Week 14 Happenings
I'm back......I'm really horrible at being consistent with this blog, I try my best. This past week was filled with "free days" which have been anything but free. I basically only had classes on Monday. But the programme for this week we've come into haunted me the whole time. I have a Dutch Listening Exam later this evening, Urban Geo presentation, Dutch Grammar and Vocab Exam on Tommorow....then Wednesday is "free"...Thursday an Anthropology & Qualitative Methods Presentation, Friday a Qualitative Methods & Urban Geo Exam. WOW!
I just finished doing the reading for my Anthropology presentation on Thursday....It's absolutely amazing and really makes one question the works of anthropologists that have sort of now gained canon status in the field of Anthropology. The proposition for the presentation is as follows "Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Margaret Mead's Coming Of Age in Samoa should no longer be considered 'classic' ethnographies".
In preparation for this, Derek Freeman author of "The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead" which is a criticism on Mead's work in Samoa was read......I actually was pretty surprised but then to an extent I could totally understand why such and such happened...Well, basically what he says it..and what my initial perception of Coming of Age in Samoa was the manner in which Samoan people were portrayed....you know the typical island people....loving life, living so "pacific" (I'm trying to play on words here....living extremely peaceful lives) free all things negative.....The exoticised preconception of islanders was exactly what was brought to the table...Somehow, it made one question...maybe this was actually how it was in the 1920's before the society was destroyed by western civilization.
Before even reading Freeman's article I was like.. “Well, duh..he's doing his research 40 years later...of course things have changed”. Only to delve deeper into the reading and discover how Mead's informant pulled one really expensive joke on her....a joke that cost the Samoan girls a view that all of us gullible-consumers-of-Anthropological-finding's have about Samoan adolescent girls. Freeman was lucky to meet up with one of Mead's key informants who was at the time of his own research now an octogenarian....She recollected..and told on how she and her fellow girls would fabulate stories to this young naive American Anthropologist(Margaret Mead).....the Samoan girls would pinch themselves in-between their stories making sure they were concise with the cooked up tales of how they met up with the boys and had passionate sex under the palm trees. Aaah, how romantic! Mead’s conclusion was that unlike American adolescent, Islanders were given the freedom of promiscuity, it was something they were not chided for as it part of the life for a teenager on the Island. A premise that became so believable in the West.
It was eye-opening...how we are so quick to making a reality or lack thereof out of our pre-conceptions.....the other day we read this article of the "Nacirema People"....without doing any background research and possessing this preconceived idea that any article dealt with in Anthropology class has to be about some foreign culture...that even when the article turns out to be something so un-alien to us...we are blinded by our prejudice.....In a sense you could kind of notice the over-exoticisation of that Nacirema text...I was thinking to myself...Where on earth are this people from? With all these funky shrines, rituals and all.
Back to Malinowski...the founding father of Anthropology....who was conradesque in his approach to native people, had little interest in his informants....basically he wasn't in the right state of mind during his research about the New-Guinean people. After his death, the Diary which he kept during his fieldwork was published...revealing the other side of this almighty “wow” father of Anthropology. The other side which is purely human but how un-academic and un-ethnographic of him...to add pepper and salt to his observations or as he put it "dress-up" his observations. But to some extent I guess, having had some amateur experience with participant observation myself...you add the occasional relishing here and there to make the story "sweeter" and ultimately fulfil the purpose of that preconceived opinion of
the reader....Unknown to me then..even Malinowski himself did that. The bottom-line here is be critical of what you read, even the most admired revolutionary Academic made stuff up or was to gullible to decipher the real from the made-up.
It's amazing..how much things I've read this past week always go back to either Conrad or Achebe...It's incredible!
Well, in between reading for presentations and what not..I've been having constructive discussions with my housemate and ultimate-distractor Tassiana. I think it's amazing to have people around you, who add to your knowledge and view of the world in one way or another. We basically had an impromptu history lesson the other day...well we kind of have impromptu lessons everyday. It all started with an innocent Chimamanda Adichie (pictured right with her novel "Half of the Yellow Sun") speech on youtube...and ended with the Nigeria-Biafra war documentary "No Victor No Vanquished" and a Samora Machel speech(subtitled ofcourse!)
I just finished doing the reading for my Anthropology presentation on Thursday....It's absolutely amazing and really makes one question the works of anthropologists that have sort of now gained canon status in the field of Anthropology. The proposition for the presentation is as follows "Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Margaret Mead's Coming Of Age in Samoa should no longer be considered 'classic' ethnographies".
In preparation for this, Derek Freeman author of "The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead" which is a criticism on Mead's work in Samoa was read......I actually was pretty surprised but then to an extent I could totally understand why such and such happened...Well, basically what he says it..and what my initial perception of Coming of Age in Samoa was the manner in which Samoan people were portrayed....you know the typical island people....loving life, living so "pacific" (I'm trying to play on words here....living extremely peaceful lives) free all things negative.....The exoticised preconception of islanders was exactly what was brought to the table...Somehow, it made one question...maybe this was actually how it was in the 1920's before the society was destroyed by western civilization.
Before even reading Freeman's article I was like.. “Well, duh..he's doing his research 40 years later...of course things have changed”. Only to delve deeper into the reading and discover how Mead's informant pulled one really expensive joke on her....a joke that cost the Samoan girls a view that all of us gullible-consumers-of-Anthropological-finding's have about Samoan adolescent girls. Freeman was lucky to meet up with one of Mead's key informants who was at the time of his own research now an octogenarian....She recollected..and told on how she and her fellow girls would fabulate stories to this young naive American Anthropologist(Margaret Mead).....the Samoan girls would pinch themselves in-between their stories making sure they were concise with the cooked up tales of how they met up with the boys and had passionate sex under the palm trees. Aaah, how romantic! Mead’s conclusion was that unlike American adolescent, Islanders were given the freedom of promiscuity, it was something they were not chided for as it part of the life for a teenager on the Island. A premise that became so believable in the West.
It was eye-opening...how we are so quick to making a reality or lack thereof out of our pre-conceptions.....the other day we read this article of the "Nacirema People"....without doing any background research and possessing this preconceived idea that any article dealt with in Anthropology class has to be about some foreign culture...that even when the article turns out to be something so un-alien to us...we are blinded by our prejudice.....In a sense you could kind of notice the over-exoticisation of that Nacirema text...I was thinking to myself...Where on earth are this people from? With all these funky shrines, rituals and all.
Back to Malinowski...the founding father of Anthropology....who was conradesque in his approach to native people, had little interest in his informants....basically he wasn't in the right state of mind during his research about the New-Guinean people. After his death, the Diary which he kept during his fieldwork was published...revealing the other side of this almighty “wow” father of Anthropology. The other side which is purely human but how un-academic and un-ethnographic of him...to add pepper and salt to his observations or as he put it "dress-up" his observations. But to some extent I guess, having had some amateur experience with participant observation myself...you add the occasional relishing here and there to make the story "sweeter" and ultimately fulfil the purpose of that preconceived opinion of
the reader....Unknown to me then..even Malinowski himself did that. The bottom-line here is be critical of what you read, even the most admired revolutionary Academic made stuff up or was to gullible to decipher the real from the made-up.It's amazing..how much things I've read this past week always go back to either Conrad or Achebe...It's incredible!
Well, in between reading for presentations and what not..I've been having constructive discussions with my housemate and ultimate-distractor Tassiana. I think it's amazing to have people around you, who add to your knowledge and view of the world in one way or another. We basically had an impromptu history lesson the other day...well we kind of have impromptu lessons everyday. It all started with an innocent Chimamanda Adichie (pictured right with her novel "Half of the Yellow Sun") speech on youtube...and ended with the Nigeria-Biafra war documentary "No Victor No Vanquished" and a Samora Machel speech(subtitled ofcourse!)
2 comments:
I hope you'll stop adding pepper and salt, it's highly unprofessional, and in fact is very unethical.
About Mead's observation, I vaguely recall a TV program I think on BBC4, maybe the 1930s in colour, dont quote me, where they refer to island teenagers making love under palm trees.
It's all down to ideological filters, nothing is free from ideology, you always have to question motives. The minute person A puts pen to paper to write about person B, ideological forces are at work, and the final piece reveals a lot about the culture and thinking of person A.
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