TED TALK: Actress Sarah Jones transforms blackness into elderly Jew & fast-talking DR

See Homework post below on RACISM: A HISTORY.

I am delighted to share one of my most favorite TED TALKS from the Long Beach conference. Sarah Jones is a locally-born actress, a Broadway star, and she won a major battle against the FCC over language in a hip-hop critique based on her poem THIS REVOLUTION.

Homework for Thu: RACISM A HISTORY

PLEASE WATCH the following clips (30 mins total) from the BBC documentary Racism: A History

NEW FEATURE: Indicate your reaction to the post at the bottom near the comment button.

1) Racism a History - The Colour of Money Part 1/6



2) Racism a History - The Colour of Money Part 2/6



3) Racism a History - The Colour of Money Part 3/6



PS: Remember this from early in the class. Puts religion and other concepts we studied in perspective as if now a retrospective of what you've now learned:

BONUS: "What we are" Dance Monkeys Dance by Ernest Cline - www.ernestcline.com

Cultural Anthropologists are Hacking Cultures

Next class, just before spring break, we have visitors: A hacker and a simplicity expert

Joshua Klein is a fervent hacker of all things, including wet, pulpy systems like animals and people and the way they behave.
• Josh’s TED talk The Amazing Intelligence of Crows
http://www.wireless.is/about.php

Bill Jensen: "80% of what you need, you've already got!" & "Everything you do uses a portion of someone else's life."
• One of Bill’s videos: Making it Easier to Get Things Done
http://www.simplerwork.com/about_us.htm

Cultural Anthropology: Quoted from http://www.aaanet.org/about/WhatisAnthropology.cfm

"In North America the discipline's largest branch, cultural anthropology, applies the comparative method and evolutionary perspective to human culture. Culture represents the entire database of knowledge, values, and traditional ways of viewing the world, which have been transmitted from one generation ahead to the next — nongenetically, apart from DNA — through words, concepts, and symbols."

"Cultural anthropologists study humans through a descriptive lens called the ethnographic method, based on participant observation, in tandem with face-to-face interviews, normally conducted in the native tongue. Ethnographers compare what they see and hear themselves with the observations and findings of studies conducted in other societies. Originally, anthropologists pieced together a complete way of life for a culture, viewed as a whole. Today, the more likely focus is on a narrower aspect of cultural life, such as economics, politics, religion or art." [For your mini-ethnographies: even narrower units of observation are expected]

"Cultural anthropologists seek to understand the internal logic of another society. It helps outsiders make sense of behaviors that, like face painting or scarification, may seem bizarre or senseless. Through the comparative method an anthropologist learns to avoid "ethnocentrism," the tendency to interpret strange customs on the basis of preconceptions derived from one's own cultural background. Moreover, this same process helps us see our own society — the color "red" again — through fresh eyes."

We can turn the principle around and see our everyday surroundings in a new light, with the same sense of wonder and discovery anthropologists experience when studying life in a Brazilian rain-forest tribe. Though many picture cultural anthropologists thousands of miles from home residing in thatched huts amid wicker fences, growing numbers now study U.S. groups instead, applying anthropological perspectives to their own culture and society.

For example, why do Americans have customized urinals like the one to the left? Or what drives the popularity of the video game Grand Theft Auto? Other cultures would surely see these as senseless. But an ethnographer is interested, willing to be interested, in how it makes senses to its users through the ethnographic method.

Use the ethnographic method as often as possible from here on out.