Life Between the Lines

As Howard Miner points out in Body Ritual among the Nacirema , this strange group of natives have extensive, complex, nonsense practices that seem to determine beauty, quality, and social standing. A much deeper analysis is required to understand the Nacirema, and as our group of anthropologists continues to delve into this tribe, new details become available. One specific group within this tribe has especially interesting practices: the youth of the Nacirema. For close to seven hours a day, these Nacirema youth exit the confines of their shrines to group together in front of older Nacirema elders who lecture the Nacirema youth about various ideas, such as how to manipulate their own language and surprisingly, how to manipulate the language of other tribes, even though many of these Nacirema youth will never communicate with other tribes. Even stranger, these Nacirema youth participate in scheduled tests in which the accuracy to which they can draw circles in a pattern determines a...

Are men and women treated equally? The question that has been cast upon society since the very first society existed has an easy answer: no. Judy Brady's essay I Want a Wife , published in 1971 — just 51 years after the ratification of the 19th amendment, seven years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a year before the approval (and subsequent failure to ratify) of the Equal Rights Amendment, slowly progresses into more and more absurd expectations of women, who are essentially equated with wives and mothers. But were these expectations as absurd to readers in 1971 as they are to us? Probably not. An in-class read of Brady's essay in 2020 seems humorously ridiculous, but many of these expectations did not  seem absurd to many conservative husbands in that age. Needless to say, society has largely advanced in its treatment of women. Unfortunately, the essay still has notable significance and relevance to today's society. Familial and societal ex...

I'm a big fan of TV.  I've watched more than my healthy share of it, and most of my friends will probably agree that I should probably consider deleting the Netflix app from my phone. Behind those hours and hours of screen time, however, I've learned things about society that aren't always obvious to us in our everyday lives. As someone born and raised in Troy, I've certainly had a different experience than a lot of other kids my age across the nation. Anyone you talk to in Troy can tell you that the racial composition of our city is drastically different than that of other cities. I"ve grown up around people who look like me, and I've taken that for granted over the years. Growing up, I never really thought of myself as a minority, and I'm sure that other people from Troy High who would be considered "minorities" elsewhere in the U.S. could tell you the same story. Back to how TV plays into this: TV really was my first exposure and my...