The Mystery of Bigfoot

Topic: Myth

Sources:

"Big Foot of North America"

http://www.unmuseum.org/bigfoot.htm

 

"The Big Foot Field Researchers Association"

http://www.bfro.net/

Relation:

As a child you are always open to the mysteries of the world, you are curious and you believe so easily.  When my sister and I were young, we were camping with our family in Humboldt County; we had been hearing stories of Big Foot, went to the museum, and were hoping to get a glimpse of him. One afternoon during the trip, we were playing in the forest when we heard a loud cracking noise we stopped in our tracks and looked around us. We were in a small clearing, and saw nothing, but the ground seemed to shake under our feet as something slowly walked through the woods. We didn’t wait to see anything, and jumped up and ran back to the campsite screaming “It’s bigfoot!! It’s bigfoot!!” Even today we both remember it, and aren’t quite sure what it was we heard, but we still like to joke that it was Big Foot. The myth of Big Foot is huge in Humboldt County, it’s a fun thing to joke about, whether or not he is real, I’m not sure, but it’s fun to pretend.

Discussion:

The myth of Big Foot, or Sasquatch, has been around for many years, and even Native American’s myths surrounding Sasquatch, or the “hairy giant” long before white settlement. Yet the first recorded sighting of Big Foot was in “1811 near what now is the town of Jasper, Alberta Canada. A trader named David Thompson found some strange footprints, fourteen inches long and eight inches wide, with four toes, in the snow” (Bigfoot of North America). The description of Big Foot is often that he is Huge, around 8-9ft and weighs about 500lbs, that he is very hairy, and walks bipedally. People have found footprints, taken castes of them, and put them in Big Foot museums, along with videos and photographs.

The legend of Big Foot is growing even larger due to contemporary culture and the rise of reality t.v., with shows such as “Finding Bigfoot” on Animal Planet. This show has four researchers on the hunt to find Bigfoot, and find if this myth is true or just a hoax. Mysteries such as this are exciting for people, and they search to find the answer. Many scientists think that the Bigfoot myth is just a joke, but along with that, many other people have set up whole research teams such as the “Big Foot Field Researchers Association,” or the “Finding Bigfoot” team. Whether or not this myth is fact or fiction, I don’t know, but it is an interesting and entertaining mystery.

Becoming a Women

Topic: Rite of Passage

Sources:

"Cultural ANTHRO" Richard Robbins

"Apology. U by Kotex"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf35wCmzWw

"Period Piece"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pe1enOm9T8

Relation: 

From culture to culture there are various ‘rites of passage’ that “mark a person’s passage from one identity to another” (Robbins, 139). I was trying to think of rites of passage that I had gone through in my life. One I immediately thought of was that of ‘becoming a woman.’ It was the summer before eighth grade, and I was getting ready for a soccer game when I realized I had had my first period, I wasn’t excited. I remember sheepishly telling my Mom, and she got so excited and started clapping and singing ‘you’re a young lady now!’ I was still not excited, as I had soccer game to play, now with a huge wad of cotton in my shorts. That weekend a few family friends came to visit and my Mom was telling them how excited she was. My friend, a few years younger than me, asked to talk with me about it, and as I explained what it was like, she looked up to me as though I was so grown up. At the end of the weekend as her family left, her Mom came up to me and said to me “welcome to womanhood.” I didn’t really understand what the big fuss was about.

Discussion:

In many cultures the transition from being a girl to becoming a woman is a big deal. While in our culture it is something that is frustrating, feared, and even disgusting. I knew many girls that didn’t even know they were going to get a period, and when they did, they thought they were dying. It is often something we are taught to be very concerned about, and something that will inhibit our daily activities. As women we are bombarded with advertising about tampons or pads that will make our period “more comfortable” and to avoid “being embarrassed” by our own body functions. 

Menstruation is also often expressed in negative terms such as, “disintegration or shedding. According to one college textbook, “When fertilization fails to occur, the endometrium is shed, and a new cycle starts. This is why it used to be taught that ‘menstruation is the uterus crying for lack of a baby.’” (Robbins, 169) It is also negatively referred by women themselves as ‘on the rag,’ and is rarely ever referred to just as a ‘period’ or ‘menstruation’ and if it is, it often throws people off and makes them uncomfortable. Why is this? Often a woman’s reproductive system is also described as a sort of machine, with the main function of making babies, and if it is unable to do so, it ‘fails.’ Do these terms and attitudes help the continuation of sexism towards women?

Some young ladies experience positivity towards getting their period, as I did, but many aren’t so lucky, and instead feel scared or embarrassed. Many of these attitudes towards menstruation are taught to us since we were young, or weren't taught to us at all, yet were influenced by our surroundings. I don’t feel that there are really any rites of passage for this sort of thing in our culture, even though this is a very important part of a woman’s life. I do feel though that some advertisements are trying to make light on the subject, and make it more funny, rather than serious and something to be worried about. 

 

Church of the Last Testament

Topic: Beliefs

Sources:

"The Vissarian Christ: Inside Russia's End of Times Cults"

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/12/16/the-vissarion-christ-inside-russia-s-end-times-cults.html

"A Visit with Vissarionites"

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2013/01/davide-monteleones-photographs-of-the-vissarionites.html#slide_ss_0=16

"Jesus of Siberia"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Cv5hZfOmk

Relation:
The ways in which each of us views the world around us differs from person to person and culture to culture. These are our ‘beliefs,’ and they help govern our lives and direct us down the path that we wish to follow. People follow these paths through different ways, some of us are religious, some not, some of us follow a strong work ethic, and the list goes on. These are all a part of our beliefs, which in turn help to define our behaviors.

Discussion:
Personally, when it comes to beliefs I myself am not strongly religious, but I’m open to hear what others have to say. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I used to participate in meditation at an ashram. At the Ashram you have the spiritual guru, or Baba, and there is a small community of people who have chosen to devote their lives to him, their spiritual practice and hard work. Since I have first hand seen this type of lifestyle, I was very interested when I heard about a man in Siberia, named Vissarion.

Vissarion, declared himself to be Christ in 1991, a year after he had been fired from his job as a traffic cop, and right around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union. “I am Jesus Christ,” said Vissarion, who at the time was a man named Sergei Torop, “It was prophesized that I would return and finish what I started.” Since the fall of the Soviet Union many cults have appeared, “sort of looking for a new belief after a whole system falls apart.” Since 1991, Vissarion’s followers have grown to be nearly 5,000.

Vissarion and his followers live the beautiful countryside of Siberia, in a small city named the Abode of Dawn City. Within the city you are not allowed to drink, smoke, curse, use make-up, shampoo, money, animal food, weapons or cars. All of the money made is put into a community fund, and every month each family is given a certain amount of food, and are encouraged to use their own vegetable gardens. Vissarion teaches that women are to serve their husbands as their husbands serve God, and to raise the birthrate within the Abode of Dawn City, Vissarion encourages men to have more than one wife in the hopes of having more 'true' Vissarionite children raised into the beliefs. The birth rate in the Abode of Dawn City is higher than mosncourat of Russia. There are also strict differences in gender roles; men are to do ‘manly’ activities, such as: build and paint houses, shovel snow, cut wood, etc., while women are to take care of the children and the home.

Vissarion teaches that he knows that the end of the world is coming, yet he does not give a date, but tells his followers that they are in the ‘ark’ and are safe from the madness of the world. People have left their lives behind to follow the teachings of Vissarion. One man says that his teachings “just make sense,” and that Vissarion “embraced and mixed up bits of everything people liked from the Bible, Carlos Castenada, Osho or Krishna’s teachings.” It seems the people of the Abode of Dawn City are happy, but some worry that if Vissarion instructed people to do something unethical that they would very likely follow his commands.

Meditation- The Art of Silence

Topic: Religion

Sources:
Anthro, Robbins, R
"The Cultural Construction of Identity" (pgs 132-137)

“History of Meditation”

http://www.project-meditation.org/wim/history_of_meditation.html

“Meditation: History”

http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/spring05/luft/history.htm

Relation:

In our reading we have been going over identity and how it constructs each person and in turn how that helps construct a culture. I feel that religion has a large part to play in a person’s identity, and whether they are religious or not, they are making a statement about it. Meditation is a part of some religious and non-religious practices, and I am examining the effects it has on people, and the benefits of it.

Discussion:

Since I was a young girl I have been drawn to and interested in religion and religious practices. People’s love and devotion to the unknown fascinated me, and even though I had never been particularly religious myself, I wanted to explore it in my own way. I took books out of the library on religion at as young as nine, and at ten I found a book on meditation, and I have loved it ever since. At ten I started meditating, and I joined a Unitarian Universalist meditation group all through middle school, and a little through high school, and in my senior year of high school I found an ashram, and there I learned a very deep appreciation for meditation and what it can do for a person.

Often when I first think of meditation and how others may view it I imagine a solitary monk in Tibet, or some new age woman wearing white in the lotus position, but it is so much more than that. One of the most iconic symbols and teachers of meditation is the Buddha. The Buddha decided that his princely life as Siddartha Guatama was not for him, and he needed to find something more. He left the life he knew and went on a long and challenging spiritual journey, where in the end he attained nirvana and enlightenment. The word enlightenment means ‘The Wisdom of Emptiness,’ and understanding that everything is empty of independent existence and ‘that all things are interconnected and interdependent.’ Nirvana means ‘The end of suffering, in this lifetime and future lifetimes.’ In achieving nirvana you leave the cycle of samsara (the cycle of being born and reborn again), and you become a part of nirvana.

There are many people around the world that practice meditation, and many religions use it as a regular practice. I remember when I was able to go to the Ashram regularly I went and practiced meditation with the others that lived there, and we practiced both silent and chanting meditation. When the chanting was over, we would drink tea together, and as I biked home I could not contain the overwhelming happiness I felt. It was truly amazing.
Meditation is a very old and challenging art. The art of silencing your mind. It takes discipline and practice to get good at it, but when you do the benefits are immense. The benefits stretch far beyond spiritual enlightenment to many physical, mental and emotional benefits as well. ‘It wasn’t until the mid 20^th century when it finally gained popularity In the west,’ and when it did researchers began testing the benefits of it and learned that it can help to treat depression, anxiety and stress, by allowing the person to become more clear-headed. It can help people break hard and harmful habits such as addictions to drugs and alcohol, and it can help to ‘lower ones heart-rate and blood pressure.’ It also has documented positive effects on people who suffer from mental health problems such as ADD and ADHD.

I feel that meditation is a practice that anyone can benefit from, even if you aren’t religious. Also, with its growing population in contemporary culture the resources to help one understand it are immense. The initial start may be a challenge, but in the end it can only help one rather than harm them.

                

A Wedding in the US

A Wedding in the US

Topic: Ritual

Sources:

“American Wedding Traditions and Customs”, http://www.elitedresses.com/American_Wedding_Customs_s/63.htm

“United States Wedding Traditions”

http://www.worldweddingtraditions.com/locations/north_american_traditions/united_states_traditions.html

“Something borrowed, Something new”

http://press.discovery.com/us/tlc/programs/something-borrowed-something-new/

Description:

Often women in the United States are brought up since they were young girls to believe in their someday fairy-tale ‘white-wedding’. And now with the growing popularity of reality television, there are even wedding competitions; to see who can get the ‘prettiest dress’, the ‘fanciest ceremony’, etc. I myself have two younger sisters, and we have talked about what we’d like to do for our weddings since we were very young. “Who the bridesmaids will be; where we’d get married; and of course who our dream man would be.” I even remember one of my sisters getting so excited she drew me a picture of what she wanted her ‘someday’ wedding dress to look like, and at the time she was eleven. I know from friends, family and the media, that we were not the only three girls who have gotten excited by this fairy-tale like ceremony.

Discussion/Analysis:

In the US, I feel that part of this fairy-tale like feel, comes from the fact that our marriages are not arranged. We choose our partners based on ‘love’. A tradition that is not as common any more, but is sometimes still practiced is when the soon-to-be groom asks the father of the bride for his permission to be wed to his daughter. The common wedding traditions in the United States are taken from a wide range of other cultures, but mostly they are from European cultures.

The White Dress is the most picturesque image we often think of when we think of the American wedding. Traditionally, the meaning of the white dress was to symbolize purity, but during the Victorian era, when the white dress originated, the white dress was a symbol of status and only to be worn once. Recently, I saw a new show on television called “Something borrowed, something new”, where the women either choose a refurbished version of their mother’s wedding dress or a new one. I’ve even seen a show where they present the challenges of finding a wedding dress with a budget of $2,000-3,000. The wedding industry has become huge, and the pressures for the ‘perfect’ wedding have seemed to grow from the traditional celebration of the love between two people to an elaborate and expensive ceremony of this love.

The rings are also another very important part of the ceremony, symbolizing eternity and never ending love. Often the rings are made with gold or silver, and encrusted with various types of jewels.  At the end of the ceremony, the bride and groom kiss to seal the vows, and then they walk together down the aisle. During this time rice has been traditionally thrown to wish fertility, happiness and prosperity to the newlywed couple. Yet in some newer traditions birdseed is thrown, or bubbles are blown.

American weddings can be very elaborate, and have definitely become a prospering business, and are a large part of our culture, but even still I feel that in the end they are just ceremonies to celebrate the love between two people, and the hopes of a happy future. 

American Football Culture

American Football Culture

Topic: Cultural Texts

Sources:

ANTHRO, Robbins Ch. 1 (pg 18-25) “Deciphering the Balinese Cockfight”

“Football in the USA”

http://homepage.smc.edu/morris_pete/papersandpresentations/main/footballinusa.html

“Advertisers pay a premium to put their spots in the Super Bowl, and it’s just not worth it.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/high-cost-super-bowl-ads-aren-worth-article-1.1252611

Description:

Since I was young I have recognized the importance of football in many families, including my own. In my early childhood I was the only daughter to a single father, and he did not leave me out of his love for the 49ers or his football excitement. I remember our neighbor was a Raiders fan, and I could hear the dueling shouts for victory from my Dad and our neighbor as I played outside. I was never very fascinated by football itself, I was more of a soccer fan, but I did always enjoy the Super Bowl commercials , and singing along with Hank Williams Jr. on Monday night Football. But with huge men running into each other, tiny cheerleaders shaking their butts, and thousands of screaming fans, what does this say about us and our culture?

Discussion/Analysis:

The Super Bowl has basically become a national holiday in the United States. The grocery stores are filled with food and event merchandising displays advertising the event and the excitement of how their bean dip, potato chips and coke will make your Super Bowl experience so much better than it was without it. There are commercials on television that use the Super Bowl to advertise their totally unrelated products, like candy bars and dog food, because the Super Bowl sells.

Then you have the Super Bowl itself; with men wearing pads that give the illusion of enlarged muscles, as they tackle one another, and the delicate women wearing skimpy outfits while cheering on the football teams. Then at halftime you have popular music artists doing extravagant shows, and businesses that are willing to pay $3.5 million to have 30 seconds of advertising that plays during the commercial breaks of the Super Bowl. Is this a direct representation of the average American culture? It has been ingrained into us that football is for boys and cheer leading is for girls, and often if you do see women playing football they are wearing barely any clothes and they are playing in the mud. There are serious women's football teams, but they are far less popular, and can often be seen as a joke because groups like the Lingerie Football League.

I don’t personally feel that football is bad, but I do feel that it does directly represent a portion of our culture. A portion that was at one time was even considered the ‘norm’, a somewhat sexist, and militant way of life. Nowadays with times changing these ‘norms’ are changing along with them, but even still football has stayed incredibly popular and is still seen as the great American sport.