Assignment 12: Exploring the Lived Experience of Race

Chapter 12:   Assignment: Exploring the Lived Experience of Race

In her documentary "A Girl Like Me," teen filmmaker Kiri Davis conducts interviews with her peers to explore the impact and consequences of societal messages regarding race. We also see Dr. Kenneth Clark's famous "doll test" with young African-American children replicated. After watching freely available video at the website RACE: Are We So Different? (http://www.understandingrace.org/lived/video/index.html), respond to the following questions:

1. What messages does our society give African-American children about their value and worth as human beings?
   
2. Does the concept of "race" enhance or decrease self-worth in children?
   
3. Can skin color and hair texture determine a person's value in the world?

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Assignment 11: Polygamy in the United States

Assignment 11:  Polygamy in the United States

While it is not surprising that we may see polygamous marriage as something that occurs only "somewhere else," there are cases of polygamous communities in the United States both historically and today. Many of the more notable recent cases have involved members of a fundamentalist group of Mormons (who should be distinguished from the main Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). In September 2002, Rulon T. Jeffs, who had been the fundamentalist group's prophet for many years, died at the age of 92, leaving an estimated 75 widows and 65 children.In the early 20th century, a split in the Church is believed to have originated in large part because of the main Church's renunciation of polygamy and its decision to excommunicate practitioners of polygamous marriage. This stand by the Church was affirmed in 1998 by Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, who gave the following statement on the Church?s attitude toward modern-day polygamy:

"This church has nothing whatever to do with those practicing polygamy. They are not members of this church. If any of our members are found to be practicing plural marriage, they are excommunicated, the most serious penalty the church can impose. Not only are those so involved in direct violation of the civil law, they are in violation of the law of this church."

Background reading on the LDS Church can be found at: http://www.pbs.org/mormons/faqs/.Read about polygamy as associated with the LDS Church historically and through contemporary groups who continue to promote and practice plural marriage as a central tenet of their faith through the interviews at the PBS site: http://www.pbs.org/mormons/themes/religpolygamy.html.Read the opinion piece "Polygamy Laws Expose our own Hypocrisy" written by Jonathan Turley, a Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School, at http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/2004-10-03-turley_x.htm#. Answer the following questions after having carefully read the material above.

1. In her interview at the PBS site, Karen Flake states that for Mormons "to walk away from polygamy was to walk away from an entire kinship structure that not only gave meaning to their most intimate associations but also was related very directly to their understanding of how one was saved." Discuss what she means by this statement in light of what you have learned in this course about marriage, kinship, and religious life.
   
2. How does the particular polygamous practice described by fundamentalist Mormons appear similar to and/or different from those discussed in the text?
   
3. Why do you think that polygamy is against the law in the United States? Given that we have learned that it is practiced in many different cultural groups around the world, how is its illegal status an expression of culturally and historically particular circumstances of society in the United States?
   
4. What is your reaction to the article by Jonathan Turley? Do you agree or disagree with him that the illegality of polygamy in the United States exhibits a hypocritical position? Why or why not?

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Assignment 10: Making a Kin Diagram

Assignment 10: Making a Kin Diagram

Chart your family in a kinship diagram of your own design that includes as many generations as possible (include your mother's and your father's ancestral line). Be sure to include relations by marriage (affines) and consaguines (relations by birth). You may use kinship symbols and abbreviations as used in the text or create your own (so long as you provide a detailed chart to explain what your symbols and abbreviations mean). Remember that you will need symbols for a range of roles such as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin; a way to show gender; a way to show which groups are closer to you (as Ego); ways to show connections between individuals (children, married partners); a way to show if people are divorced; and a way to show if people have died. There are (as we have seen) many potential ways of figuring kinship as well as many types of family. For example, this assignment need not be restricted to so-called blood relatives; you may be adopted or have people who you consider like family (people whom anthropologists sometimes call "fictive kin"). If necessary, describe remarriages, half-siblings, or other details in accompanying notes. After completing and carefully labeling your kinship diagram, answer the questions below.

1. What lineage system does your diagrammed family use?
2. To which relatives are you closest? Why?
3. Identify your parallel and cross cousins on the diagram.
4. What categories of relatives can you identify in your diagram?
5. Does your reckoning of kinship appear consistent with that expected for most people in North America? Why or why not?
6. How did you gather the necessary information on your family? Were there any surprises?

Note:  Oral Presentation required as part of assignment

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Assignment 9: Kayapo Environmentalism and Cultural Survival: Indigenous Resistance

Assignment 9: Kayapo Environmentalism and Cultural Survival: Indigenous Resistance

The anthropologist Terence Turner has worked with the indigenous Kayapo of the Brazilian Amazon. Specifically, Turner has documented how the Kayapo have actively formulated a resistance against efforts to exploit natural resources in their traditional lands. Using the example of Kayapo resistance, Turner has maintained that indigenous people are capable of shaping political policy and that their knowledge of ecologically fragile environments around the world is essential to contemporary efforts to protect these places. At the same time that indigenous peoples are threatened by the efforts of state governments to increase revenue through promoting extractive industries such as timber and mining, perhaps surprisingly, wildlife conservation efforts may also threaten their way of life.Learn more about the Kayapo. Their struggle has become something of a model for indigenous environmental activism. With the assistance of anthropologists, indigenous advocacy groups, members of the U.S. Congress, and the international media, their cause has rallied support from around the world. Visit the website of the organization Cultural Survival and read the following articles: http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/brazil/kayapo-choices-short-term-gain-vs-long-term-damage and http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/kayapo-plan-meeting-discuss-dams.

1. Describe the basic challenge facing the Kayapo.
   
2. How have the Kayapo organized to resist these challenges? In what ways has this resistance relied on traditional means of organization? In what ways has it required the Kayapo to adapt to their changing circumstances?
   
3. How is the experience of the Kayapo similar to and/or different from the situation facing indigenous peoples in Peru as described in the "In Their Own Words" textbox titled "Protesters Gird for Long Fight Over Opening Peru's Amazon"?
   
4. Do you think that the case of the Kayapo is an appropriate model for indigenous resistance or environmental activism more generally?
   
5. Read about the organization Cultural Survival while you are visiting the site. Does this appear to be an organization whose efforts you would support? Why or why not?

Assignment 8: Magic in American Sports

Assignment 8: Magic in American Sports

Read the New York Times article "Voodoo Logic: So Who Cursed Whom With Jersey?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/sports/baseball/
17shirt.html). After having read the chapter and this article, think about how magic may play a role in everyday activities in societies like the United States.

1. As defined in the text, magic is a set of beliefs and practices designed to control the visible or invisible world for specific purposes. How does the use of the baseball jersey fit this definition?
   
2. In what other ways is there evidence of ?magical thinking? in sports?
   
3. Search for at least one more (non-sports) example of practices designed to influence events through magic in the contemporary United States. Describe the practice in terms of worldview.

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Assignment 7: Rites of Passage

Assignment 7: Rites of Passage

Many cultures choose to mark certain points in the human life course through ritual. These points are frequently taken to be critical transitions for the individual and the group and include such things as birth, the onset of puberty, marriage, life-threatening illness or injury, and death. People throughout the world have heightened emotions during times of important transitions, which may be both physiological and social. Such watersheds as graduation from school or retirement at the end of a working life are major transitions in modern large-scale societies. In your assignment, be sure to think about both domains (i.e., the more sacred as well as the secular) when selecting rites to examine.

1. Identify three rites of passage in your culture or in a group in which you are a member. Try to find at least one such rite that you have experienced.
   
2. Describe how well these rites appear to fit (or not) the stages described in the text.
   
3. For the rite of passage in which you participated, what was this experience like? How did it appear to change you and any other participants?
   
4. What purpose does each of these rites appear to serve for the group?
   
5. Compare these rites of passage in your culture with at least one from a different culture.

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Assignment 6: Ethnography of Virtual Worlds

Assignment 6: Ethnography of Virtual Worlds

Visit the Second Life site (http://secondlife.com/; note that you need not join) and answer the following questions after exploring the site and viewing the material at the link "What is Second Life."

1. While virtual worlds have existed for at least 30 years in some form, they have only recently become the interest of a variety of scholars, who see them as a new frontier for the study of identity and culture, among other things. In the text, we read about the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff's fieldwork in the virtual reality program "Second Life." Imagine that you are going to do an ethnography of Second Life. How would this be similar to and different than an ethnography of the offline world? What challenges would you face? What opportunities would be present in an ethnography of the online world that are not present in the offline world?
   
2. Given what you are able to learn from the website, what similarities and differences do there appear to be between physical-world and virtual-world social networks?
   
3. When compared with the offline world, Second Life offers the advantage of a highly apparent social construction of reality. How might the structure and design of virtual worlds affect the behavior of actors who live within them?
   
4. As noted in the text, anthropologists are interested in what might be called the performative nature of identity. How does Second Life help us to see and think about self, personality, and subjectivity?

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