Full Research Plan

After the trailer, my research has become more focused.

With suggestion from Professor Wesch, instead of South American contact and the injustices that have been done since/because of western influence (I can't tell you how difficult it was to try to put together a "story" that incorporated pre-South American mediation, because, well, they weren't mediated), I'm going to be focusing on the Chevron/Texico oil contamination in Ecuador.

More research into the topic will be needed, with a much-anticipated viewing of CRUDE, and delving into who the major players are. Not only lawyers, judges, indigenous people, and CEOs, but those in the Ecuadorian government who are, essentially, protecting Chevron, extending their reach and destruction by playing a meddling middle-man.

Chevron as well as Chevron-accusing sources, like ChevronToxico, will be investigated in order to gain both view points, and material for the two minute project.

We watched videos today in class in order to spark some kind of "big idea" of our own. I wasn't having one until Dr. Wesch defined the difference between Rebellion and Revolution. Rebellion is a regime change. Revolution is a total system change.

I couldn't help but think of 1776, John Adams, and William Daniels' line, "this is a revolution, dammit, we're going to have to offend SOMEBODY!"

This led me to the realization that Bob Dylan was right, you do have to serve somebody, no matter who you are.
And then to an idea, more of a question, really, Does anything ever change?
I know the idea's been had before. By many people. In many situations. But this one applies to something generally thought about as having a change.

Douglass Rushkoff, in his "Program or be Programmed" stated that new forms of media came about with new forms of thinking, but a generation behind. Writing brought about Islam, but instead of readers there were listeners to those who could read (people gathered in a square listening to a rabbi read scripture). The printing press brought about Protestantism, but instead of creating writers, people were reading. His "big idea" is, What is the digital age bringing about?

My answer? It doesn't matter because nothing really ever changes anyway. Before classifying me as an existential hack, hear me out.

Thousands of years between the development of writing and the evolution of the printing press, yet we're still focused on the existence of God; people fighting people about what they believe, how to act, and what's moral. The digital age only brings about a more efficient manner of getting at each others' throats.  Someone always wants to be in charge.
"I'm the leader, I'm the one that says when we go."
Gotta Serve Somebody.
Again, not a new idea because, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In "Twitter Revolution: Iran vs. USA", a concept DC Comics and Alan Moore, the soldiers at Lexington and Concord, and the prehistoric peoples at Hohokam and Chaco had thought of before Twitter was ever a twinkle in anyone's eye was put forth: governments should be afraid of their people, people shouldn't be afraid of their governments.
Building on these rebellions/revolutions through Twitter, I refined my idea. Things are different. At least on the surface, but nothing changes.

Evident from the news mash-up of Iranian and American ways of dealing with social networking in similar situations with similar reactions, things are not different. There is, however, the illusion of being different. If the United States didn't have that veil of "justice" hanging over its head, there'd be none. We wouldn't know what to define justice as. Unfortunately, when our government gets to define justice, it also defines the actions needing justice, ipso facto, only veiled. 

The modes of keeping subjects and followers of these two institutions may be different, but they are indistinguishable from one another at their core.

Jeremy Rifkin's "The Empathetic Civilization" backs up these ideas. Primates strive to be empathetic. People strive to be empathetic. It's embedded within us, right down to our dendrites and axons. But we only want to be empathetic to people who are like us. Not different from us.
This explains our inability or unwillingness (yes, the differences between those two could change a whole outlook, but it's practically impossible to differentiate between them when there's limited study on the subject) to empathize with those who we continually exploit in the third world. Exploiting their natural resources, their labor, and eventually taking their lives.
The same concept was used in WWI and WWII in nationalistic propaganda. The Germans were displayed as dark, ape-like creatures, and the Americans were the hero coming to save the damsel in distress.
If you make the "enemy" nonhuman, it makes him that much easier to hurt. Because he's not like you.
Rifkin argues that there have been stages to this dehumanization of "alien" peoples. First, people discriminated through blood ties; if you're not in my band or family, you're alien. Then, people discriminated through religious ties; if you don't believe in the same God or the same rules I do, you're alien. Finally, people now discriminate through national ties; if you're not from the same country I am with the same cultural practices, you're alien.
I argue we didn't change the way we discriminated, we only built upon the manner in which we did so. Structural racism exemplifies this human ability to integrate the ideas of blood ties, religious ties, and nationalistic ties seamlessly.


I sat in class silently fuming about this. It's not a big idea. But it's an idea and it's mine and it works into my views about how Chevron can mutilate Ecuador's environment leaving its people barren and diseased.


Stemming from that, this project is hypocritical. I realize the intentions and fully support them. However, undergraduates in a semester - now roughly rounded to about 5 weeks - are not going to put together the kind of thoughts "giants" could put together with a minimum of 10 years to think of these "great ideas". Dr. Wesch realizes this, a man as brilliant as he is doesn't let things like that slip past him, but the pressure is still there. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the first step is to realize you don't know anything. Then you can start the research in order to stand on the shoulders of giants.


GO KSTATE :3

Project Trailer...Take 2

Right. So. This version? Much better than the last. Less time, less heartache and grief, and a better result.
Bring it, Derek.

One of the major helpers in getting this finished was Indigenous People of South America. There are other geographical areas of interest. Might help out some others.

Project Trailer

Whew. I did not expect the number of hours I spent working on this to be so high. Could just be my complete lack of experience and difficulty finding information and sources
(I spent at HOURS browsing music after music, video, photos, data, etc...), but I think it mostly had to do with the medium. Video.

I'm an essay writer. It's what I've been doing since my first encounter with the public school system 15 years ago. Essays don't require creativity, just a logical plan of thought laid out before me. Not usually a problem when I know what I'm writing about, no matter how much information I need to condense.

With video however, it's not just a story to read or hear, it's also a story to see. Putting things together in a way that makes sense in this manner took me days.

I'd been thinking about where I wanted to go with this, how I wanted the story to start, which story I wanted to tell since last week. This week, on Wednesday, I started working. Late nights turned into early mornings with little sleep, Thursday's class making me paranoid about the quality of my product. This isn't something I can just piece together in a logical formation, but I need to make a kind of "quilt" from multiple sources, making them all say what I want them to say.

It's evident to me from my product that I'm still having trouble with the idea of patch working, but the more I get used to it, the better I should get.
...I say that now.

I know in class, when we watch the trailers, I'm going to constantly be comparing my work to the work of everyone else.
The probable stiffest competition? Derek. Kid's a genius with video.

Today, I spent a solid, continuous 10 hours working on this. The weird part? I never got bored or distracted.

Time to turn it in.
Deep breaths.

South America. WHAT.

So far, it looks like the vision for South America is to explore South American contact, its affects on the cultural and religious practices, and South America's eventual integration into the world system, now becoming popular with shamanic tourism. A potential issue is that South America is a pretty big place. We have not yet zeroed in on a specific area. Whether this will become a problem or whether we can effectively cover a few key areas has yet to be seen.

Have to admit, I'm pretty excited.

The article I summarized in my last blog post will be one of the major players in European affects on South American culture and religion. It's SO specific to the subject and displays change perfectly.

However, since the assignment is to summarize 2 sources, I'll include two more.

Joseph Bastien's Mountain of the Condor: Metaphor and Ritual in the Andean Ayllu also displays the integral, unique cultural and religious practices of South America.
The beliefs of Indians in the Andean ayllu is based on this metaphor of the body. They see the geographical layout of the land as a literal body and it permeates their beliefs in marriage practices - they must marry from a different level of the mountain in order to keep trade relations amicable because no one horizontal area is self sufficient.
Their belief in life cycles - the puna (top of the mountain ~ 14,000 m +) is seen as the head, or origin of the person. As life goes on, the person travels down the mountain in rivers. When you die, an underground river takes you back to the top of the mountain to be born again from the head or origin.
Their belief in sickness and witchcraft practices - the head is the origin, so if someone has access to your hair they are able to affect the rest of the body and it must be healed by an ayllu affected by water - the medium of the river of life.
Basically every aspect of life in the Andean ayllu is affected by this body metaphor of their mountainous environment.
The area Bastien writes about - the Kataan - is a relatively isolated area of Bolivia, difficult to get to in the dry season, but treacherous in the wet season. Therefore, not many visitors are received and their cultural practices remain healthy, but still have some outside threats. The Kataan healers and diviners have a kind of "power" modern science can't explain. Yet, missionaries try to shut down their practices and if they are seen be outsiders, insults like "dirty Indian with the medicine bag" are hurled at them.


Laura Fishman's Claude d'Abbeville and the Tupinamba: Problems and Goals of French Missionary Work in Early Seventeenth-Century Brazil is a resource displaying rituals and European contact with South America
Essentially, Claude d'Abbeville is a Capuchin (a reformed order of Franciscans) father and he goes to South America working under Portugal, Spain, and France, arriving in Maranhao in Brazil in 1612. D'Abbeville reported that the Tupi Indians received the French well, and went so far as to classify them as "great prophets of God," so d'Abbeville was convinced that the time had "come for God to be adored and recognized" there. His positive letters back to France served as propaganda in order to recruit more Capuchin missionaries in the area, but, in fact, the more time d'Abbeville spent with the Indians, the less he believed they were receptive to his cause and the more frustrated he became. Although the Tupi believed in spirits running and affecting their lives, the missionaries didn't believe that was really a viable religion. Missionaries spent time trying to educate the people in a specific area, but these people are nomads constantly looking for their utopia, making the radiation of education difficult. D'Abbeville, although disgusted by some of the Tupi practices like cannibalism, found a kind of peace within the Tupi. He writes that Indians offer “a good lesson for a Catholic family, who, even though they have received the light of faith and the sacrament of marriage, cannot live together in peace for a single day without quarrel, discord, and division." D'Abbeville laments that the French Catholics have strayed so far from the true essence of Christianity, while the Tupi, who are a "primitive" people live so well in the image of God. For this reason, he was not a proponent of baptism in the New World where the indigenous peoples would have to renounce their beliefs in order to be Christian. Still, d'Abbeville believed that Christianity was the only correct way to live, and wrote in letters back to France that contact with more civilized Christians than were already present in the New World (slavers and land owners) would aid in the conversion of the Indians. All in all, d'Abbeville renounced the ways of the Catholic Reformation mentality of the time, but still managed to show no respect for the native culture he had immersed himself in.