Language And Gender

When I read the section of Language and Gender, I was surprised what the other contributed about language and gender. For me, I am used to seeing language separated by two categories either masculine or feminine. As a Gender and Women's Studies major, I think that this area of cultural anthropology has really had me the most interested with regards how we determined language and gender.

I found this article titled Language, Gender and Feminism just to get a different perspective of how language and gender correlate. The article discussed how the male is in power within in society and in language and how women's language is seen as powerless and weak. I have this idea that language itself is powerful. The reason why some view language and women has powerless and weak due to the patriarchy of society and also by the marginalization of words.

I also think that language weak when it is silenced. Audre Lorde a famous black feminist once said this about language and silence. "I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at risk of having it bruised or misunderstood." Language is powerful- however, I also believe that language is socially constructed.

Anyone else want to contribute to this idea? I think there's a lot we can discuss with this?

Welcome Spring Anthro 1200 Bloggers!

A new Anthro 1200 class is just beginning at the University of Wyoming and so we are getting a number of new bloggers as well.  Welcome to all of you and look forward to your posts.  See the other posts in the blog to get an idea of the proper format.

all best,

Leila

Anthropology in Nursing

The first day of class we all introduced ourselves and mentioned our majors. Quite a few people were nursing majors.  I researched how anthropology relates to nursing.  These three sites are pretty interesting:

• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1036575/pdf/medhist00047-0114.pdf
• http://www.conaa.org/en/calls-announcements.htm
• http://www.medanthro.net/

The first is an article about nursing and anthropology.  The second is the website for the Council on Nursing and Anthropology- I never even knew that existed! The third is the Society for Medical Anthropology's website which is part of the AAA. It is pretty neat to just explore the websites.

Lithuanian Culture

In Anth 1200, we discussed kinship charts and family origins.  In my kinship chart, there are ninety people, ranging from my grandparents to my cousin's children.  Sixty-six of the ninety are from my mother's side, the Naumovich family, a clan from Lithuania with strong family ties.  Out of curiosity, I did some research on Lithuanian culture mainly with this site: http://www.litfood-fair.com/lithuania/culture.shtml, and found that my family has aspects of it in our lives today.  Literature is big in Lithuania and our family is huge on reading and sharing books.  Music is also very popular, my grandmother has played the organ and piano as well as sung in a choir for more than fifty years.  My aunts and many of my cousins are members of various choirs.  My grandfather is a wonderful cook and we have many traditional European dishes around the holidays including kielbasa and pizelles.  Happy Holidays!

The Bhagavad-Gita

In English class this semester, my class was assigned to read the book The Bhagavad-Gita. This book was pretty interesting, but raised a lot of questions for me and I ended up not agreeing with it's teachings. The book describes many traits of Hinduism and dives deep into the Hindu culture. The main character, Arjuna, is being taught by the god Krishna the ways to find enlightenment. One point Krishna makes is that one must be nonattached to their actions. This is the only way they can fulfill their dharma, which is basically what a person is destined to do. For example, a teacher teaches, a mailman delivers mail. I had a problem with this idea though. How can somebody do their dharma and do it well without being attached to their actions? Could Michelangelo have created the David without being completely absorbed by what he was doing and being 100 percent passionate about being an artist and creating something beautiful? I don't think so. But in Hinduism culture he could have. This opened my eyes to how vastly different people are across the globe. For someone like me, Hinduism is completely odd and doesn't make sense, but to many other people in the world it makes total sense, and many live by teachings of Krishna.

gangster culture

in the 1990 mob movie Goodfellas you can get a really good glimpse at the various cultures that make up a gang in NYC from the mid 20th cenury on. what most of the common known mafia groups are is Italian or of Italian decent. when you are in the mob you have to be one hundred percent italian to ever be made, which is pretty much becoming a boss of your own crew. this is so that people could trace back your family to the old country where the mob came from. the main characters henry and jimmy could never be made because they had irish blood in them even though they were really good gangsters. also the main character henry had to pretent to be jewish so that his girlfriend's parents would approve of him and let them date.

Ancient Mayan Culture

One of the groups did Mayan culture for the group presentations last Tuesday in class. They talked about many different aspects of ancient Mayan civilization. There is a film called Apocalypto that does a superb job at visually showing us many of these aspects. Certain human behaviors of the ancient Mayans are illustrated in Apocalypto in great detail, and certain aspects of the culture, such as human sacrifice, is shown in vivid and gruesome detail. This is important in my opinion because it successfully demonstrates the brutality and strangeness of the customs of ancient Mayans. I wonder how accurate the portrayal of these customs are in the film, but listening to the presentation in class, there are a lot of parallels between the actual facts and what happens in the movie. It seems that the film makers really did their research, but there is always the chance that they glamoured it up and emphasized things to make it more dramatic and enjoyable.