Amanda's Blog

The last texts we examined in ASTU this year was the film American Sniper and the article Redeployment. Both texts illustrate the concept of militarization which is a new term I learned this year. From my understanding, we encounter militarization in our everyday lives whether we are aware of it or not. While watching the film American Sniper, it is clearly evident that militarization influences the lives of individuals differently. Literary scholar Patrick Deer suggests that how one side of militarization shows how distant the military can be from us, and on the other side it shows how it can be very intimate to us. American Sniper allowed me to understand militarization more clearly from the protagonist’, Chris Kyle, point of view. As Deer argues, representations of war in the media have a ‘master narrative’ which is simply viewed as mass killings, whereas counter narratives show a more personal experience of war which is exemplified through Kyle in American Sniper.

Like most of the texts we studied this year, collective memory is a key idea of militarization. The Americans in the film have a certain shared interpretation and memory of the conflict that was happening at the time [in American Sniper]. However, although the majority of Americans have exposure the the tragedy, there are varying levels of intimacy to the war. For example, Kyle is obviously experiencing the war first hand, his wife still has an intimacy to the war because she has a close relationship to someone who is a part of it, and other U.S citizens are watching the news about it on television. Nonetheless, all of these people are being effected by militarization, just to different degrees of intimacy.

The concept of militarization made me think more about how much we are involved and exposed to on a daily basis, but we are not always aware of what it is. The idea that militarization has a more subjective narrative to it reminds me of similar aspects of consumption and the process of commodity chains we learned in Geography and Sociology. We consume the same products on a daily basis but we are not fully aware of the its origin, how it was made, and the individuals that were behind the making of it. This shows that rather than thinking of the outcome of a product, we should be more aware of the effort put behind it in order for it to be consumed by us. Like militarization, most of us are not aware of how much of an effect they have in our daily lives, unless we are personally affected by the ‘counter narrative’.

On January 13th, 2018 I visited the Museum of Anthropology. This wasn’t my first time visiting, although going there with a motivation this time made me carefully explore areas in the museum I would not have not done so the first or second time. This post will focus on my experience at the “Amazonia” exhibit. When I first entered the exhibits, I was presented by multiple numeric values on the Amazon Rainforest including the number of individual trees there are, how many plant and animal species exist there, and what percentage of this species have been discovered. As I began walking deeper into the exhibit, I was exposed to objects that were a part of the Amazonia culture. One object that particularly grabbed my attention were the two ‘bowls’ under the display glass. The question that sparked my curiosity was ‘what significance does a bowl have in Amazonian culture?’

These ‘bowls’, included in the description of the exhibit, are called kené. The Shipibo use kené as a form of gaining access to the spiritual world by drinking ayahuasca from them. This immediately led me to recognize how spiritual the Shipibo are and made me inquire about other spiritual forms the Shipibo practice. Unfortunately, ‘today the ca. 36,000 Shipibo are under pressure from the neighbouring Spanish speaking mestizo population, commercial fishermen who have depleted their traditional waters of fish, turtles, and manatees destroying their subsistence base.’ Due to this exacerbating issue, the Shipibo, women in particular, must sell their ‘textiles, jewelry and pottery’ to tourists in order to survive the modern world.

This made me reflect back on my question of what significance does a bowl have in Amazonian culture?’ As simple we may think, what we consider, a ‘bowl’ is other cultures rely heavily on them for multiple purposes. In this case of the Shipibo, they utilize them for spiritual practices and selling them to tourists to earn money for food, medicine and access to Western education; essentials of surviving in the modern world.

On October 31st, 2017, my ASTU class took a field trip to the RSBC Library. During this visit, we were divided into groups who each received one of Joy Kogawa’s archival materials. The documents that my group analyzed consisted of many documents by the Dominion Department of Labour which were for Japanese Canadians. The purpose of these documents were to relocate the Japanese Canadian because they could not go back to the West Coast (B.C). The Japanese Canadians would fill in the documents and submit them to the Dominion Department of Labour (DDL).

This field trip expanded my perspective on Obasan and Joy Kogawa by understanding more about the process of this relocation of the Japanese Canadians. This reminded me of one of the themes in the novel; memory. The accumulation of all the archival materials themselves are one part that contributes to Joy and the public’s personal and collective memory of the traumatic events her, her family and fellow Japanese Canadians experienced.

Analyzing the official documents from the DDL intrigued me and I found the requirements and information included on these documents very interesting. In terms of memory, these documents helped me to comprehend how Kogawa’s perception of memory is by collecting materials. These materials would not only contribute to public (collective) memory but they also help support Kogawa’s book and help her narrate a story with the influence from her personal experiences. By sharing her archival materials with the public, this benefits us in a way that helps us understand the circumstances of which the Japanese Canadians were put through. This may also help us relate certain situations in the novel to other traumatic events in history.

The archival materials produce a sense of how we interpret history and how us, the public, can understand another person’s experiences. This may make events in history more reliable as we are exposed to primary sources, such as the documents regarding the relocation of Japanese Canadians. In addition, we had the opportunity to evaluate the first drafts of Obasan. This not only enhanced our understanding of these events, but also contributes to how history is created through the eyes of someone who witnessed it.

One of the main themes in the graphic narrative Persepolis, is identity; in particular, the restriction of identity. Identity can be understood as characteristics, beliefs and values that help distinguish individuals from one another. In Persepolis, Satrapi exemplifies many ways in which she experienced identity oppression during the revolution in Iran in 1979. The first way in which Satrapi illustrates this is in the opening chapter ‘The Veil.’ In 1980, the new regime in Iran made it mandatory for women to wear the veil; a change that Marji was against. Marji and her family believed that they could still be religious whilst not wearing the veil. However, after reading multiple articles written by women who have a close relationship with the veil, I learned that the the veil can also act as a form of identity. This lead to think about individual motivations behind wearing a veil.

Although I cannot relate to being in this circumstance, I extended my research on veils to gain a clearer understanding of those who have more experience. There was one article, that my ASTU professor shared, that I found particularly interesting in regards to identity. The article was titled ‘Veiled threat’, published on December 12, 2003 on The Guardian. This article was written by someone who experienced the revolution in Iran, when she was 10 years old, and was forced to wear the veil. The strict consequences of not wearing the veil is why she is opposed to wearing it.

However, she acknowledges that some people have chosen to wear the veil because it gives them a sense of identity and belonging. She demonstrates the significance of the veil specifically in regards to religious identity. She claims that ‘women who had come from North America in the 1970s did not wear a veil but now they want their daughters to’. She states that although these people are French, they choose to express their identity through religious identity by wearing the veil because they feel excluded from society.

Two contrasting perspectives on wearing the veil arise due to different factors. In Persepolis, the revolution made all woman obliged to wear a veil or else they would be put in jail. Marji felt that this was extremely restrictive in terms of her identity because she was not able to fully express herself. In the article, published by The Guardian, the women who came from North America wanted to gain identity, after feeling marginalized from society, thus why they chose to wear the veil.

This is a question that has been discussed thoroughly in my ASTU class. We examined the different forms of genre and what elements are required for something to be considered a genre. From these class discussions, I now understand that a genre is made up of a situation and form. In other words, the purpose, audience and occasion, in addition with a social context creates a genre.

Although I developed a clear understanding of genres, I still could not fully comprehend how many different genres we encounter on a day-to-day basis. For instance, after reading a scholarly essay, written by Kate Douglas, about the young generation taking selfies at trauma memorial sites I came to two realizations. Firstly, selfies which are usually frowned upon by older generations have become accepted into culture and act as a tool that helps us with self expression, engagement, and memory. Secondly, the way people respond to similar events differs. This may be due to different ages, cultural backgrounds, personal experiences, etc. This relates to my first realization as the variables listed above affect the way we, as individuals, engage with different cultures, remember certain events, express our feelings and share our experiences.

Prior to reading this scholarly essay, I understood a selfie as simply capturing a photograph of yourself, most of the time with a background of significance, so that people remember where they went and what they did at a at a certain point in time. One key variable that stood out to me was cultural backgrounds and how that affects the way an individual responds to an event. Being half Thai and half Canadian, I witness many contrasting behaviours and social norms. In Thailand, taking selfies, editing them immensely, and posting them on social media platforms (mostly Facebook, Instagram and Line) is an extremely common ‘social norm’, almost as if your audience expects you to post photographs and videos of where you went and what you did during your day. Also, because of how popular taking selfies are in Thailand, memorial sites almost encourage visitors to continue these practices because this could be a way of promoting tourism for the memorial sites. This is what Douglas refers to as ‘dark tourism’. In contrast, I have noticed that people in Canada who take selfies at memorial sites mostly do it for personal purposes, to remember the experience they had when they visited a memorial site.

After analyzing the scholarly essay written by Kate Douglas, and thinking profoundly about the themes and issues raised, I have come to the revelation that the modern social media phenomenon of selfies has more motivation behind it than what we would assume at first glance. When one takes a selfie, we unconsciously develop an emotional attachment to not just the location, but to the experience as well. Thus a combination of our cultural background and emotional attachment may provoke vivid memories of the circumstances the selfie was taken in.