Familiar Strange
Making the familiar strange assignment:One of the ways to describe anthropology is a discipline that, “makes the strange familiar and makes the familiar strange”. That is, it encourages you to look at practices you don’t know about and might think are a little odd in such a way that you begin to understand, and sometimes relate to, them (“make the strange familiar”). It also encourages you to look at things you or people in your culture do and believe as if they are alien to you, so you can work out why you do and believe those things; you are encouraged to use anthropological thinking and tools to understand your own culture (“make the familiar strange”). This second aspect of anthropology is what this assignment will focus on.
You are going to find an aspect of your culture to focus on. Just as Horace Miner did in his Nacirema article, you are going to describe a ritual/belief/practice/all of these common in your culture, describe it, explain why it is done/believed in the minds of the people who believe/do it.
What conclusions as an anthropologist can you draw about the practice based on what you have found out, and what anthropological work you have read relating to the belief/practice.
Here are some guidelines to help you:
1. Think carefully about the practices you see around you every day, and/or about beliefs that people express regularly.
2. Can you focus on a belief/practice/ritual etc that you have identified?
3. How would you describe it? Depending on what you have chosen, you might need to observe it. You might need to simply talk to people about it if it’s a belief.
4. What do people say about it: how do they describe it, why do they do/believe it?
5. Can you sum up what you’ve found with about 4 or 5 statements?
6. Can you take photographs that will help understand the phenomenon and/or illustrate those 4 or 5 statements you’ve made?
7. Have anthropologists written about this? Can they give you any insight into what you’ve seen?
8. How can you relate this practice/belief to the larger culture? What does it tell you about your culture in general terms?
Keep in mind that COVID-19 is very real. Do not violate COVID-19-related protocols, such as physical distancing and mask wearing. Do NOT break those rules in the course of your research. If it is not possible to talk to people safely, or if you just do not want to be in public because of COVID-19, no problem: choose a focus that will not force you to be in public.
The hardest part is probably identifying a phenomenon (because it’s so familiar!). In the online textbook (The Art of Being Human), the writer gives some guidance. Clearly, you can’t choose the ideas he presents, but the quote below should give you an idea of how to think of what to focus on:
“Start by thinking of things that are done in your culture that might strike an Anthropologist from Mars as strange. For example, the Nacirema keep small animals called teps, heal themselves through the ritual of gnippohs, spend lots of time obsessing over their bodies while they ezicrixe, spend 13 to 25 years of their lives simply training for the complexity of their lives in special places called loohcs, etc.” (Wesch 2018, p. 63)
Here’s some more guidance. In order to identify a phenomenon to study you have to have:
“the ‘willingness to be puzzled,’ especially by things that do not seem puzzling at all. Everyone else is busy trying to figure out things that do already seem puzzling. But what about the things that don’t? What about things that are just sort of assumed as uncontroversial?” (Nathan Robinson 2020
