Anthropology Essay -- Anthropologist Culture Essays

Anthropology Anthropology what a vulnerable observer you are! You may well have to jump into the arms of the scientists if you are going to try to keep your grass hut at the academy! -- Ruth Behar Debates on the role the reflexive plague the field of cultural anthropology as postmodern critics join the bandwagon attempting to claim authority in this dubiously recognized discipline. In the borderline realm between the sciences and humanities, cultural anthropology has tried to find a niche in which it can comfortably rest. For many, this has been in building a foundation of the methodical. If anthropology can classify, categorize, and synthesize, it can assert its legitamacy to the glares of academia. However, in the attempts to salvage its reputation, anthropologists have sacrificed the validity of research by neglecting our subjectivity. Critics have viewed the role of the reflexive as anthropological "naval gazing" leading to introspection and empathy which undermine accurate observation. However, I contend that it is important to include reflexivity in anthropological method. The anthropologist has to recognize not only the effect the surroundings have on him/her personally , but also the effect he/she has on the surroundings. This dialogue comprises data. If neglected, the text in its attempt to be comprehensive would be left incomplete. The anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has been particularly criticized for his statement on reflexivity in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. In this work, he revisited his previous ethnography Grief and Headhunters Rage with a new perspective. Many years after his fieldwork, he realized the importance of personal experience in understanding the context. He states, "Dur... ...8) The anthropologist provides the framework for fieldwork. He/she is the very lenses in which the reader views the culture. By acknowledging his/her own subjectivity, the anthropologist recognizes the limited view he/she provides. This also adds texture to a text by filtering through his/her own background and personal experience. This personal insight is what gives understanding between individuals. By infusing this into the data, the anthropologist draws the reader into a realm where he/she can have the capacity to understand more deeply the ethnography. Beyond the personal background of the ethnographer, his/her actual presence in the environment effects the data immensely. The colliding cultures can reveal a lot about the culture at hand. Reflexivity leads the reader through a depiction of the ethnographer's journey rather than a detached set of sequences.

Down these mean streets by Thomas Piri Essay

Years after its original publication, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets remains as powerful, immediate, and shocking as it was when it first stunned readers. In this classic confessional autobiography, firmly in the tradition of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Piri Thomas describes the experience of growing up in the barrio of Spanish Harlem, a labyrinth of lawlessness, drugs, gangs, and crime. The teenaged Piri seeks a place for himself in barrio society by becoming a gang leader, and as he grows up his life spirals into a self-destructive cycle of drug addiction and violence, the same cycle that he sees all around him and hardly knows how to break. Piri is also troubled by a very personal problem: much darker than his brothers and sisters, he decides that he, unlike his siblings, is black, and that he must come to terms with life as a black American. Eventually arrested for shooting two men in an armed robbery, Piri spends six years in Sing and Comstock prisons. With insight and poetry he describes his time in prison, the dreams and emotions that prompted him finally to start life again as a writer, street poet, and performer, and how he became an activist with a passionate commitment to reaching and helping today’s youth. One of the most striking features of Down These Mean Streets is its language. â€Å"It is a linguistic event,† said The New York Times Book Review. â€Å"Gutter language, Spanish imagery and personal poetics†¦mingle into a kind of individual statement that has very much its own sound. † Piri Thomas’s brilliant way with words, his ability to make language come alive on the page, should prove attractive to young people and inspire them to look at writing and literature in fresh new ways. Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas’s plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery–a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop. As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author’s voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalisation, survival, and transcendence is available in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the author. The questions, assignments, and discussion topics that follow are designed to guide your students as they approach the many issues raised in Down These Mean Streets. The questions of race and culture, of drugs, and of crime and punishment are all treated in the book, and should provide jumping-off points for many fruitful discussions. Another important element of the book is its vivid description of the youth culture of the barrio. Ask your students not only to pay special attention to that culture, but also to compare it with their own, and to look for similarities even when similarities might not be immediately evident. Piri Thomas gained the distance and objectivity to observe his world without prejudice or self-deception; your students should try to do the same. Finally, the students should be encouraged to look at the book not only as a cultural document, but also as a work of literature. Ask them to examine the language Thomas uses, his choice of words, the â€Å"flow† of the story. How does he create his informal tone, his sense of immediacy? This work might help change your students’ ideas about the â€Å"right† way to write, and inspire them to try to find their own individual voices. To what extent is Harlem’s communal code of pride, masculinity, and â€Å"rep† re-created in prison life? How does life inside prison resemble life outside? â€Å"The reasoning that my punishment was deserved was absent. As prison blocks off your body, so it suffocates your mind.† [pp. 255–56] Does this indicate to you an essential fault in the prison system? Do you think that the advice Piri gives Tico about how to deal with Rube is good? Is prison a purely negative experience for Piri, or are there good things about it? Which of the people he meets while in prison enrich and improve his life? Does Piri decide not to join the rioters, or is the decision essentially made for him by the hacks? Why does Chaplin/Muhammed believe that Christianity is the white man’s religion, Islam the black man’s? Do outside or societal factors play a role in Chaplin/ Muhammad’s choice of religions? As he leaves prison, Piri says, â€Å"I am not ever going to be the same. I’m changed all right. † [p. 306] In what ways has Piri changed, and what has changed him? Which of his ideas have been altered by his time in prison? Piri presents himself as a product of his race, culture, and community, but many of his traits are purely his own. How would you describe Piri’s personality? Poppa: What kind of a person is Poppa? What makes him proud, what makes him ashamed? Is he a good or bad father, a good or bad husband? Do you find him sympathetic? Trina: Piri sees Trina as nearly perfect. How would you describe her? Do you think that she behaves passively toward Piri, or does she demonstrate spirit of her own? What do you think of her response to Dulcien’s baby? Brew: How would you describe Brew’s character? What has given him his outlook on life, and how does it differ from Alayce’s? How does he perceive Piri? Why does he agree to go south with Piri? Chaplin/Muhammed: What has made Muhammed hate Christianity? What does Islam mean to him? Piri Thomas uses a number of pungent expressions, both in Spanish and English. How does the language he uses express his character and his world? Write a two-page essay describing one day in your life. Use your own style of talking, and try to be as colloquial as possible. What might your essay tell the reader about you, your friends, and your world? The youth culture in Spanish Harlem to which Piri and his friends belong has certain firm, if unwritten, rules. Would you say the same is true of your own school or neighborhood? What are the rules that govern the behavior of young people you know? What do you feel you have to do to be â€Å"cool,† to be accepted, to belong? Write a short essay describing the social rules your own friend’s follow. Piri is describing a specific period in time: the 1940s. Do you find that the life a family like the Thomas’s lived has changed much since that time? Make a list of the things that have changed for teenagers like Piri, and of the things that have stayed the same. Reference †¢ Down these mean streets by Thomas Piri

Hitlers Rise to Power A Timeline

Adolf Hitlers rise to power began during Germanys interwar period, a time of great social and political upheaval. Within a matter of years, the Nazi Party was transformed from an obscure group to the nations leading political faction. 1889 April 20: Adolf Hitler is born in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary. His family later moves to Germany. 1914 August: Hitler joins the German military at the start of World War I. Some historians believe this is the result of an administrative error; as an Austrian citizen, Hitler should not be allowed to join the German ranks. 1918 October: The military, fearing the blame from an inevitable defeat, encourages a civilian government to form. Under Prince Max of Baden, they sue for peace. November 11: World War I ends with Germany signing an armistice. 1919 March 23: Benito Mussolini  forms the National Fascist Party in Italy. Its success will be a huge influence on Hitler. June 28: Germany is forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which imposes strict sanctions on the country. Anger at the treaty and the weight of reparations will destabilize Germany for years.​ July 31: A socialist interim German government is replaced by the official creation of the democratic Weimar Republic. September 12: Hitler joins the German Workers’ Party, having been sent to spy on it by the military. 1920 February 24: Hitler becomes increasingly important to the German Workers’ Party thanks to his speeches. The group declares a Twenty-Five Point Program to transform Germany. 1921 July 29: Hitler is able to become chairman of his party, which is renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP. 1922 October 30: Mussolini manages to turn luck and division into an invitation to run the Italian government. Hitler notes his success. 1923 January 27: Munich holds the first Nazi Party Congress. November 9: Hitler believes the time is right to stage a coup. Aided by a force of SA brownshirts, the support of WW1 leader Erich Ludendorff, and browbeaten locals, he stages the Beer Hall Putsch. It fails. 1924 April 1: Having turned his trial into a grandstand for his ideas and become known across Germany, Hitler is given a derisory five-month prison sentence. December 20: Hitler is released from jail, where he has written the beginning of Mein Kampf. 1925 February 27: The NSDAP had moved away from Hitlers influence during his absence; now free, he reasserts control, determined to pursue a notionally legal course to power. April 5: Prussian, aristocratic, right-leaning war leader Paul von Hindenburg is elected president of Germany. July: Hitler publishes Mein Kampf, a ranting exploration of what passes as his ideology. November 9: Hitler forms a personal bodyguard unit separate from the SA, known as the SS. 1928 May 20: Elections to the Reichstag yield just 2.6 percent of the vote to the NSDAP. 1929 October 4: The New York Stock Market begins to crash, causing a great depression in America and around the world. As the German economy was made dependant on the United States by the Dawes plan, it begins to collapse. 1930 January 23: Wilhelm Frick becomes the interior minister in Thuringia, the first Nazi to hold a notable position in the German government. March 30: Heinrich Brà ¼ning takes charge of Germany via a right-leaning coalition. He wishes to pursue a deflationary policy to counter economic depression. July 16: Facing defeat over his budget, Brà ¼ning invokes Article 48 of the constitution, which allows the government to pass laws without Reichstag consent. It is the start of a slippery slope for failing German democracy, and the start of a period of rule by Article 48 decrees. September 14: Boosted by the rising unemployment rate, the decline of center parties, and a turn to both left and right extremists, the NSDAP wins 18.3 percent of the vote and becomes the second largest party in the Reichstag. 1931 October: The Harzburg Front is formed to try to organize Germany’s right wing into a workable opposition to the government and the left. Hitler joins. 1932 January: Hitler is welcomed by a group of industrialists; his support is broadening and gathering money. March 13: Hitler comes a strong second in the presidential elections; Hindenburg just misses out on the election on the first ballot. April 10: Hindenburg defeats Hitler at the second attempt to become president. April 13: Brà ¼ning’s government bans the SA and other groups from marching. May 30: Brà ¼ning is forced to resign; Hindenburg is talked into making Franz von Papen chancellor. June 16: The SA ban is revoked. July 31: The NSDAP polls 37.4 percent and becomes the largest party in the Reichstag. August 13: Papen offers Hitler the post of vice-chancellor, but Hitler refuses, accepting nothing less than being chancellor. August 31: Hermann Gà ¶ring, long a leading Nazi and a link between Hitler and the aristocracy, becomes president of the Reichstag and uses his new power to manipulate events. November 6: In another election, the Nazi vote shrinks slightly. November 21: Hitler turns down more government offers, wanting nothing less than to be chancellor. December 2: Papen is forced out, and Hindenburg is influenced into appointing the general, and prime right-wing manipulator, Kurt von Schleicher, chancellor. 1933 January 30: Schleicher is outmaneuvered by Papen, who persuades Hindenburg than Hitler can be controlled; the latter is made chancellor, with Papen vice-chancellor. February 6: Hitler introduces censorship. February 27: With elections looming, the Reichstag is set on fire by a communist. February 28: Citing the attack on the Reichstag as evidence of a mass communist movement, Hitler passes a law ending civil liberties in Germany. March 5: The NSDAP, riding on the communist scare and aided by a now tame police force boosted by masses of SA, polls at 43.9 percent. The Nazis ban the communists. March 21: During the Day of Potsdam,  the Nazis open the Reichstag in a carefully stage-managed act which tries to show them as heirs of the Kaiser. March 24: Hitler passes the Enabling Act; it makes him a dictator for four years. July 14: With other parties banned or splitting up, the NSDAP becomes the only political party left in Germany. 1934 June 30: During the Night of the Long Knives, dozens are killed as Hitler shatters the power of the SA, which had been challenging his goals. SA leader Ernst Rà ¶hm is executed after trying to merge his force with the army. July 3: Papen resigns. August 2: Hindenburg dies. Hitler merges the posts of chancellor and president, becoming the supreme leader of Nazi Germany.