Big+Man+Week+5

In the last week, we have discussed a lot of information about language and how different languages perceive messages differently, such as not having a specific words for specific thoughts between languages. My question asks about another point to human characteristics, symbols. Differently cultures and people raised under different stimuli perceive symbols completely differently. Will the concept of symbology be touched on throughout this course? I understand it falls under a different field of study, but would you say the material and topics of symbology are more in line with the study of Linguistic Anthropology or Cultural Anthropology?

I've been thinking some about language. So much so, in fact, that I had a discussion with my friends tonight about what exactly the word "candy" meant. I was surprised to find out that candy canes don't qualify as candy, nor does cotton candy, and neither does chocolate. In my discovery I found out something interesting about language: Denotation and connotation have very fuzzy lines between them. Some people think of a word meaning one thing and if you ask them they'd tell you they thought so denotatively, yet the <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">dictionary says an entirely different thing. Makes one wonder where you can <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">ever draw a line between the two.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">P.S. "denotatively" is now a word. Because I say so. Isn't language just <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">great like that?

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/denotatively http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denotation http://books.google.com/books?id=6GYapYaLOggC&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=J.L.+Austin+denotation+connotation&source=bl&ots=AThFQL2BWk&sig=5Dtm9Zgu444Bz_l3PlyXKCDbPdg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=BAdkUJisEKjo0QH7loDACw&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q=J.L.%20Austin%20denotation%20connotation&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=bnhNE6LrmMYC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&dq=J.L.+Austin+denotation+connotation&source=bl&ots=HqYlOuVSfd&sig=HPm5syRcyHJknusrJDQTgFI3Yw8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=BAdkUJisEKjo0QH7loDACw&ved=0CDkQ6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=J.L.%20Austin%20denotation%20connotation&f=false

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._L._Austin

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Initially, I thought that emotions were only as a result of biological factors at different levels. How much of emotions are culturally constructed (environmental) and how much are from bodily arousal (biological)? Is it even possible to measure this? How can anthropologists use emotional "data" in research? <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Could emotion and perception be directly linked between a culture- that is a certain perception of something stimulates a specific emotion? According to the textbook emotion, or “bodily arousal” occurs when “our familiar world is interrupted,” which I took as meaning an event in our daily cycles that is out of the ordinary. This brought my attention to the female genital cutting topic and began to wonder if it is the perception and emotion that a culture has formed which causes the polar opposite reaction to genital cutting between “us” (our culture) and “them” (African cultures.) Could it be that African nations have a much different perception to the entire process and thus, experience different emotion when the process is undergone? This would even feed into the pain experienced from the operation; could the perception once again influence the pain felt by woman has they are cut? Thus- since Western women have such a negative perception and experience negative emotions; they associate the process with extreme pain and therefore, are biased towards it?

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.an.15.100186.002201?journalCode=anthro http://theoryandconsciousness.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/anthropology-of-emotions-reading-list/

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">In Dave Chappelle's video, he demonstrates how black people, white people, <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">and latinos respond to different musical instruments. This is shown as a <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">cultural difference between the three groups. Where is the line between <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">identifying cultural differences between races and racial stereotyping, if <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">there is one? If a cultural difference is identified between two groups, <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">could an employer or voter choose one candidate over another based on this <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">cultural truth, or would that be racism?

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">So I was reading about the section called "Avaters, Alts, ans the Self in <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">Second Life" and I just kept thinking about the holodeck from star trek. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">People get addicted to video games where they are pretending to have a second <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">life what would happen when people are actually able to physically live a <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">second life and their second life could be all they imagined?

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">I play video games as much as anyone else but what does it say about us that <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">we prefer a fake life to a real life? Or does it really matter if we live a <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">second life if we are happy? http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/boellstorff/ http://www.robbiecooper.org/

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">In chapter 6 in the section about illusion and visuality, Susan Vogel defines <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">visuality as the ways that individuals from different societies learn to <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">interpret what they see and to construct mental pictures using the visual <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">practices that their won cultural system favors, much like how different <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">language <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">of each society affect our perspectives. It mention it the last article <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">we read, <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">"Worlds Shaped by Words", that the some language are more adapt to handling <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">certain studies such as German and philosophy. I was wondering if there <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">was an equivalent in different perspectives. That one way a society learn <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">to interpret what they see makes them better at doing certain tasks than <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">other societies?

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">In Chapter 6 of the textbook, it mentions the test done to measure the <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">"speech capacity" of European American children versus African American <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">children. The book explains that the African American children interpret the <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">test as a "threatening personal and social attack" and, thus, don't respond <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">to it well. This reminded me of the ongoing test score gap for the SATs <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">between black students and white students, which doesn't seem to have much to <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">do with actual differences in intelligence. Some people think that, because <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">blacks have been negatively stereotyped as scoring lower, they automatically <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">feel more pressure when taking the test and assume they will be scored <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">according to this negative stereotype which causes them to not perform as <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">well as they could. This is clearly a problem, so I was wondering, what, if <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">anything, can be done to fix it and make the test less "threatening"?

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95sep/ets/labo.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ogbu http://ed-share.educ.msu.edu/scan/TE/danagnos/te9202C.PDF

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">I was thinking about the diversity of the fieldwork anthropologists undergo <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">and I was wondering if those that study more dangerous scenes like the drug <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">subculture and such experience dangerous situations and how that affects <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">their work.In addition, are such dangers enough to make them cease their work <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">or does that encourage them to further understand the world they're diving <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">into?

http://philippebourgois.net/

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">The chapter mentions that rape is a form of structural violence or <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">extreme suffering because of either political or economic forces, but I've <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">read a few articles dealing with it as a societal issue. The term "victim <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">shaming" is something I've seen come up often, meaning that the blame is <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">placed on the victim for the act of violence against them as if they were in <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">control of the situation or there was something more they could have done to <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">prevent it. A lot of cases go unreported because of the stigma that society <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">has placed on it, that the victim is to blame instead of the attacker, and <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">they start to feel as if it really is partly their fault, and they're too <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">scared or ashamed to come forward because this mindset has apparently leaked <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">over into the law system, that the severity or punishment of the crime can be <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">determined from what the victim was wearing or if they were in a <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">relationship. So my question is: Who shapes cultural ideas? Is it an <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">individual with influence who spreads their opinions so that we're made to <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">feel a certain way on issues and we pass that along to our children? And how <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">how is possible go about changing the way a society feels about an issue that <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">is such a taboo?

http://stopviolence.com/winkler/social-murder.htm http://books.google.com/books/about/Survivorship.html?id=I-AgAQAAIAAJ http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/143 http://www.mediasanctuary.org/node/99

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">In Chapter 5 of Schultz and Lavenda's, "Cultural Anthropology", the concept of trauma was discussed. In the field of anthropology, there are few terms and concepts that have concrete definitions and standards that are universally accepted. When we seek to determine the occurrence of trauma, do we base its existence on the nature of the event that occurred, or do we base it on the severity of the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual turmoil it inflicted on the "survivor"? In the United States, we might view Female Genital Mutilation to be a traumatic event because of our personal belief systems and our unfamiliarity surrounding the procedure, but if the woman subjected to FGM has no traumatic reaction, then is it really considered trauma? On the other hand, if someone experiences intense Post Traumatic Stress symptoms after what we may collectively view to be an event unworthy of the "trauma" label, than do we consider their reaction invalid? There are scales used by the psychiatric field to determine the severity of PTSD symptoms, but in terms of anthropology how do we discern what may be traumatic for one group from that of another?

http://www.mcgill.ca/ssom/facultyinfo/young http://www.portlandpsychotherapyclinic.com/training/blog/changing-ptsd-criteria-dsm-5

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">My question this week relates to chosen trauma. When an ethnic group or country has a common chosen trauma, how do these impact a major event (war, hurricane, social segregation, etc.) occurs and the aftermath and recovery period of said event? Apartheid in South Africa and the present mood over it is an example that comes to mind.

http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item5600338/?site_locale=en_GB

http://www.usip.org/publications/rethinking-truth-and-reconciliation-commissions-lessons-sierra-leone