Humanities Homework Help

Your final paper for this course will destabilize something that you saw as normal before this course opened your eyes to cultural construction and naturalization. The title of your paper should be like this:   ________ is _______  Fill in the first blank with the object that you chose from your brainstorm, or a new object. You are not required to stick to the object you put on your brainstorm. Fill in the second blank with something else this object could be in its cultural context if viewed from outside that context.

Examples of titles:  The U.S. Map is The Apocalypse. The Nike Air Jordan Sneaker is Holy Writ. Turquois Gel Nail Polish is Wage Theft. My Mother’s Set of Jade-Inlayed Chop-sticks is Mitochondrial DNA. Tajin is Fatherhood. Bean Pie is American Islam (if you want to know what I mean by that last one, check out thisgreat video (Links to an external site.)).

Turn in a 1,000-word paper demystifying your title. How does your title make sense? How in the world could nail polish be wage theft?  How is ______, _______?   Your title is your argument. Your paper should provide the evidence to convince me of your argument. Mixed in with this evidence you should include at least 4 direct references to course materials, readings, lectures, etc. References to course materials do not have to be cited in any specific way. For example, you could write, “as Jason talked about on the week 2 lecture video…” or “in the Lissa ethnography…”.  However if you include ideas in your writing that are either not from the course material, not common knowledge, not the ideas of people you personally talked to, or not your own ideas, you must cite the source of those ideas correctly using the American Anthropological Association’s guide to the Chicago citation style found here (Links to an external site.).  

Other than the rubric (see below), there is really no more guidance I can give about this final paper. It is very open-ended and largely depends on your expertise of your own cultural universe. You are the expert on how your object works in your life and the lives of those with whom you share that aspect of culture. You are the expert on what it is. Trust yourself. Write. (and if you want to think of a way other than writing to show me that you can complete the objective of this assignment, let me know what you are thinking and I might approve it, for example, I approved this Download this in the past for a paper entitled “A Potato is Frugality”).