So, I was a dork, and had research journal #18 and 19 mixed up (research journal #19 was originally titled research journal #18). Anyway, here is the correct topic for research journal #18.
Response to Chapter 6 in FieldWorking
Chapter 6 was about listening to the diction people use during an interview, as this provides a deeper insight into their culture. A good example of this was the interview with Danling Fu. She goes into the importance of silk in the Chinese culture. The authors mention that there many different words for silk in the Chinese language. Through the interview, they discover that there many ways that silk participates in the culture. For instance, the silk worms’ principles are used to illustrate how one should live. The chapter also mentions body language as a way to gain a deeper insight of a person and their culture. The authors mention how Karen Downing’s research could have been more enriched if she had paid attention to the way her subjects held themselves and spoke. The section on verbal performances was interesting. “[Verbal] performances use spontaneous verbal art; they are unrehearsed, unscripted, and not often staged. This concept of verbal performance comes from folklore and depends on three features: a performer who is an insider to the culture, a recognizable oral performance, and an audience of insiders.” (FieldWorking pg. 335) When I first thought about what analyzing words from an interview would entail, I just solely focused on the uniqueness of the connotations of certain words to a culture. I hadn’t considered the ways words are melded together to create these culturally rich verbal performances. This is something to chew on as I delve further into interviews and oral histories.
Box Activity #27: Gathering Verbal Performances: Proverbs, Jokes, and Sayings
Through my general overview, I noticed a few lighthearted articles about the intelligence of girls (I’ve noticed that females were referred to as “girls” for the most part) at ETSTC. For example, on September 26, 1941, an article entitled “Evolution of a Co-Ed” was printed. This listed the characteristics of a girl from her freshman year to her senior year. Some of the progressions were about tolerance of dirty jokes, dating frat boys, interaction with men, etc. I wish I had taken a picture of the article, or at least taken some in-depth notes about it, but since it was printed before the U.S. entrance into World War II, I decided that a brief comment on it was enough. On March 3, 1942, another article was printed that poked fun at the “girls”. The name of the article was “Girls Smarter than Boys at ET”. The opening sentence of the article was, “It may not prove much of anything, but figures showing scholastic rating of all the campus organizations seem to indicate that East Texas State girls are more intelligent than boys…” The article then goes on to list the cumulative GPAs of various campus organizations, such as sororities and fraternities. The thing that I’m still hung up on is the first few words of the article, “It may not prove much of anything, but…” Does anyone feel the same way too? Maybe it’s my inner feminist, but it’s hard to see those two articles as purely harmless humorous articles.
