Weird Nacirema people! (Body Ritual Among the Nacirema)

          

Nacirema=American??

 

 

           It was Thursday that Mr. Menard asked us to write an in-class essay. And he gave me a piece of paper, which was filling two whole pages. This writing was about Nacirema people and their cultural behaviors. According to Horace Miner, the writer of this writing, Nacirema is a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. I never heard or learned about these people's culture. Thus, their weird behaviors were very surprising to me at the first time. From private shrines to charm-boxes, everything was unfamiliar and different compared to my life. But on the next day, when Mr. Menard told us that Narcirema is a word which wrote American backwards, I just couldn't stop from laughing. Also, everything written on the essay was true life of Americans, just written in different perspective.

 

           After I knew that this writing is about Americans, Every puzzle pieces of Nacirema started to fit into the reality, and it was all true. Knowing the truth of Nacirema was knowing the true thoughts of mine toward cultural relativism. At the same time, it gave me an opportunity to look back at myself, how I felt about different cultures. And as we all consider As I described 'weird behaviors' on the paragraph one, I wasn't having positive attitude toward Nacirema people. Everyone who read this essay for the first time would have felt same as mine, and this is the main point which author tried to point out about cultural relativism. People claim cultural relativism, and they think they make interpretation of different cultures based on cultural relativism. However, as a human being, it is hard to understand other cultures, even if they do, it is just their outer side not the inner true feeling.

 

           This is writing also criticizes behaviors of American people. By looking at Americans in different point of view, their behaviors just look awkward and stupid. However, the truth is 'We are actually practicing this'. I'm not American but these Nacirema behaviors could applied to my life also. According to essay, the author describes ritual activities of Nacirema people are focused to the appearance and health of human body, criticizing what is now called lookism. For example, they rely on charm boxes, which seems very stupid activity, and relying on magicians for their healthcare. Anyone who didn't know the truth at the first time would think that people are having foolish phobia toward things they shouldn't be afraid. However, when we know the truth, situation flips over. This is the moment when people starts to question themselves. "Is it the real life of ours?". Nowadays, people put a lot of focus on their looks. As it is described on the passage most of Americans consider themselves ugly. Also, when we look at the case of Korea, we see many hospitals for plastic surgery, and most of women have their double eyelid operation. Society just leads them to have these surgeries, because society wants those people who have more good looking rather than people without double eyelid.

 

           Last week, I had a Chinese presentation about Chinese cultures and one topic was to research about 'China's uncleanness'. When the word 'Chinese' comes into my mind, I had a prejudice that Chinese are dirty. I knew I should consider cultural relativism, but my thinking toward Chinese seem unchangeable. However after days of research, I found out that they were in inevitable conditions of being dirty. There were no clean water resources provided to poors, and no houses for them to block from harms outside. Considering China's population, the number of poors just exceeds the populations of many other countries. I think this can be considered to the case of Nacirema. It isn't important to understand in the way how we look at ourselves. We must not have a stereotype that they should act like us. Being different doesn't mean being wrong. This writing about Americans gave me a huge lesson how I should react to different cultures. Also, as I mentioned on the paragraph 3, nowadays, people fear from too many things. As the members of a society, it is important for us to remember that we are the ones who control the society, not the society itself.

Academic movie review: Stupidity? (The Age of Stupid)

Are humans intelligent?

           It is definite that humans are intelligent. Humans know how to control their instincts unlike other animals, and their acts are based on rationality. However, even if humans are intelligent and rational, they are so stupid that they make themselves dangerous by their own hands almost to the death. Which means, human activities that are done so far is threatening their own human beings.

 

           Now, it is THE AGE OF STUPID. Human's eagerness of comfortability caused many harms(global warming, climate change) to our planet and it will happen more frequently in the future.  And the movie 'The Age of Stupid' is a good example for stupid human behaviors toward the climate change.

           The Age of Stupid  is a short movie directed and written by Franny Armstrong in 2009. This movie is a documentary movie, made by combinations of many documentary film about climate change. The story begins with an old archivist from devastated earth of 2055 living in a archive where all the resources are stored. Before the old man starts to show documentary, you can notice that he is repeating same question over and over again with the regret mixed into his voice.

"We could've save ourselves."

This short sentence contains many things that will be discussed later on the movie.

We could've save ourselves but we didn't. We could've save ourselves from the climate change but we did not do that. Why not?

           The purpose of this movie is to persuade audiences that climate change is a serious problem that we face today and we have be desirable to solve this problem not just being stupid. But, since this movie is just 89 minutes, it seems hard to persuade the audiences in such a short time. However, by providing examples of real documentary films, it makes the movie more credible and unbiased by looking at one problem with different perspectives. And the movie especially talks about the oil(oil is the main cause of stupid human activities), providing different view with three people.

           Oil also known as petroleum has been dominating our lives since late 19 century. It is used in variety of purposes starting from transportation to clothing. Now, the demand for this cheap and efficient energy source has grown so rapidly that it's the most used energy source throughout the world. In order to give more accurate and unbiased view, the movie shows three different documentaries related to oil.

 

           The first documentary is about a story of  young aged man who owns his low-price airline in India. Airlines are one of the most high consumers of petroleum since their jobs is to fly airplanes for far-distances, so a lot of oil is consumed. For the international airplanes about 36,000 gallons of oil is used for 10 hour flight.

           Second documentary film that archivist shows is about a man who works for an oil company called 'Shell'. His work is to analyze the samples brought from the under ocean and he decides whether it is adaptable place to drill the oil. Thus, he is contributing to the oil production.

           For the last, there is a woman from Nigeria who suffers from harm driven by the oil companies. There is no clean drinking water for them to drink, and the atmosphere became murky that it is even hard to breathe. All these harms came from desire of oil companies to make more profit.

           Now, by taking three examples with the perspective of economy, we can notice there is serious inequality among these people. First example is a 'consumption activity', second one is 'production activity', and the last one is 'allocation activity'. Each three activities rely on each other to form a economy system having all having profits. However, Nigerian woman from the third example gets all the harms from the process of production and consumption. For example, strong and rich country like USA consumes huge amount of gasoline and huge amount of carbon dioxide is being emitted to the atmosphere which causes the global warming. Thus, it seems fair that USA gets all the disadvantages for producing greenhouse gas but it all goes to the underdeveloped countries especially located near the equator. Total increase of temperature of the earth is just critical to them unlike USA, located in the northern hemisphere. These countries suffer many climate changes like flood and hurricanes driven by developed countries. Developed countries get to have benefits contrary to underdeveloped countries.

 

          The reason that I chose 'Stupidity?' for my writing is because I wanted to question if human beings are intelligent(What is the standard point of intelligency?). Other animals which are concerning about extinction of their specie might be regarded as more intelligent animals than human beings in our 'Age of Stupid'. Now it is time for us to look back at ourselves worring about the future as we did in the long past before the evolution and making earth a better place for our future generations.

 

<People trying to see global warming as a natural process>

Reflection of 'The age of stupid'

 

 

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_age_of_stupid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

http://navercast.naver.com/contents.nhn?rid=116&contents_id=3754

http://navercast.naver.com/contents.nhn?rid=116&contents_id=5270

 

Personal Narrative Speech- My life in America!

Good morning! Today I'm going to talk about the some experiences that I have experienced during my life in the United States.

           Since my grandparents and cousins on my father's side live in America, I had a lot of opportunities to go to America and study during my summer vacations. But, my parents actually wanted to have more quality environment for me to study for a long period of time not just for summer vacation. So after a long conversation about the actual benefits that I can gain from education in America, our family decided to immigrate. At that time, I was just 5grader in Elementary school so I wasn't fluent in English. Therefore, it was hard to express my opinion and have conversations in English. I thought it would be challenging to go to America and get along with native Americans but at the same time it seem exciting to live a life in America. Due to my past experiences, I expected my school life in America would be harsh, and I was right. I went to Elementary school on the next week that I have stepped on America, because my mom said it won't be any beneficial to drag more time. And starting from that point my life started to tangle. First class that I took in my Elementary school was a science class. According to my memories on the first day, science teacher was talking about some topic related to solar system, but all I hear was language that did not belong to our solar system which was a serious problem. This also happened to me in my daily conversation with my friends. I could understand some basic conversations but it was difficult to me when they started to talk about some jokes. For example, my friend said "Do you know how to wake up Ladygaga? poke her face!"and I couldn't understand. So I tried to find a solution, and finally found the solution that can be connected to all daily conversations. My solution was to act like 'I understood everything' by giving a little smile. So in that case of Ladygaga, I could just smile showing my expression of understanding. But, it had a significant problem. One day my friends were talking about something and I smiled as I usually do pretending that I understood everything. However, one girl turned to me and said "You think that's funny?" and she started to cry. At that time I realized something was wrong. I didn't know they were having serious conversation, and she got angry because I was keep giggling about the things that were so serious.

           And another moment that I have experienced is racism. In Korea, I have learned many thing about race discrimination toward multi cultural students. The serious problem between student and multi cultural students was bullying. We should not bully them because they are just different from us but I didn't expect that I would be one of those minorities who suffer racism. I didn't experience bullying but there were some moment that made me uncomfortable. My first moment that I have experienced racial discrimination was in summer vacation. In summer every year there is a swimming pool party held by the residents at the public swimming pool. I was waiting in the line to ride a water slide but one of the white twins that were in front of me was starring at my face. It kept on like about 20 seconds. So I asked him "Why are you starring at me?" and the reply was "Hey there is a Chinese guy over here" and he started make sounds that were used to mock Chinese. And I said "I'm not even Chinese I'm Korean!" he ran away. I was just frustrated by this.

 

           The reason that I have mentioned these two experiences is because it gave me a chance to look back at myself. From me being so passive not trying to learn English but try to look for tricks, I could learn that when I face some problems, I should not step back but try to get through it. And from the racism that I have experienced, it gave me a more broader perspective on how I look at people from different cultures. Even though I came back to Korea, these are so valuable experiences and I'm looking forward to experience more on my life in KMLA. Thank you.

Personal Narrative: My Mother

        On the backstage, I couldn't stop pounding of my heart, and my body kept shivering. It was the most nervous moment in my life. To relive my nervousness, I thought about the moments that my volunteering team practiced for this performance.

After few moments it was my team's turn to be on stage. As the leader of the team, I lead the team members to middle of the stage where all attention was focused. I started the performance with the strong beat of my drums. At that time, I put all my efforts and passion in to the rhythm making one piece of harmonized music.
Finally, it was all finished. My team got applause from the audiences and I was so proud and confident about myself that I actually accomplished this.
However, few months before, I wasn't the type of person who is very confident about myself. I was totally different, always depressed and had no enthusiasm.

 

        I was a normal boy who lives in Korea, and had a normal life as others but when my family decided to move to US my life got tangled. In the middle school, my grades were all low almost getting 'F', and I had no friends at all. This was so definite because I couldn't speak, write, read English as fluent as Americans which made me to act passive. As my exhausting school life continued for months, I almost got the blues. My mom was also worried about me. She wanted to help me out but it was hard to find a solution in a new environment.

 

        One day, my mother came to me and said "Since you like to volunteer for others, let's volunteer for people who need your help". I was concerned about myself 'Will I be able to volunteer in a foreign country?'.But on the next day, after hours of thinking, I decided to do it. My mother began to search for Koreans who are interested in volunteering to form a group. And as the oldest in that group, I got the position of team leader.

 

        My team practiced many performances such as taekwondo, and samulnori(Korean traditional music) for six months and the day came. After the performance, our team got famous by doing Korean traditional performances for volunteering. Many city newspapers and Korean broadcasting channel came to our group and started to interview. It was the best day in my life, and also the turning point to be confident about myself being passionate.

 

        Now, I'm so thankful to my mom who put so many effort for me to have self-confidence. And this couldn't be done without her help. This is my experience that I can't ever forget which gave me an opportunity to go beyond myself.

My goals!

In middle school, teachers put a lot of importance on reading and grammar, not writing. So, as other students do, I didn't spend much time on writing. However, by taking this writing class with Mr.Menard, I truly feel my English writing skill will enhance much better than now. Since, I know writing is crucial throughout the whole school life, I set three goals to accomplish before the end of this writing class.

 

1.

I will write with more advanced vocabularies.
When I write, I always concern about my vocabulary. Since, I didn't memorize many vocabularies as my friends do, I strongly feel that my essays are just weak and not influential. I want to write that is well-organized and more influential to others.
So, in the writing class, I will memorize more words and utilize it when I write essays.

2.

I will write faster than before.
I'm the type of person who thinks a lot before writing an essay. Because of this, I spend lots of time on thinking about the ideas and organizing it to make a perfect essay. However, this puts me in trouble when I have piles of works to finish and I still have some essays to finish.
So, my goal is to shorten the writing time, and have more organized essay.

3.

I will write with no grammatical errors.
When I re-read my writings, I find many grammatical errors on everywhere. But, even if I find those errors, I don't know how to fix it, and the correct way to fix it. This is the time when I feel so depressed about my work. I read some books about writing grammar but it was always hard for me to utilize the data from the book in to my writing.
Thus, my last goal in this writing class is to minimize my grammatical errors as possible.

Montly TOEFL essay #1: It's all connected with food!

Describe a custom from your country that you would like people from other countries to adopt. Explain your choice, using specific reasons and examples.

Today, all around the world, there are many customs that exist. All customs have different characteristics that are developed from different ethnic backgrounds. Since, every country has their own custom whether that custom is considered good or bad, it is important to share good customs that can be enormously beneficial to others. For this reason, I want to introduce a good customs that Korea have. My country, South Korea, have many customs. Such as customs that developed by Koreans, and also customs that came across the East sea from China, such as, Confucianism. Between these customs there are good ones that other countries should definitely adopt. For instance, respecting parents, bowing to elder people. Because of this our country needs to learn other good customs from different countries, and if I could have a chance to inform good customs of my nation, I would definitely introduce Korean food custom.

When we think about Korean food custom we usually think about environment-friendly food. These environmental food includes eating vegetables, herbs, and most importantly fermented food. Korea had been developing many fermented food like kimchi, and doenjang which are very helpful to our health. Our food custom, eating fermented food for everyday, has lead Koreans to have more environment-friendly and healthier eating habit. However, in 21 century, many people love to eat instant food that are considered unhealthy, and disease provoking food. Fermented food might not be tasty to people from other countries but as the importance of these food is significantly increasing, it is necessary. Thus, it is important to us to have environment-friendly food and this is the reason that I want other countries to adopt this food custom.

The next food custom that I want to talk about is Korean table manners. Since, Korea puts significant importance on respecting others, from the past Koreans have been developing its own table manners. Specifically, one example of table manner is 'young people should not eat before elder person, and they should not leave the seats before the adults finish their meal'. They consider this as disrespectful thing. This is also connected with Confucianism which came from China, increasing the importance of respecting others. When I was young, my parents always taught me it is disrespectful thing to take a spoon and eat before my parents eat. I still follow this when I get to eat meal with my parents. Also, this kind of table manner should be adopted in other countries to show respect to others and by setting these table manners in different countries, they will know how to react when they are eating with others. I think Korea custom has huge positive aspect on respecting others.

Many countries share different customs from various backgrounds, and Korea has its own custom on food. To sum up, the custom that I'd like other countries to adopt is Korea's food custom. This food custom can be divided into two categories, eating environment-friendly food, and our table manners.

Self introduction~~!

Hello! to all of you who will be seeing my blog. First, my Korean name is 정용한 and my English one is John. This is my first blog that I have made throughout my whole life so I'm not used to this kind of interface... But since I started it I would have to introduce myself first! (If you have any uncomfortable feeling about my blog design, please let me know :)


I'm from Seoul, Gwangjang middle school. And to describe my personality, I might seem a bit quiet person to those of you who don't know  me. But, once you become a friend with me you will find out that I'm not that type of person. I'm actually active person and I like to talk infront of many people. Oh! and I don't have a clear view  of what I should do for my career now. But since I have a big interest on engineering and medicine, I think I would choose between two. For the 1grade 1semester, I'm taking SAT physics for my science module. I think 'Physics' is a really cool subject to learn about motions and energy but at the same time it is the hard one to study.


Since, I have choose to go to university abroad, English takes a lot of space during my study.  I've been living in United States for about 2years, and I took regular school classes, but compared to that I think my English level didn't get to the point that I expected. And because of this I always wanted to learn English more deeply, and by attending KMLA, I believe it will bring me a chance to practice.


I am really looking forward to my English class with Mr.Menard because I think it would be a great chance for me to enhance my English skills. But the true reason that I'm looking forward to it is because I like to write about many things such as, short fictions that I wrote in my spare time, and poems that I use to write when I'm depressed deeply writing is one of my favorite subjects(believe it or not~). I usually take a lot of time to write a essay but after I finish writing it, I feel so proud about my self :)


Thank you for reading my self introduction and have a nice day~