on american history x 6-7 pages written froman emic point of view.

The assignment is not as easy as it may appear. It is neither a movie review nor an opportunity to make socio-political judgments. Each of these films presents a culture and/or people traveling between cultures and creating new ones. Your task is to be an ethnographer as you watch one of them, and to report your findings.This means that you must evaluate the information based on cultural relativism, doing your best to be non-judgmental and to understand the culture(s) from the emic (interior) point of view. In a brief film (as opposed to two years of real ethnographic field work), that information is incomplete (though many ethnographers feel the same way even after two years). You will have to extrapolate, speculate, or admit lack of information in some areas.This assignment will be an ethnographic analysis on three levels.First, describe the culture(s) on the basis of the categories from your textbook and class, including economy, modes of communication, symbolic communication, kinship, marriage, gender, political systems, power relations, religion, and art. What are the larger processes (if any) which affect the culture(s) which you are encountering, e.g. colonialism or globalization? Obviously, you can not cover all of these areas, so you must make choices based on what you are most interested in or what you consider most significant.Second, describe the viability of the culture(s) presented in the film, and reflect on what may be missing in order to enable the culture to reproduce itself into the future. For example, the all-male monastery in Name of the Rose needs a surrounding culture to reproduce human beings; many of the other films show cultural/political tensions which must be resolved in order for the society to survive into future generations. Keep in mind that the resolutions may not be ideal or fair; for instance, resistance to an unequal balance of power may result in a more egalitarian situation, or in the creation of a permanent underclass.Third, because you are viewing culture through the lens of a camera, you need to go beyond encountering a culture directly. The movie makers created this film for a reason, and they have created a narrative in order to tell a story and create a certain understanding in the viewer (you). Make some observations on what you think was their purpose in making this film, how it may affect the audience
(for instance, would it confirm a viewer’s prejudices or expand his or her understanding of others?), or how it could be more thoroughly descriptive.Write a six to eight page ethnographic analysis of the one of the films listed above. Follow the mechanical criteria listed in the Essay Writing Guide on the website for this class.