I want you to consider the notes on Geertz and what kind of tools they might give you to observe, report about, and analyze cultures you come in contact with. I hope that as we practice observing particular online cultures, it'll give us the tools to better understand those that we are a part of. Since these online communities are, well, online...they are defined and constructed mostly by discourse. As part of the goal of a class that focuses on rhetoric and composition, I think it fits into our objective to help you develop more agency in terms of your own participation via discourse (or written words and visual images) in online communities that you are a part of.
Since Hill suggested we look out the window of our culture at others that are foreign to us before we look in at ourselves and attempt to analyze that which we take for granted in a more 'objective' way, we'll look at some groups that I am pretty sure are new to most of you. Second Life, which I wrote about in the email concerning class homework, is one such site for study, if your computer hardware can support its requirements. Regardless, MUDding is something we can all explore. Since both are connected to gaming (either because they are games or they were developed from games), the gaming texts we are going to read will help offer us some questions that may give us insight to see these environments more critically.
For this blog entry, I want you to read through this article by Horace Miner. If you're wondering about the disgusting image above, it was inspired by the Miner article. Read the whole thing, but don't kill yourself trying to understand every little detail. There are footnotes at the end of the essay. Let me give you a hint...Miner wrote this piece to criticize the kind of ethnography he saw going on in anthropology. Specifically, he felt that anthropologists were going into foreign cultures and then exoticizing, sensationalizing, and ultimately misunderstanding them from a scientific model that presented itself as 'objective.' Presumably, such anthropologists were ethnocentric. For your comment to this blog, I want you to tell me how Miner might have been accomplishing what I've detailed above...
1 comment:
Yeah, the picture was a bit disturbing and as I read the article it was a lil weird as well. But as I thought about it more, is it only "weird" because these are not everyday, natural occurances in our society? Maybe this is all these people have been accustomed to during their lives. Maybe they find everyday rituals that we take part in to be offensive or disturbing.
When I was reading about the ritual that takes place with the children and the medicine men, to me, it honestly sounded a bit like their yearly check-up to the dentist, in its own strange kind of way.
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