White Performance:
When looking at the performance of race, as a white person I asked myself how am I and those who are in my family, neighborhood, area of Pennsylvania (NEPA) performing whiteness. During Thanksgiving break from American University I was able to return home and observe how the people of my small town PA performed their whiteness (there are hardly any other races in my town in Northeastern PA).
NASCAR, football, beer, Abercrombie and Fitch. At a local bar in NEPA, the Banshee (and Irish pub) one can see all of these and a variety of white performances. As the bagpipes rang and the Guinness flowed I observed the interactions of a purely white crowd. The music was primarily Irish with the introduction of a random Journey, Rolling Stones, and Credence Clearwater Revival song every intermittently. People conversed, while middle age men and women danced stiffly and to in my opinion very poorly. The more they drank in fact the better they thought they danced adding new “different” moves. It was almost scandalous as two youngsters (in there mid 20’s) took to the dance floor, which was seen in the reactions of the older men at the bar, which I heard say that they were dancing like; “they were having sex”. In this case there are to performances going on at once, the performance of middle aged white people and the performance of mid 20’s white people. Therefore there must be a division of performances within races. My performance being different from that of my grandfathers or his grandfathers or his grandfathers. If this is so is there a true description of how one can perform race? Are all white people doomed to be bad dancers? In this bar in NEPA it seems that they are.
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.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment