Position Paper #7 Options
Monday, April 2, 2001

No written assignment for Monday, April 2. Please just complete the extensive reading assignment.

Wednesday, April 4, 2001, Option 1

Choose one of these three possibilities for Wednesday:

1. You could discuss the differences between Berkey and Boddy's essays by contrasting their types of data, methods of analysis and interpretation, theoretical issues considered, goals, and types of ideas developed. As you compare the two very different essays by a historian and an interpretative anthropologist, discuss your own responses to the historical approach using documents from a purely male-produced discourse and your response to the anthropological approach using female friends' and the anthropologist's own ingenius interpretative readings of metaphors, fertility symbols, ideologies of fertility, and the like. What critiques would you make of each essay, and what value do you think each essay has for our discussion of these highly fraught customs, which are often maintained and supported -- sometimes violently -- by traditional women in highly patriarchal societies.
2. Another approach would be to provide your own very brief essay/discussion about these practices. Relate these two articles to other literature you have also read, and/or to other studies we have read this semester regarding birth, kinship, female sexuality, and the like.
3. Propose a topic for discussion that will enable the class to engage in a close analysis or one or both articles, and provide your own response to your question.

Option 2 for Friday, April 6, 2001

Choose one of these three possibilities for Friday:

1. Both folklorists, Miska and Wickett, writing in Katherine Young's anthology Bodylore , address rituals associated with death, funerary practices, and ideas about the dead person. Both extrapolate large cultural ideas about the phenomenology of the body -- the larger cultural notions about the ways body experience informs identity, knowledge, belief, culture. Compare the very different data, methods, types of analysis, and goals of each study to get at the different kinds of conclusions each writer reaches regarding the significance of death. How does each scholar combine folkore such as myth and other genres in their studies? Can you locate or infer any sets of underlying assumptions, goals, values that account for their differences?
2. As you compare the two articles, discuss which piece you find the more engaging and provocative, and explain why. Are you most intrigued by learning about Egyptian ideas regarding the body and soul, regarding double existences and appearances? Do you prefer the article that draws the most coherent story together, the most well-knit set of interpretations, as Wickett does in her study of drinking from the blood bowl in funeral ceremonies in Taiwan? Are there other factors regarding you values on methods, assumptions, goals, values, rhetoric, etc. that contribute to your preferences?
3. Propose a topic for discussion that will enable the class to engage in a close analysis or one or both articles, and provide your own response to your question.