Your Final Project: Mini-Ethnography incl. an Interview

Don't forget to watch the video on ethnographic interviewing before next class Oct 16th. [Click on the index card and discover the INDEXED blog]


STAYING ON COURSE
Meeting once a week can lead to a pitfall -- being disoriented about our course of actions.
Remember to

1. Read the Kottak chapter for the week and read the Conformity and Conflict Chapter assigned and write a 250-500 response each week (exceptions are in the schedule).
   
2. Take the online quiz when indicated on the schedule
3. Prepare for your group's presentation -- the assignments are on the blog
4. Begin to consider an aspect of life/culture you would like to study through participant-observation for your final project -- a mini-ethnography. We will do some exercises and actually draft your proposal during class on Thu Oct 16th. You will revise it and set up an interview the next week. A deadline will be announced in class.
   

ABOUT INDIVIDUALS & CULTURE
Consider we are interviewing individuals but from an anthropological perspective, individuals are a reflection of larger cultural phenomena. The interview will be used to gain insight into the emic worldview of a specific culture through the individual/interviewee. As the ethnographer, you will have to determine the framing of what you learn--this is the etic viewpoint, applying anthropologial concepts and thinking, choosing what captures your attention and it may or may not be what the interviewee thinks is interesting about his/her own culture.

Here's a excerpt from Chapter 3 - Culture of the Kottak to get you thinking about what you will be studying.

Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice (from Kottak Ch.3)

• People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly following its dictates. Cultures are dynamic and constantly changing.
• Culture is contested—that is, different groups in society struggle with one another over whose ideas, values, goals, and beliefs will prevail.
• Common symbols may have radically different meanings to different individuals and groups in the same culture.
• Ideal culture consists of what people say they should do and what they say they do, whereas real culture refers to their actual behavior.
• Agency refers to the actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities.
• Practice theory recognizes that individuals within a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and influence.
  1. Practice theory focuses on how individuals influence, create, and transform the world they live in.
• Culture shapes how individuals experience and respond to external events, but individuals also play an active role in how society functions and changes.

GETTING STARTED/BRAINSTORMING A POSSIBLE PROJECT:

• Who would you love to meet from NYC and why? Call or email about an interview for a course at Baruch College.
• What cultural event or institution do you already participate in that you could study? Who would be a great key cultural consultant?
• What matters to you regarding family, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, social stratification, or the world? Is there an institution, an event, or a person whom would make a great key cultural consultant on how things work?
  
• Who is a person you already know whom you admire and why? Consider interviewing them on their life from an anthropological view. (i.e., How did you become a successful stock broker on Wall Street as a woman? This would explore gender and business.)
  

Prof. G's Whiteness as Social Construct Slide Show

I know this exercise in creating a white museum (see previous post) has been difficult, uncomfortable and a bit baffling for many of you. As I reflect on how it is going, I am realizing that my presentation of it (as a professor who is not white) and the way I set you up (not as well as I would have liked in hindsight) was filled with troubling concerns. It looks like I am trying to entrap you into racist ideas and thinking. This much be disconcerting so early in the semester for many of you.

I promised this class would be a safe space to learn and grow in. I want you to be ready, willing and able to embrace and be empowered by ANY communication by the end of this course. Perhaps I've failed at bit at preparing you just yet. In any case, this is an important exercise that will set us up our conversations not about whiteness but about the nature of culture found in Chapter 3.

Yes, we need a definition of whiteness to complete this exercise though there are perhaps many we can come up with. That's the art of exploring the unknown, i.e., learning. To get to the unknown, we must empty ourselves of all we already know. Then discovering new things becomes available rather than replicating the past as if that's learning (sharing what you already think is known or true--that's just the first step). Additionally, we also need to define CULTURE to get at the heart of what this course in cultural anthropology is about and how it will become useful for you in the future. I gave you one definition--the learned ways of thinking, feeling, believing and behaving and now you've read about the value of working with a key cultural consultant (formerly called "informants" but the term evoked spying on your own culture/community).

So, I invite you to check out my emic slide show, my virtual white museum. I invite you and your group to create your own emic collaboration on whiteness as a slide show. That way we'll have 6 slide shows from the body of the class to compare. What different stories of whiteness can we tell or will the be the same? You game?? You can tell it from ANY perspective, from ANY point of view, from how far we come, what is no longer, from the view of minorities or from people considered white but view themselves as a particular ethnicity, or from religions, from sports, or from eye color and shape. Anything that tells a story about what we already know about whiteness. A local view of whiteness. We will explore and distinguish the difference between emic and etic in class. Prof. G