Feb
1
Popular Culture as Folk Culture
Posted by: Brian | February 1, 2009 | Comments Off on Popular Culture as Folk Culture
Popular Culture as Folk Culture
I liked the readings for this week. I think that the first readings by Miguel Angel Asturias had kind of a moral advice. In the first one the “legend of the signing tablets” Utuquel says that to create is to steal. I kind of got a sense that he was saying that rather than to invent things people sometimes just recreate based on existent ideas. I king of agree with this idea in that culture at first was like a “creation” but then people reinvent culture and therefore cultures become a mix of many different aspects. At the end when the rainbow is formed from all the tablets, in my opinion could mean that at the end in this case in folk culture the mixture of different aspects result as something positive , in the story, it was the rainbow.
I also enjoyed reading the second story “legend of the Crystal Mask.” In this story how the author writes that “the one who adds creatures of artifice to creation must know that these creatures are rebellious. See, they have buried him, yet they remain.” After reading this part the word that came to my mind was technology. Human beings have created many things to make our life easier, and I am not saying is bad but at the same times we are so dependent on technology that sometimes instead of benefiting us, it affects us. It is like the story he created all of those figures and at the end they killed him.
In the “legend of the silent bell” I like the part where all the nouns are giving their jewels that are material goods and then how the Indigenous noun gives her eyes. I got the impression that the author was kind of showing that personal sacrifice or like “emotional sacrifice” is different to “material sacrifice.” It is here hard here for me to stay since for some people it is really a sacrifice to give away things such as money and for others is more important to donate time or feelings that are not “material things.”
The really liked the last reading. It made me thing of the saying that says that the one that laughs at the end gets to laugh harder. I think that those kinds of stories are part of the resistance of all the marginalized groups in different societies. It gives people hope that at the end things will change and that things can get better.
