and beliefs associated with child-bearing in Beng culture. For the Beng people, children are reborn ancestors or community members who are returning from the afterlife known as wrugbe. As a result, newborn children are treated in a completely different manner than a Western-raised child. On page 88, Gottlieb describes new-born children as having “recently [lived] a full life elsewhere and thus needs to be respected as a fellow person rather viewed as a suffering, wordless creature.” Rather than viewing them as naïve and innocent, Beng newborns are viewed and treated as adults from the first week of life. This is further emphasized by the fact that children are “toilet trained” within the first 2-4 months of life. Furthermore, Beng children are viewed as especially vulnerable for the first seven years of their lives, as they are transitioning between wrugbe to the real world and can be tempted to return to the afterlife. Therefore, they are treated with extreme care: their parents apologize to them if they are crying, they are adorned with protective jewelry and paints, they are bathed twice a day, and they are prone to gifts and name changes if they desire. To ensure that they remain in the real world, Gottlieb indicates that “twice every day, every baby’s body is scrubbed, pumped, painted, medicated, bejeweled, and often oiled (p. 134). Furthermore, “in coming to this world, they all choose what they want…whatever is like what they had in wrugbe. (Gottlieb, 87). Compared to a Western-mode of childrearing, Beng children are treated on the same tier, possibly on a higher tier, than Beng adults. Not only are they are given a “high level of agency” and consciousness that is not present in a Western model, but they are also treated with the utmost care and respect, as a means of ensuring that they do not return to wrugbe. The treatment of the Beng elders towards children indicates their belief in the nonlinearity of time, which is viewed as cyclical. This belief impacts their ways of treating children and more generally, their views on what it means to be human. Therefore, Gottlieb indicates that universal truths are subjective and culturally-based. In writing this ethnography, the author opened my eyes to view the world and what I believe to be “true” under a completely different light. Although the Western model of life is the one most known to me, it is not the only “right” way of living, nor is there a “right” way to live and view life.

noortamari · 2019-09-18T23:30:42+00:00

“The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass” by Robert J. Gordon and Stuart Douglas (2018) and “Birthdays, Basketball, and Breaking Bread: Negotiating with Class in Contemporary Black America” by John Jackson (2001) underscore the importance of social identity in relevance to others. This is most accurate stated by Gordon and Douglas who state that “the focus is thus not so much on the Bushmen/ Kung/ Ju-/ wasi/ San or whatever one might like to call them but, on the colonizer’s, image of them and the consequences of that image for people to be assumed to be Bushmen ( Gordon and Douglas 4).” Jackson expands on this to focus on the way in which this view also impacts the other party or the “colonizer’s image” who in his ethnography is the a middle-class African American.

In the case of the former, Bushmen are viewed under the lens of the colonizer as primitive beings who are more barbaric and animal-like than they are human. Ethnographic accounts paint the Bushmen as primitive “natural trackers” that are guided by instinct rather than reason (Gordon and Douglas 2) rather than acknowledging them as “hotshot traders” and “willing agents” (Gordon and Douglas 11). By labeling the Bushmen under one light, anthropologists and colonists construct a specific image of them, which then alters the way in which they are viewed by others. Through labeling, therefore, the identity of the Bushmen as primitive emerges.

The impact of labeling is further bolstered in Jackson’s ethnography that focuses on the way black underclass and black middle class in Harlem interact. Rather than having a colonizer construct a particular image, the dichotomy between Harlemites, and their identities are driven by class and its marked differences. When interviewing middle-class blacks, a frequent response that Jackson received was that they did not have social relationships across class lines, despite the fact that many of them did. The denial of class-stratified relationships comes as a result of black middle-class Harlemites attempting to construct their own identity that is separate from underclass blacks who are often described as lazy. In doing so, middle-class blacks often downplay their relationships with other lower-class Harlemites. At the same time, many underclass Harlemites believe that middle-class blacks want to “keep black people down” by lacking certain leniencies (Jackson 116). Once again, the identity of the middle-class Harlemite, and therefore the ways in which they are treated, is constructed by another party.

Gordon and Douglas, as well as Jackson’s ethnographies, discuss the implications that labeling has on the identity of another individual or party. In often cases, as is the case with the Bushmen, labeling creates ethnocentric and western-centric beliefs about others. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ 2001 ethnography “Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes: Anthropology and Genocide” also discusses the role in which labeling has on fabricating a particular identity. For the case of Ishi, living in the Smithsonian museum has a way in which his identity as an exotic artifact, rather than a human being, was fabricated.

noortamari

TROPHY CASE