Pocahontas †Cultural Anthropology Free Essays

Composing Assignment #1: The Cultural Construction of the Idea of Progress Film picked: Pocahontas One of Walt Disney’s most well known movies, Pocahontas, happens during the 1600s, as the British find portions of the â€Å"New World† that are occupied by local Americans. In this film, we can differentiate the crude way of life and culture of the Native Americans to that of the British, and can perceive how the thoughts of â€Å"progress† or social development assume a job in the ethnocentric predisposition held by the Westerners during this time, making the crude generalizations be assembled. Disney utilizes the structure of the characters themselves-what they wear, how they talk, what they eat, what they have faith in, and so forth. We will compose a custom paper test on Pocahontas †Cultural Anthropology or on the other hand any comparative point just for you Request Now ; and the plot line of the film, to portray the social development of the possibility of â€Å"progress†, and inspire the restricting thoughts of the â€Å"primitive other† and â€Å"civilized self†. This film opens demonstrating us the life of the British as they board the boat and keeping in mind that they’re cruising adrift. Disney begins with the British since we as westerners identify with the British, and consider their to be of life as ordinary and humanized. We promptly identify with the shade of their skin, their westernized garments, the manner in which they talk, and the innovation they approach as well. While on the vessel, John Smith (the male hero) alludes to the Native American Indians as â€Å"savages† who ought to be slaughtered in the event that they disrupt the general flow. This gives us a sneak top into the mentality of the British and how adversely they see the Native Americans. Leaving us with the conviction that the Indians are savages, Disney at that point presents Pocahontas (the female hero) and the Indian clan that has been living in the New World. Promptly we are presented to the crude way of life of the Indians. We see that their method of voyaging is by wooden kayaks, their apparel comprise of an earthy colored material that covers almost no while they additionally don't have on shoes, they live in tents, and have only nature at it’s most perfect structure encompassing them. We see the ladies out in the fields gathering corn by hand, while the men are getting back home from fight, with just withdraws from and lances for weapons. The underlying response to seeing the way of life and lifestyle among the Indians is to consider them to be â€Å"uncivilized† and â€Å"savage†, similarly as John Smith was stating on the pontoon. Anyway all through the film Disney starts to challenge this conviction and gives us that the westerner’s lifestyle may not be the most ideal lifestyle for everybody. Up until this point, John Smith and the remainder of the English men had been finding new places and discovering Native American’s that had been living for a long time on these remote terrains. The Europeans consistently considered these to be as uncouth, brutal savages, who should have been dominated and â€Å"westernized†. John Smith says something to Pocahontas about how they could improve the Indians life, and fabricate them streets and tall structures, and show them how to â€Å"make the vast majority of their land†. This is an ideal case of the ethnocentric predisposition mindset of the Europeans. They not even once thought about that somebody else’s method of living and culture could really be an effective. They felt that their way was the most ideal way, and whatever else was only an immature, savage way of life that expected to advance into the westernized way of life. After John Smith offers this remark about â€Å"bettering the Indian’s life styles† Pocahontas is profoundly insulted and continues to sing the well known melody, The Colors of the Wind. In this melody Pocahontas gets down on John Smith about his ethnocentric position and gives him her perspective, in singing: â€Å"You think you own whatever land you land on, The earth is only a dead thing you can guarantee, But I know each rock and tree and animal, Has a real existence, has a soul, has a name. You think the main individuals who are individuals, Are the individuals who look and think like you, But in the event that you walk the strides of an outsider, You’ll learn things you never realized you never knew. † For the first run through John Smith starts to tune in to Pocahontas and acknowledges how uninformed him and his team have been to figure they can guarantee any land they run over, rewarding the locals like wild brutes. This time the Europeans have looked downward on the crude culture of the locals, imagining that they were sub-human, and should have been supported and restrained simply like creatures; anyway at this time John Smith see’s the free soul in Pocahontas, and he appreciates her association with the nature all around her. He starts to see that the Natives are simply typical individuals in their normal component, a flourishing off of their general surroundings, with no need of innovation, or any of the headways the westerners were bringing to the New World. Generally speaking, Disney’s film, Pocahontas, makes a superb showing differentiating the way of life of the â€Å"primitive other† and â€Å"civilized self† with Pocahontas and the Indians as the crude other and John Smith and the Europeans as the edified self. We can see through the Europeans, their ethnocentrism, and their guileless mentalities that persuades they own whatever land they land on and can treat the locals anyway they need. Disney anyway plays out this film in a manner to give us his view on this ethnocentric predisposition and how he trusts it to not be right and unlawful. He makes the watcher side with the Indians and depicts the Indians as the heroes and the Europeans as the miscreants. Disney was attempting to communicate something specific that this whiteness perspective isn't generally right and can at times carry mischief to others in any event, when its not purposeful. Works Cited: Pocahontas. Walt Disney Feature Animation, 1995. Film. Seriff, Suzanne. â€Å"Cultural Anthropology: ANT 302. † University of Texas. Spring 2013. Step by step instructions to refer to Pocahontas †Cultural Anthropology, Papers

Essay --

In the realm of mainstream society, individuals admire a horde of intriguing, gifted, and motivating people groups who impact the world. Artists, on-screen characters, competitors, big names, they all are important supporters of mainstream society. Individuals admire them, examine them, and read articles about them. The media gives these people groups questions, praises, and analysis. No other story is as motivating as the narrative of a timid young lady, brought into the world under the name of Diana Spencer, who turned into an image of liberality, shrewdness, harmony, and love for the world. Princess Diana, who wedded into the Royal Family, was one of the most persuasive and well known individuals in this world. Conceived on July 1, 1961, in Sandringham England, a little town in the province of Norfolk known distinctly for the Sandringham House, â€Å"a most loved occasion home to Queen Elizabeth II and a few of her predecessors†,(Sandringham, p.1) Diana went to an all girls’ school, and afterward moved to a government funded school. She bombed her O-levels twice and was not considered scholastically solid. Nonetheless, Diana was viewed as near eminence, for she and her family had collaborated every now and again with them. Diana grew up playing with Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, the more youthful kin of Prince Charles. Intrigued by music and moving, and a young lady with a fantasy â€Å"to become an expert ballerina†(Diana, Princess of Whales p.1) Diana was incredibly saddened when her folks isolated. Set in the authority of her dad, who earned the acclaimed title of â€Å"Earl Spencer† in 1975, Diana earned another title as he did, and got known as â€Å"Lad y Diana Spencer† in her childhood. Woman Diana Spencer went to Riddlesworth Hall before boarding at West Health School, and went to the Swiss completing school, the Institute Aplin ... ...ring came to Diana, who kept her title â€Å"Princess†, much after the separation, the evening of August 30th, 1997. She passed on in an appalling auto collision with current sweetheart Dodi Al-Fayed. The driver of the vehicle was affected by liquor, and was being sought after by picture takers that night. Al Fayed and the driver kicked the bucket upon sway. Diana kicked the bucket a couple of hours after the fact. Significantly after her passing, her liberality and works were proceeded. A tribute to Diana’s commitments was taken care of through the Landmine tab of 1998 and the Ottawa Treaty in 1997. Both of these archives were about landmines and followed Diana’s sees on them. After her passing, Diana’s inheritance was proceeded by the Diana, Princess of Whales Memorial Fund which â€Å"supports the wiped out in Africa, helps displaced people, and stops landmines.† (Biography Online, p.2) Diana, the People’s Princess, will live on in people’s hearts until the end of time.

The Muti Water Project

The Muti Water Project If some of you have been reading the blogs for a while, then you may know about the Muti Water Project, an initiative I had been busy working on since my sophomore year. I worked to design and build a longer lasting water source for a town, Muti, in my fathers home province, Kafa, where he went to middle school and where some of my relatives still live today. Ive written two blogs about it already, “A Story About Muti” and “Why is There No Water”. This was a long, arduous process, seriously affected by not only logistics, weather, and funding, but also politics. Several months of delays occurred due to the state of emergency announcement in Ethiopia in 2016. (You can get the full story in those two blog posts + this podcast). But finally, against many odds, the well is actually finished!!!! Photos of the well I received from our contractor (finishing touches of concrete being placed!) It was actually finished some months ago (last semester, November 2017) but today I woke up and realized that I’d left everyone hanging, without actually announcing this positive development (such MIT lol). Targeted Issues and Solutions In “Why is There No Water”, I’d highlighted some key qualitative issues I’d discovered from interviewing Muti residents. Children (as young as 5) are the ones who typically fetch water from rivers and streams. They can have lifetime health problems afterward a from carrying the heavy containers back and forth. People regularly die digging shared, shallow water wells either from collapses or lack of oxygen. Children have died or gotten injured from falling into said shallow wells (fortunately, not as often anymore because people are aware of this problem and small children are not sent to fetch water from wells) During the rainy season, there’s an increase of typhus/typhoid infection due to the rain and river-swelling problems I discussed earlier With this well, made with an AfriDev pump (the part of the well that will need the most maintenance and we sourced locally from within Ethiopia), several of these issues are addressed: Children (as young as 5) are the ones who fetch water Children, followed by women, are the household members most frequently tasked with obtaining water. This will probably still be true, and in some ways is actually intended with the development of this well (we placed the water source next to the primary school, so the youngest children attending school are closest to the clean water). But in addressing other issues, we hope access to water will be safer for these children. People regularly die digging shared, shallow water wells either from collapses or lack of oxygen. This is a problem with the construction of the well. Since this well was much larger in diameter than the shared, shallow wells people just make in their backyards with a shovel, the risk of asphyxiation from the digging process was lower. Additionally, the well was constructed in coalition with trained professionals (whereas wells people construct in their backyard are typically untrained local men, simply digging). This well was also lined with concrete during the construction process. Children have died or gotten injured from falling into said shallow wells and from typhus/typhoid infection The AfriDev pump is, on the one hand, simply necessary for this well, as it is much deeper than shallow backyard wells. But as a side effect, it is also much safer than an open cavity, which is how children can fall or be pulled into shallow wells by the weight of the water vessel (think rope-and-bucket that you pull to retrieve water). The depth of this well is also what makes the water clean, and prevents typhus/typhoid bacteria from inhabiting the water. This point is particularly counterintuitive for most Americanshow can digging into the ground, the dirt and soil, of all places, be clean? In fact, most of the things that make dirt dirty (bacteria, bugs, decaying debris) are in a thin, shallow layer close to the surface of the soil. This is very simple and obvious when you think about itmost living things (Typhoid bacteria included) need oxygen, and you can’t find much oxygen as you progress lower and lower into the ground. As an example, in natural disaster scenarios, temporary graves as shallow as just one meter below the surface are constructed to bury bodies while preventing decomposition, so they can later be withdrawn and identified (even “six feet under” would be overkill). This is why I chose this hand-dug well concept (over 15 meters, but under 30) for the Muti region. I knew it was simple enough that there were people (contractors and workers) who were familiar with how to construct this system with the parameters we specified, and in this particularly lush, rainy region, we didn’t need to go very deep. We simply needed to get away from the “dirty” dirt to the “clean” dirtsediment found in water at this depth is more or less larger chunks of whatever’s already in your fancy mineral water: possibly calcium and magnesium deposits, or other inorganic precipitates. No living, typhus-causing things! A Sustainable Solution In many ways, this is the beginning rather than the end. The real goal of this project was to try and see how long the water source would lastif we can beat 3-4 years without the well truly failing (a broken pump, as I mentioned, can easily be replaced) then I will consider the project a success, as the main issue we were trying to solve involved clean water sources frequently failing, going “dry” in as little as 3 months. That success would motivate further hand-dug well projects in the region, where right now spring protections are the default constructed water source. And the proliferation of hand-dug wells would hopefully continue to solve all the above problemsright now with this well, these water problems are solved mainly for those living nearest to the well, and the children at the school. The reasons why water sources can go “dry” are a whole other hydrology lesson, but the core of the issue is that, the water “table” (you can think of it as a line of water under the soil) is not perfectly flat or uniform. Sometimes, you may think you’ve hit the water table, but really, you’ve just hit a little pocket, which can actually become “dry”. In other situations, if your water sources conflict, you can end up “lowering” the water table in that area with frequent use. Sometimes, you can inadvertently turn one of your sources into a drain for another source, causing the first source you built to fail. Of course, there’s still not a great way to “x-ray the ground” which is a silly question I asked in a conversation with the incredible Professor Strzepek of the TATA Center. Professor Strzepek agreed to assist with this project (he provided the above graphic and taught me everything I know about water). Though it was cool to learn about this, I was a little dismayed: I did not have access to sophisticated surveying equipment, and there’s very little water data available about this region. I tried still, though, to make sure we made a good decision about the well location in a pretty hack-y way: with Google Maps. Google maps has some pretty neat features I learned about entirely while trying stuff for this project. For one, it allows you to view the elevation in these cool altitude plots collected from Google satellite data, where those curves in the photo represent a line of the same elevation (for those of you who’ve taken physics, it’s sort of like voltage potential rings). The map is also shaded for an intuitive visual effect. All the other wells are flagged, and the location next to the primary school is the star. Using this feature, I could at least feel mostly confident that the well was far enough from the other springs (and, importantly, not on a hill) so that any interference with the water table wouldn’t affect the life span of the well. Of course, if future sources are built in the next few years, this would need to be revisited. I also gained some intuition as to why the other spring protections failed. Spring protections have to be constructed where there is already surface water, which severely limits your options in location as you have to find a spring, creek, or river to work with. As you can see from the terrain diagram, many of the springs are at points of locally high elevationthey’re on hillsides. They’re also close togethersprings 3 and 4 in particular failed particularly fast, with spring 3 failing in only 3 months after it was constructed. You can see a little bit more clearly which water sources are likely to be inadvertent drains for other sources. Performing this project helped me understand water a lot better, but also opened my eyes to the problems engineering alone will never be able to solve. The village, Muti, has a local government and collects taxthe things governments do, in exchange for creating infrastructure. Clearly, in Muti and other rural areas, there is a disconnect between the resource collection and the infrastructure distribution. This can be for a variety of reasonsfarmers don’t have much tax to give, and infrastructure is especially hard and expensive to develop in this mountainous, rainy region with dense forest. There’s also a sort of exponential effect in infrastructure developmenta road makes it easier to transport materials, which in turn makes it easier to build roads. So, starting “from scratch” is especially difficult. Of course, there obviously might be issues in accountability or management at the resource-collection levelcorruption, incompetency, misunderstandingbut I want you to understand that this is not the only problem, as developing infrastructure in this area is a monumental task to begin with. All I can say, at the end of the day, is that this project was just a small drop in the ocean of what needs to be done, and which will hopefully happen in the future. As Ethiopia faces waves of economic, political, and technological changes, I hope to continue being a part of them! (those enough water puns for you? x)) 3 I made a small video of the whole experienceapologies for the low quality, but I hope you still find it a fun glimpse into life among my family in rural Ethiopia. Uncles, aunts, cousinsthey are the reason I had so much passion for this project. You can also see here the types of open, hole-in-the-ground wells that are common DIY kinds of solutions in the village, and how the final hand-dug well is much different from those! If there’s anything I’ve learned at MIT, and especially from this project, it’s that the only thing ever standing in our way is fearfear of failure. “I’m too young” or “I’m not wealthy enough” or “I don’t have the time” or even as basic and seemingly valid as “I don’t know how to do this” (I literally knew nothing about water before starting this project), these are all excuses we tell ourselves to let that fear fester and convince us we can’t do something. But if we are courageous enough to simply try, to work hard and be dedicated, you find that those obstacles slowly, surely fall away, until you’ve achieved incredible things. Thanks to everyone who supported me on this incredible journey, either as part of the project or just with your wonderful words of encouragement 3 Post Tagged #Muti Water Project