Wood Sampler mash-up

While on a visit to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin I came across this interesting juxtaposition.  Inhabiting this beautiful, mid-century slightly modernist department store building was a furniture and decorating business, The Wood Sampler.  The shop was closed, but my company and I peered inside to the space.  I was interested in how the aesthetics of varying types of nostalgia were coming through.  This store front was a sign of development and modernization to this historic downtown area at one time. Now, probably about 30 or 40 years later, this wood furniture store moves in, selling relics that simulate (or should I say fabricate) an idyllic, pastoral perspective on family life and domestic spaces.

Moments of constructed family norms in Storycorps interviews

Foreword: In the following paper I analyze specific components of the Storycorps project.  Storycorps is an oral history project sponsored by and broadcast on National Public Radio, NPR.  While the project is not specific to families, a large portion of the interviews surround issues pertaining to kinship.  To learn more about the project, visit this link.

Moments of constructed family norms in Storycorps interviews: Introduction

In the article titled “Is there a family? New Anthropological views” the authors, Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako ask readers to reexamine the constructs of family life that are possibly hindering their family relationships.  They call for an understanding of family “not as a concrete institution designed to fulfill universal human needs, but as an ideological construct associated with the modern state.”[1] This paper will analysis Storycorps, an oral history project which records interviews between two people for broadcast on public radio, and how it relates to social constructs of families and the agency of individuals in American society.  I will focus specifically on those moments in the interviews when the constructs of family, what the participants think a “normal” family should be like, emerge from the conversations.  How does the participant’s perception of the Storycorp project accompanied by the highly facilitated interview process foster these expectations?  These moments in this specific ethnographic project reveal bigger systemic norms pervasive in American culture at large.

Download full paper pdf here

Justin Bieber talks about abortion, sex, and politics in new Rolling Stone

This post comes as a good follow-up on my post concerning the Justin Bieber “Pray” video.  I think the headlines and the articles below speak for themselves:

Justin Bieber Talks Sex, Politics, Music and Puberty In New ‘Rolling Stone’ Cover Story

Tween evangelist? Justin Bieber film packed with prayer

Justin Bieber Says He’s Pro-Life on Abortion, Wait for Sex: Apparently he wasn’t quite assertive enough for the pro-lifer’s.

A question of empathy: Justin Bieber and the difference between anti-abortion and anti-choice.

While I do think that a clear political agenda is beginning to emerge with force from the Bieber icon, a view presented in the second article, I was swayed by the last article in the Huffington Post to be slightly more understanding and read further into the situation.  Maybe Bieber, still only 16, is just trying to do and say what he thinks it right.

Never the less, the structures of sentimentality surrounding his pop empire and agenda deserve a critical engagement.

structures of sentimentality

Structures of sentimentality.

I have been thinking about what this means lately.

sen·ti·men·tal [sen-tuh-men-tl]

–adjective

1. expressive of or appealing to sentiment, esp. the tender emotions and feelings, as love, pity, or nostalgia: a sentimental song.

2. pertaining to or dependent on sentiment: We kept the old photograph for purely sentimental reasons.

3. weakly emotional; mawkishly susceptible or tender: the sentimental Victorians.

4. characterized by or showing sentiment or refined feeling.

sen·ti·ment [sen-tuh-muhnt]

–noun

1. an attitude toward something; regard; opinion.

2. a mental feeling; emotion: a sentiment of pity.

3. refined or tender emotion; manifestation of the higher ormore refined feelings.

4. exhibition or manifestation of feeling or sensibility, or appealto the tender emotions, in literature, art, or music.

5. a thought influenced by or proceeding from feeling oremotion.

6. the thought or feeling intended to be conveyed by words,acts, or gestures as distinguished from the words, acts, orgestures themselves.

I hadn’t viewed any top Youtube videos in a while when I came across a story about American Idol contestant, Chris Medina.  I want to try to understand his story in relation to structures of sentimentality.

Here is an article that discusses the use of sentiment in this story

‘American Idol” sob story stirs a debate