Sunday, February 27, 2011

Blog #7

This week in class, the discussion was mainly about the topic cultural celebrations and their importance to its culture and the way the performances reflect the larger social issues.  The Mardi Gras video that the class watched truly demonstrated the importance of having these performances for the group and even the individual.  In the documentary there were people who were very clearly emotionally influenced by the celebrations and everything that went into it. This really proves how important having cultural performances is to countless cultures.  These performances can be as extravagant, like Mardi Gras in Alabama, or they can be as simple as a small theatre production in a community.  These events reach a community is many ways that a community may not be able to be reached otherwise.

During my four years in high school, I took an American Sign Language (ASL) class each year.  The wonderful thing about this class was that I did not just learn the language, but I also learned about Deaf culture.  Deaf culture is not limited to a certain ethnic background, heritage, or race; in fact Deaf culture is not even limited to deaf people.  This culture can include obviously those who are deaf, family members of deaf individuals, students of ASL, etc.  This culture consists of many, many types of people, which can make for a mix of cultures producing a larger one.  Deaf culture consists of nearly everything that “normal” culture consists of, including cultural performances.  The National Theatre of the Deaf is just like any other theater group, putting on productions of stories or skits while incorporating their culture and at times teaching the audience a bit of sign language.  This particular video I posted explains a sect of the National Theatre of the Deaf; this sect consists of two deaf performers and two hear performers (who know ASL).  This combines both of these, very different at times, cultures and creating a holistic culture with the two.      

1 comment:

  1. I think this illustrates very well a point that you made in a previous entry -- we don't need to go far to see cultural differences; they are sometimes right next door to us! When we think of other cultures, Deaf culture doesn't immediately come to mind, but as we talked about in ANTH 3800, there are certainly some cultural differences between Deaf people and hearing people.

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