What?

This blog is part of a larger project of our anthropology class. While others pay particular attention to public communication, sex and sexuality, and body language, our focus here is the performance of race. We look at the many ways in which people or things become of an ethnic background. This can include how a person references, whether through physical attributes, speech patterns, or surroundings, another ethnicity. It can include the ways in which a person makes their own ethnicity apparent (or render them invisible). Even within one ethnic diaspora, we meticulously capture the events in which they separate themselves through even narrower ethnic classifications. Every entry displays a reenactment of a racialized characteristic in the context of American life -- and a profound sense of the meaning of culture.

Why?

We participate in the mass observation movement because we believe that it has much to contribute to the field of anthropology. We capture the "thick description" described by Geertz without the consequences of our participation. In each moment, we are able to catch power structures, cultural flows, functions, structures, an individual's or community's relationship to its environment, human agency, symbols and symbolic meaning, the difference differences make, and/or how history is played out in one simple incident.

Monday, December 4, 2006

What's a FOB?

Nemesis Records forumers contemplate what a "FOB (Fresh of the Boat)" means:
Okay, I know what a FOB is, but I recently had this interesting (or maybe not) discussion. How do you identify someone as a FOB? Is it their clothes? How they talk? ESL? Do they like 29 cent hamburgers?

I want to try to put FOBbiness (or FOBulousness) on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the FOBbiest. I guess we should try starting the discussion by rating how FOBby some people are and getting an idea of what the scale looks like from there. So to get the ball rolling, here are a few Asian-American celebs to think about: Jackie Chan, Bobby Lee, Zhang Ziyi, Lucy Liu, Kelly Hu... Please try to explain your ratings and feel free to do any other Asian-American celebs.

This is just like a "it'd be cool to know" thing, so be sure to have fun with it.

Feel free to read the whole thread here: What's a FOB?

Some interesting responses:
From Vietgbaby:
FOB detection...

1. Their language(accent, word choice, word order, sentence structure, diction, deletion of phonemes, & so on... Oh! & they say " ... man!")
2. Appearance (home sewn clothes, & styles & haircut)
3. Smell (tiger balm, green eagle brand oil, or herb scents)
4. They bring their own lunch to school/work. (rice, fish sauce, & ca co a.k.a. spicy/salty dried fish)
5. The walk ( walks bold-legged w/ arms swinging like crazy in front& behind them as they walk)

From unclenine:
doing the V sign in photos...
that's FOB! you'll never see me doing that little habit. hahaha!
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