Sohil's Story

In Body Ritual Among the Nacirema , Horace Miner uses satire to examine the American culture. He does this by writing familiar actions that each of us does, in an unfamiliar way. For example, a "charm-box" is actually a medicine cabinet and a "holy-mouth-man" is just a dentist. Miner uses these weird names to show the audience of anthropologists that if we describe other culture's routines as peculiar, then they will appear peculiar to us. Even if the routines are as normal for them as going to the dentist is for us, we might see them as odd. The point of writing this piece is to show anthropologists that by looking at cultures from an outsider's perspective, the reason behind the custom is lost. This raises the question of how to study other cultures from the outside and truly understand the reasons behind the custom. The essay can also be seen to satirize American citizens. The essay portrays the rituals as a long, tedious process. It also states t

     In Just Walk on By, by Brent Staples, we see the reactions that white women have while passing him on the street. Staples uses many anecdotes to show the number of times he scares a white woman. He also uses irony to demonstrate how foolish it is to mistake him for a mugger. For example, Staples describes himself as a softy who isn't able to hold a "knife to raw chicken - let alone hold it to a person's throat". However, people's reactions to him forces Staples to adapt. He has to whistle Vivaldi to put others at ease much like a "cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country".      This essay made me think of implicit bias which is the unconscious attribution of certain qualities to certain groups of people. I read the book Blink , by Malcolm Gladwell, during silent reading time last year, and in it, he describes how people are able to make decisions very quickly. One of the decisions that he analyzed was the association betwee

After reading There is No Unmarked Woman, by Deborah Tannen, I thought about how this might apply to Disability, by Nancy Mairs. Tannen says that all women are marked by the way they dress, their makeup, and their title. Even the language marks women. Actor, which is unmarked for men, becomes actress, which is unmarked for women. Mairs says that lack of representation and misrepresentation are to blame for society's view of disabled people. Advertisers don't include disabled people in their commercials because they are afraid that they too will become disabled at one point in their lives. TV shows and movies misrepresent people with disabilities by only showcasing their disabilities. This leads society to believe that the only interesting thing about people with disabilities are their disabilities. Mairs uses the example of a TV show, where a woman who is diagnosed with MS decides not to go to Kenya and instead fall into a doctor's "manly protective embrace" (Mair