Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

At 2:18": "What's important here is not technological capital but social capital. These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring....Now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen ANYWHERE that people can take for granted that we are in this altogether."

Collaboration

The Baruch Bigger Picture Book

1. NO CLASS TUE APR 20 - Professor Gaunt is at a Twitter Conference and you should spend this time working on your draft of your essay. In lieu of attendance, please submit your draft by email to kyra.gaunt@baruch.cuny.edu by 5pm Tuesday.
   
   
2. NO QUIZ. Ethnicity and Race chapters and group presentation is postponed. Thu we will begin to edit your essays and launch the survey.
   
   
3. READ BY TUE APR 20: The Audacity of Humanity Ebook
1. Read at least the cover page, tag cloud of contents, authors page (created by Wordle.net), the intro by Kyra Gaunt, and 8-10 different essays or more.
   
   
2. WRITE A RESPONSE BY EMAIL
   - Share what was your favorite essay in Audacity of Humanity and why?
   - Share how these essays exemplify the title of the book AUDACITY OF HUMANITY? In other words, based on a sampling of the essays, what is audacious and what speaks to humanity, in your own words?
   
   
4. Watch two or three videos of your choice from below and write a few comments on each to show you watched it.
   
1. The digital ethnography from KSU by Mike Wesch called A VISION OF STUDENTS TODAY
   
   
2. Learning to Change, Changing to Learn (5:37") features my favorite quote "it means the death of education, but the birth of learning."
   
   
3. Networked Student - A video about the idea that learning occurs from diverse social network and ties.
   
   
4. OPTIONAL: TED Talk: How Schools Kill Creativity by Sir Ken Robinson (19:21").
   
   
5. Begin to write a 300 word essay that begins "What matters to me is..."
   
1. It can be about being a student, being a young adult embarking on life. Anything that makes you happy, that you desire, or that would make being a school more a reflection of what matters in life to you or to people as a whole.
   
   
2. It can be small, simple or mundane. It's more like what matters to you right now.
   
   
3. This might seem audacious. Like this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. No one may agree with me, but this thing you write about lights you up. It simply mattters. If the world might take a listen to your thoughts about X or Z, life would be different for people (in my humble opinion).
   
   
4. This can be a "discovery draft" or a "shitty first draft". Just write and ask later whether it's a good idea. If you feel compelled to write (and it REALLY CAN BE ABOUT ANYTHING YOU ARE INTERESTED IN RIGHT NOW). Write on!
   
   
6. SEND A RESPONSE ON EMAIL SHOWING YOU COMPLETED ALL OF THE ABOVE AND ATTACH A DRAFT OF YOUR ESSAY ABOUT WHAT MATTERS RIGHT NOW
   
   
1. Share about your favorite Audacity of Humanity Ebook Essay and/or bio and why
   
   
2. What does it mean to be audacious and in this book and what does it say about humanity as a collective of ideas.
   
   
3. Attach your "shitty first draft" of a possible 300 words or less essay. Don't worry about a title yet. But if one comes to mind, share it.

_________________

YOUR COMMENTS BELOW

So you have some ideas about what we should or should not be up to with this project. I love what Bishoy said. This is an opportunity like no other. When do you get to CREATE instead of consume as a student. This book will be launched to students to inspire them to begin to inquire into what matters that represents Baruch College. Get the Bigger Picture of Baruch from our ebook.

Ultimately, I want you to see how simple it is to make a difference in a small but powerful way with an ebook. And I want to apply all the etic principles of ethnography and anthropology to ourselves and our environment. Make a difference RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.

Add your comments below. BE GREAT. Google anything you are unsure of or if you need help use Google HELP to log on to make a comment. Also see sidebar for instructions on commenting on the blog.

Free ebook THE AUDACITY OF HUMANITY ed. by Prof. Gaunt in 3 weeks

Before spring break I mentioned that I was creating an ebook that inspired our final project The Baruch Big Picture Book. I released it to the world on Friday April 2, 2010 and it's been viewed by over 3000 people since then and counting.

The ebook is called THE AUDACITY OF HUMANITY and it features over 39 authors, ages 10 to 63, from 5 continents, representing multiple ethnicities, sexualities and belief systems with different abilities and limitations. We are ONE people, the human race, courageously up-ending stereotypes and generalizations.

Each contributor offers their story as a radical transformation of what leadership can be. We are not contained by description (check out our bios). We agree to be offended
and stay connected. From A to Zed, we are a collective testament to the audacity of humanity. Be the audacity of that!!

One is a former student from ANT1001. Read the page under the tag "LEARNING ENGLISH" by Mei.

This is free. Liberate it. Tweet it, email it, post it on your own site.

Bringing Beginner's Mind/Etic Research to Women in Islam

“In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few”

Shunryu Suzuki quotes (Japanese Zen priest, ?-1971)

Originally posted 3/31/2009 at 1:54pm

I said last week I'd send an email about our conversations last class. The group presenting on gender presented a few videos out-of-cultural-context without any intervention into the generalizing stereotypes that exist in our culture about 1) women in Islam and 2) female circumcision in Africa. These two topics are fraught with stereotypes, "evolutionary" bias (like they are behind the modern way things SHOULD be), and mere misinformation that is worse than the truths are for actual men and women who are Muslims in the majority of cases.

Here's a different view than what we saw last Thu in class.



I insist that everyone take a look at a great website I found on PBS called GLOBAL CONNECTIONS: The Middle East. The first question they delve into is "What factors determine the changing roles of women in Middle East and Islamic societies?

Some Americans believe that Muslim women are oppressed by their religion, forced to cover themselves completely, denied education and other basic rights. It is true that Muslim women, like women all over the world, have struggled against inequality and restrictive practices in education, work force participation, and family roles. Many of these oppressive practices, however, do not come from Islam itself, but are part of local cultural traditions. (To think about the difference between religion and culture, ask yourself if the high rate of domestic violence in the United States is related to Christianity, the predominant religion.)...

The Quran explicitly states that men and women are equal in the eyes of God. Furthermore, the Quran: forbids female infanticide (practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia and other parts of the world) instructs Muslims to educate daughters as well as sons insists that women have the right to refuse a prospective husband gives women rights if they are divorced by their husband gives women the right to divorce in certain cases gives women the right to own and inherit property (though in Sunni Islam they get only half of what men inherit. Men are expected to care for their mothers and any unmarried female relatives, and would, it is reasoned, need greater resources for this purpose.) While polygyny is permissible, it is discouraged and on the whole practiced less frequently than imagined by Westerners. It is more frequent in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. Many Muslims cite the Quranic phrase "But treat them equally... and if you cannot, then one [wife] is better" and argue that monogamy is preferable, or even mandatory. The Quran and the role of women As the Islamic state and religion expanded, interpretations of the gender roles laid out in the Quran varied with different cultures. For example, some religious scholars in ninth- and 10th-century Iraq were prescribing more restrictive roles for women, while elite women in Islamic Spain were sometimes able to bend these rules and mix quite freely with men (see Walladah bint Mustakfi below). Some contemporary women -- and men as well -- reject the limitations put on women and are reinterpreting the Quran from this perspective.

How do you bring beginner's mind to something that seems so strange, even shocking at first? What tools do you have to have to begin considering how to think like an anthropologist. Think about how Geertz had to learn how to see sculptures in jungles, paintings in deserts, and political order OUTSIDE of state political structures that we recognize as "normal" or "the way is should be."

We will discuss this in class this week and the coming weeks.

YouTube Digital Ethnography from ANT students in Kansas

Originally posted on 11/5/2007 at 1:17pm.

A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. Made by students in a Cultural Anthropology Class in Spring 2007.

Ch. 8 - RELIGION: What do we know about how religions got started?

Originally posted 4.23.2009 at 4:21am

Watch one or all three of the videos. One is an excellent ethnographic short of Cargo cults. The second is on Rastafarianism. The third is a dialogue between a Catholic priest and a Brahmin priest of Hinduism.

Cargo cults are compared to the cult of Jesus in this 6:03" segment:




This features a man from a community of Rastafarians, who have settled in the small southern Ethiopian town of Shashamene (3:01"):



This is a fascinating dialogue between a French Roman Catholic official (it seems) and a Hindu official or Brahmin priest.



POST A COMMENT: Decided to give you a bit more direction for the comment here. PICK ONE QUESTION TO COMMENT ON.

Q#1: After viewing the video on either Cargo Cults, Rastafarianism, or the dialogue between the Catholic Priest and the Brahmin priest, how does the example you chose to watch highlight

1. the social constructed nature of religion as well as
2. how our view of others is a manifestation of our own grinding and their reaction one cultural constructed by theirs.
   

If you are unsure of the culture of Cargo cults, see Kottak Mirror for Humanity, p. 195 again.

Q#2: How has the world capitalist economy of core and periphery stratification of nations perhaps contributed to the spread and formation of religions like Rastafarianism and Cargo cults?