maria biasin

It’s worth beginning by stating that one of my favorite anthropologists to read for pleasure and a theorist whose ideas and knowledge I respect is Geertz.  Arguably, Geertz is the most influential American anthropologist of the past few decades.  His writings have defined and given character to the intellectual agenda of a meaning-centered, nonreductive, interpretive anthropology and have provoked much excitement and debate about the nature of human understanding.  His pioneering interpretive turn made it possible to grasp the particular, changing constellations of meaning which constitute human societies, and are often masked in the explanatory systems and generalizations of traditional anthropological methodologies.  Geertz’ work is possibly of greater relevance today, when very diverse societies are drawn closer together, often in mutual incomprehension and conflict.  Geertz uses admirable techniques of historical particularism, cultural relativism, fluid readability, and thick description.  For these reasons, Geertz would be the first anthropologist I shared with the world.

However, this isn’t to say that reaching cultural truths can be achieved by using Geertz’s methodologies alone (for this is his biggest critique: that his anthropological writings are so personal and depend upon the writing skill of the scholar therefore they lack a proper methodology to follow).

If you’re interested and haven’t read the Balinese Cockfight article (which you should!), you can have easy access to it by simply searching on google and downloading the pdf, fyi.

I seek to explore the historical progression of transgendered and queer anthropology from feminist theorists’ perspectives.  How do these analyses differ?  How has the terminology used in a predominantly white, Western, English anthropology subsequently marginalized sectors of the transgendered and queer populations because of a lack of accurate descriptions and a lack of anthropological interest in general?  Can different or “improved” feminist theories of anthropology actually deliver change?  These are questions I will be asking and researching the next few weeks as I work on writing a paper for my final project as an undergraduate.  Questions of identity and credibility consequently surface.  I am an anthropology student, a lesbian woman, a white American, a teacher’s assistant.  Can I justifiably comment on the personal violence of the trans woman or the gay man’s experience?  Labels are limiting.

More on this topic later, I’m sure.

Five inches tall it rests on a bureau.  Whose idea was it to strategically place stones of varying colors into a sphere shape resembling Earth’s geography?  It doesn’t seem too ingenious to me.  Perhaps I’d be more convinced if the lines of latitude and longitude were even slightly accurate rather than appearing like chip marks left over from metallic gold nail polish.  Labels in Latin give it an authentic feel.  Or maybe that “authentic” feel stems from the irony that Earth is comprised largely of rock, so it would be like taking bits and pieces of yourself to form a miniature version of you and set it on a table.  That’s just fucking weird.  It’s not as if inanimate objects, like rocks, manufactured itself into this boring, bureau-confined Earth.  I wonder where it did come from.  I don’t mean the intellectual property of the stone-Earth merchandise, but who made it?  It sure as hell wasn’t from a personal sacred stone collection the geologist next door gave as a Christmas gift, more likely a duplicate of millions that were handmade by young teenagers with callousing fingers in China or Taiwan.  I sit here and acknowledge this.  You sit there and acknowledge this.  The Apple Corporation and its trillion dollar enterprise sits somewhere and not only acknowledges this, but continues to actually employ these young workers and exploit their nimble fingers by hiring them to finagle together the latest ipod. (listen: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory).  Why is it so difficult to do something about it?  It is so easy to gloss over these fine details and look at that cheap, Latin marked, five inches high globe and not have a single thought cross the observer’s mind aside from how completely heinous the lines of longitude and latitude are (or how an accompanying sun made of solid hydrogen and helium would make the pair out of this world, so to speak).

Today Mary gave me a miniature elephant-shaped marble incense burner.  Joe gave me one shaped as a penguin two years ago.  Evidently, I think more highly of the infamous stone-Earth object than it has declared (or maybe this is because it was a gift from my mother).

Saludos