This week’s blog posts covered the full breadth of our first month in ASTU. Many of our classmates focused on our exploration of genres and academic writing, while many chose to comment specifically on Kate Douglas’ article on selfies and witnessing. Some chose to reach further back and focus on our joint lecture and the discussion of memory and history. All of the posts were insightful, but the discussions that I was especially interested in were those that surrounded Douglas’ article, one of the more loaded topics that we have looked at so far.

Douglas’ argument was, even for most of the class, fairly shocking. After all, we have also been raised with certain cultural norms and concepts of what is and is not appropriate in specific contexts. This is very apparent in the fact that not everyone was convinced by Douglas’ essay. Some felt, to quote Thursday’s class discussion, that Douglas had given the individuals taking ‘inappropriate’ selfies “too much credit.” Several people build on this point in their blog posts. Esther’s post, for example, centers on the idea that traditional witnessing rituals serve individual purposes that cannot be replaced. She argues that, because of the fact that individuals cannot experience the specific horrific events firsthand, witnessing rituals are built around the idea of empathy and are “intended as a means for us to understand.” This point, I believe, can be extended to the idea that it is the ritual itself and not the concept of ritual that is important. If this is so, can selfies truly serve the role of witnessing? Alexa’s post builds on this, and ultimately argues that they cannot. Citing an essay by media scholar Yasmin Ibrahim, Alexa argues that selfies do not match the context of witnessing sites, and create a ‘duality’ by exclaiming that “I’m alive where others have been sacrificed.”

However, there are contrary perspectives offered in a number of blog posts. One I find particularly interesting is Amanda’s, in which she offers her perspective as someone who is half-Thai and half-Canadian. Amanda describes how, in Thailand, attitudes towards selfies at memorial sites are completely different, and that they are even encouraged. She argues that this is due to varying social norms, and that cultural background does in fact influence the rituals and expectations we attach to memorial sites. Anthony’s blog post complements this, not expressing complete agreement with Douglas’ argument, but nonetheless stating that “our judgement or disapproval must not draw a line in the sand, never to be crossed.” Anthony’s post argues for a sense of cultural malleability and the idea that new trends need to be contemplated more carefully and not simply cast as intrinsically good or bad.

I think all of the aforementioned blog posts bring up some fantastic points and ask great questions: do rituals serve specific, lasting objectives? Are these rituals universal? Are certain practices simply incompatible with certain contexts? Personally I find the answers to be multidimensional. I definitely think Amanda’s example of Thai cultural differences regarding selfies makes a strong case against the universality of rituals. At the same time, I do think that witnessing rituals should be treated individually according to purposes and principles, rather than as broad cultural phenomena that must necessarily change over time. Most importantly, however, I think it is imperative to think about these questions and participate in academic discussion (a recurring theme in our ASTU class), rather than leaving them to be answered automatically. I definitely value Douglas’ essay for doing just that.