Toree Dobson

ANT 3212
4 September 2022

Week 2 Assignment

The Goddess and the Computer Discussion Questions:

1. Both systems have a cognate desire: to share. The Balinese system shares water, believed
to be a divine gift, by irrigation temples. By irrigating water to different villages, the
Balinese priests are protectors of a divine element essential to human beings’ ability to
survive. The Green Revolution, too, sought to share water. People saw that resources
were lacking and sought to amend the lack, but they didn’t consider enough variables to
avoid catastrophe.
2. Because researchers didn’t use a holistic approach to rice-harvesting, pests and disease
affected the harvest and its potential consumers. Ironically, the Green Revolution sought
to bring resources and essential provisions—water—to lacking communities, but their
interjection resulted in blight, famine, and suffering, the opposite of their intended
purpose.
3. The ecological systems included a change in the cropping pattern of the rice, the types of
rice grown, outside developers arriving to build dams and dig canals. These actions,
variables, and interchanging elements brought pests that killed the rice and destroyed
crops that were to be harvested for future consumption.
4. The Green Revolution experts didn’t perceive that the introduction of pesticides and a
decline in the soil’s fertility could adversely affect the harvest, and they learned that the
Balinese priests played a crucial role in water management.
5. Because researchers’ from the Green Revolution errors were so catastrophic, researchers
learned to include more variables when considering a cultural and environmental project,
and they learned that timing is a key factor in determining the accuracy of the
measurement of the variables.

Reel Bad Arabs Discussion Questions:

1. Initially I was intrigued by the title of the film, wondering if “reel” is meant to be a
command and an adjective. I then wondered what “bad Arabs” might mean. About thirty
seconds into the film, I was thinking that I didn’t quite realize the damaging stereotypes
placed upon Arabs within American culture. I hadn’t consciously considered my
prejudices of Arabs as violent or “savage,” rather, I felt a little ashamed at realizing that
my cultural bias tells me to consider that Jasmine might be promiscuous or dangerous and
that Aladdin might be helpless because of his emotional involvement. My prejudices, I
learned, situate me into realizing that in a way I’ve idealized another culture by relating it
to some mysterious unknown.
2. In the film, I thought about how someone like me, born in Kennesaw, Ga in 1991 might
perceive the different gender roles of someone like Jasmine, depicted in an idealized
cultural adaptation of the supposed “American Dream” along with notions of
 Romanticism and empiricism in comparison to someone like Cinderella (who happens to
be a young, white woman—like I knew I would one day be). I thought about the
differences between the American idealization of a domestic housewife and how that
idealization is both a liberty and a confinement, depending upon the housewife’s
situation. Jasmine’s situation is equally dichotomous.

Advertising Missionaries Discussion Questions:

1. The actors are bringing in new artifacts, physical representations of another culture’s
environmental knowledge, and they’re introducing these artifacts to the audience in rural
Papua New Guinea. These artifacts will become symbols to the individuals within the
audience, and then the individuals will communicate with one another and agree upon
meanings for the symbols, and then the mental maps of the people in this rural
community know certain, confined information about what another culture has, and they
create a mental map, categorizing, say Americans, as x, y, and/or z. The group’s collected
thoughts and beliefs about this category may shape the future of every element of the
future of their culture.
2. Without further context, I can’t give an opinion. Initially, I was thinking that the audience
knows that these people are actors and therefore must understand that some of the actors’
actions will be symbolic. But then later in the clip, I realized that the staging and the
acting, while entertaining, was an economic ploy to make more money. These two
perceptions compel me to offer different answers as to whether or not this is enculturation
—but because there is even a slight intimation on my part that there may be enculturation
involved, I’ll say that I believe that the audience in Papua New Guinea is being
enculturated, but I don’t think it’s for a cultural-homogenizing effect. That is, I don’t
think that the motivations are solely for cultural-homogenization because the primary
motivational factor seems to be money rather than multiple factors.
3. The actors in the advertisement all have agency because they have knowledge that their
audience does not have. And I do think that the actors’ agency is hegemonic because
they’re offering information and resources that could seemingly aid this community, and
we don’t know if this community knows about the potential effects of the actors’
advertisement.
4. Aluago is in a tribe that makes wigs from their members’ own hair. The actors in the
troupe bring a Coke bottle, uncap the lid, and place it upon their closed eyelid in front of
an audience. Both the wig and the bottle cap are external objects that symbolically alter
the viewer’s perception of the wearer. An audience member may perceive people who
drink Coke as haughty, privileged, unknowable, foreign, strange, overwhelming, or they
may perceive people who drink Coke as financially well-off, cosmopolitan, and
technologically intuitive. Both assumptions may be erroneous or correct in varying
degrees, but either way, the viewer perceived an object as a symbol. If Aluago’s
reputation is destroyed because the people in Papua New Guinea’s society find that the
sellers of Coke are greedy or unethical, then they may perceive people who sell things as
greedy or unethical. If these symbols are integrated within Aluago’s community and
culture, then consumers may perceive his sales-person-ness as a threat which may ruin
his reputation and prohibit him from committing to the sustenance farming lifestyle in
which he lives.