Lit Analysis #1: Winter Reading

Nonfiction: Annual Editions - Anthropology  

• Topics and/or Events
• The book I read is subject to anthropology, the study of humans (past and present) and the way they interact with tradition and culture. It is set in different stories, true stories written about diverse group of people and cultures written by actual anthropologists that give insight to how they, whatever or whoever the story was based on, lived and acted, thrived and failed.
• There is no single author; the book contains a variety of stories, articles, written about the topic of cultural anthropology. There is, however, a single editor by the name of Elvio Angeloni. I believe he edited this piece because it is in his area of interest, which happens to be learning and working with indigenous peoples. It is also essential to note that he received an MA in anthropology and in communication.
• The book was suggested to me by Breanna Rodriguez after an enlightening conversation about my topic (cultural awareness and diversity, stories told through transmedia). She told me about a book that she owned and allowed me to borrow her own copy. Excited about the book, she told me about the stories and the perspective they were written in. Nodding along, I tried to get out of it, but she was insistent and promptly gave me the book right there and then.
• It was startlingly realistic, the book made me look and paint pictures of the real world, topics ranging from overpopulation to sexuality to the americanized topic of mental illness.
• People
• The authors surely created the characters, not in anyway one might think, but they did. By writing about the certain people that were presented to the audience, they did so by putting themselves in it. Yes, they were written through observations, and therefore not completely created as original creations, but were written by the authors in such a way that they put a piece of themselves in there. So, in reality, by writing about someone else (whether it be through mere observations) they did it in a way, through style and diction, that skewed the audience’s perspective therefore making it a part of their own creation. The overall tone was both conventional and informative, it informed the reader the struggles and successes people made, it showed parts of peoples’ lives.
• David Pizarro - a psychologist that experimented on the “perfect aroma,” via fart spray! His experiment essentially had to do with peoples’ influence, or rather, the way they were influenced by the way things smelled. To me, he sounds like a typical scientist, prompted by his curiosity to finding out answers. If I were to write him as a fictional character, I would mainly use indirect characterization. Using his actions to convey his character seems more ideal than just listing them off.
• Patricia Cochran - an Inuit (Northwestern Alaska) that talks about her dietary intake. She talks about how they got their food (mainly hunting and foraging) and the type of food that they ate (hunted seal and walrus, marine mammals with lots of fat). She acted pretty nonchalant, specially about the topic of food, even with the question of “why so many fat?”
• There’s something very unique and satisfying about reading people's’ stories, how they live and act, what they do or don’t do, their differing cultures and traditions. Reading and learning about someone who’s vastly different from you, yet is so similar in some says, satisfies your innate curiosity. It breaks down the boundaries set up by society, and it’s great in that way.
• Style
• The authors used a journalistic style
• “Wild-animal fats are different from other fats. Farm animals typically have lots of highly saturated fat”
• “Has poverty ravaged mother love in the shantytowns in Brazil?”
• “Kidnapping Women: Discourses of emotion and Social Change in the Kyrgyz Republic”
• The authors use more lengthy descriptions, but also use some dialogue. Since it is written as observations, it makes sense that there would be more descriptions of the things happening around the characters. However, the book doesn’t lack dialogue. There’s plenty of dialogue that allows the readers to seek input from the actual characters, and not have to rely from the author’s descriptions alone.
• The authors’ tones are informative and conventional, often answering questions that pertain to the topics of cultural anthropology and always subjected to an interview from the authors to the people
• The authors’ attitudes about the subject and/or topic - highly passionate, but inquisitive
• Variety of articles (including classic articles) and textbooks
• It didn’t really matter to my thinking, I merely used the words as guidelines and then thought about questions and/or answered questions that were pre-written on the book