Communicating, Religion, and Art

Angela Carroll

Dr. Wilson

10-23-11

COM 360

Think, for a moment, about the various ways we communicate in our culture and how it has changed over the years. In the past, communication was primarily limited to those around us and who we could walk to. With the rise of technology, our ability to connect, converse, and to convey ourselves has expanded. Such growth in the methods of communication, “the process of sending and receiving messages” (Miller pg. 190, 2011), and the explosion of globalization has allowed our ideas, religions, and our art to be both exposed to, and to influence, other cultures.

The ways in which people communicate differ depending on the culture you belong to as well as the context which influences which type of multiple ways to communicate is used. In the American culture, for example, it is generally accepted among many that one must make eye contact when speaking to another person face to face. Looking away is generally considered rude (Miller pg. 194 ,2011). Further, it’s not considered proper to touch another person unless they are related to you or you know them very well.

Among some in Japan, eye contact can be considered rude (Miller pg. 194 ,2011).
In many cultures, clothes are also used to convey meaning. In America, one wears a suit to look wealthy and successful. In Kuwait, women cover their heads to mark themselves as wealthy (Miller pg. 195, 2011).

As technology has progressed, new routes of communication have opened, each with their own etiquette. In America, ‘texting’, like email but faster and over cellphones instead of computers, is a way to stay connected, especially among young people. Texting while one is class is also very popular but not smiled upon by professors.

E-mail, older than texting, can be done over the Internet. Though it is not as ‘quick’ as texting, e-mailing allows one to send documents and large amount of data across the web. E-mail is considered more professional and used in working environments. When e-mailing another person, one must be sure to include information in the subject line to allow for easy reading. The person receiving your e-mail isn’t going to go through each message they receive and might send yours to the trash bin.

One form of commutation which includes the Internet as well as television, books, and other formats is media. Media reflects the ideas and beliefs of a culture; however, it can also contribute to the way reality is understood.

Again, through framing, a media outlet can portray an event, a person, a country, and even an entire culture, in a certain light.

For example, one popular image existing in television is the idea of the gay best friend, a gay man who is ‘friends’ with a rich, white, often single woman. These men are especially feminine and talk about nothing but fashion, sex, and guy problems.

Are some gay men like this? Sure. But are all of them? NO!

There has long been a similar trend in the portrayal of black characters in television being used as comedic, helpful, plot devices, a subject that is further explained by Eric Deggans on npr.

Media is just one area where a person orients their understandings of the world. Religion, “beliefs and behavior related to supernatural beings and forces” (Miller Pg. 212, 2011), can also be a main factor in shaping how a person thinks.

Religions can include sacred rituals, myths, ‘stories about supernatural forces or beings’ (Miller, Pg. 213 2010) doctrine, “direct statements about religious beliefs” (Miller, Pg. 213 2010), and the beliefs and actions of those involved.

Myths, as found in the Irish storytelling from an earlier post, can be used to pass on morals and values. Doctrines are written like as found in the Holy Bible or the Qur’an and explicitly state what should be done and should not be done (Miller, Pg. 215 2010).

Although rituals can be sacred, like the foot washing in some Christian churches, they can also be secular. An example of a secular ritual can be found in Comic-con. Held annually in Los Angeles, Comic-con was once considered by geeks, nerds, and others as the “Nerd Prom”.

Comics are also a form of cultural expression and used to communicate. They, like other forms of medium, can be considered to be a form of art. Art comes in two forms, fine art and folk art. Fine art,“ produced by artists usually trained in the Western classical tradition” (Miller pg.236, 2010) while folk art is considered to those without such characteristics.

My grandmother has a particular fondness for folk art, coming from the Appalachia region where there is a great amount of art from different cultural backgrounds produced. She enjoys reading the Fox Fire books which detail the culture of Southern Appalachia. Folk art from the Appalachia region includes pottery, dolls, quilts, paintings, carved knives, and many, many other objects.

Another love for my grandmother is traveling for leisure, or traveling for no reason and without rules (Miller pg. 243, 2010). She loves traveling so much, she often spends hours online researching vacation spots. My grandmother, however, restricts herself to places she is familiar with as she is aware of the methods tourist destinations use to attract people.

Using framing, advertisements hide much of the reality behind their choice of frame. Instead, they attempt to communicate to possible customers of the safe, relaxing, and 'authentic' time available within their country (Miller Pg. 245, 2010). Often, the suffering of the people are minimized as well as their diversity.

One such example can be found in the documentary Life and Debt , a video on the true reality facing many of the Jamaica people.

Works Cited
Miller, Barbara D. (2010). Cultural Anthropology in a Globalizing World (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall: New York.

Spooky Irish Tales: A Ireland Year Event

Angela Carroll
Dr. Wilson
COM 360
11-20-11

At Reinhardt University, we celebrate a different culture every year by holding various events. For 2011, we are celebrating Irish culture and one of the events held , for the Halloween celebration, was the “Spooky Irish Tales”. Story-teller Betsy Doty, who has long told stories throughout her life, including in a homeless shelter, came to our school.

Besty Doty used an active, theatrical method in her story telling rather than simply speaking from her chair.

She stood and walked, used hand gestures, and changed her voice with each character. Her stories, like many stories, used repetitive phrases, rhythms, and hand motions. Doty told four Irish stories, each had their morals and could be used to obtain insight into the Irish culture, as myths typically do (Miller pg.213, 2010).

I will share the basics and some cultural insights for three of the stories with you.

The first story she told us was the tale of Mr. Fox, though, she admitted that it was a story with unknown origins. The phrases within it, including ‘much to do about nothing’, led many to believe it too be originally English, however, the Irish claim the tale to be stolen from the Gaelic tales(Doty, storytelling 2011).

“Mr. Fox” is known as a “Blue-beard tale” in that it is a tale about the dangerous of trusting a wealthy, seemingly God-fearing man you know little about. It is a story aimed primarily towards young female listeners.

In “Mr. Fox”, a young woman named Mary fell in love with a red haired man called Mr. Fox and they plan to marry after knowing one another for two weeks. While Mr. Fox is away, Mary journeys behind the church in search of the castle Mr. Fox told her they would move to after the wedding.

I’m not going to completely ruin the story for you, however, just know that Mary finds a grotesque secret and runs home(Doty, storytelling 2011).

It involved a barrel of blood

The story could reflect the patriarchal structure and the importance of family in Ireland. Mary, a female, wanders alone to Mr. Fox's castle and faces terrible danger. It is only when she returns to her family where she is safe (and Mr. Fox is dealt with by her brothers).

Then again, because it is Mary who turns the tide against Mr. Fox in the end, it could just easily reflect a wariness of red haired people who promise things which are ‘too good to be true’.

The second story was a result of the actions, as Doty informed us, by W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Lady Wilde during the late 1800s. Around the 1850s, development was occurring via the railroads. Gaelic language was in danger and so too was the Irish culture. A way the wealthy and educated sought to save the Irish ways was by going into the rural areas and finding stories. W.B Yeats published Fairy Tales of the Irish Peasantry .

Moo!

After asking the help of a priest and and a 'fairy woman', Brian is forced to go another night with the mystery of his sick cows another day. That night, however, he is visited by an old woman who he gives food and shelter to. She offers to help him, using witchcraft by asking him to get the first cow he sees and bringing it to her.
The old woman sings a song over a fire while the Brian and his wife churn butter out of the bad milk.

A person knocks on the door and the old woman says that this is the person who has placed a spell on the farm. When they open the door, Rachel Higgins, another farmer and their neighbor, is standing there. She owns fewer cows than Brian yet still has better business than all the other farmers.

After Brian helps Rachel Higgins, the old woman tells him to go to the field with dogs and other men and to chase whatever they find. Brian brings his other neighbors and their dogs to his field and they find a giant hare, sucking the milk from the cows... (Doty, storytelling 2011).

Rawr!

Again, I don't want to completely ruin the story, however, notice the repeat of themes. The tales are not only for entertainment, but for moral lessons. In both stories, there is an important lesson of: “ Don't trust appearances, evil can take many forms.”

Not this blatantly obvious...

Further, there is also a fondness for supernatural tales. The final story Doty told us was the tale of the Banshee.

A banshee travels the night, searching for another lonely soul to take with her back to the underworld. Once she stops by a nursery, finds a baby who has been left alone, and takes the infant.

Throughout the night, she continues to look for other souls to steal, however, each time she is forced to turn back because of kindness. For example, she approaches a blacksmith closing down shop and is about to take his spirit, yet, his cat enters the house and wraps herself around his leg.

I savz yur sol?

In the end, the Banshee must leave because of the coming light (Doty, storytelling 2011). Again, evil is beaten and light, both metaphorical and physical, save the day.

Works Cited
Doty, Betsy. (2011). Spooky Irish Tales. Storytelling. Reinhardt University.
Miller, Barbara D. (2010). Cultural Anthropology in a Globalizing World (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall: New York.

The Speckled People

Angela Carroll

COM 360

10-7-11

Dr. Wilson

The Speckled People

Hugo Hamilton's book, The Speckled People is a memoir, detailing his childhood in 1950s Dublin, Ireland. As a child with parents from two differing cultural backgrounds and as a Irish-German boy growing up in a rapidly changing world, The Speckled People is Hamilton's account of, not only his struggle to find his identity, but the struggles of his German mother, Imgrad Kaiser, and his Irish father, Jack Hamilton.

Hugo is trapped between his father's demands that he be the 'weapon' for the Irish people, his mother's gentle advice to survive and be a good person, and the rising influence of England and America. In The Speckled People, Hugo faces hatred for his German blood from his peers and anger from his own frustrated, culturally vulnerable father. He grows up in the aftermath of two nations, Ireland and Germany, struggling to find themselves, and feels the effects of the First World War, the Holocaust, and Southern Ireland's recent gained independence.

Hugo is affected by his links to both Germany and Ireland as the two countries have dealt with their own cultural identity crisis. Ireland, the land of his father, had long been dominated by the English empire since the twelfth century (Gale 2007). Hugo's home town of Dublin was once the city where the English army was kept as they battled against opponents of the English control.

A great source of the divisions between the Irish and the English people came in the battle between the foreign Protestant religion and native, Roman Catholicism. From 1541, when King Henry the eighth placed a Protestant church in Ireland, policies were used to oppress Roman Catholics and favor Protestants, policies which also contributed to the Potato famine in the 1800s (Wilson 2011).

Events such as the Potato famine and the continued oppression from the English led those who supported Home Rule, nationalists, to continue to revolt against those who favored colonialism, Unionists, often in a violent manner.

There was still a sharp divide between Protestant North Ireland and Roman Catholic Southern

Ireland. Separatists groups, such as the Sinn Fein, believed in forming Ireland into its own independent nation and fought many years to gain control. Northern Ireland, would remain in control of the United Kingdom until 1999, however, in 1949, Southern Ireland finally gained independence from England as the Republic of Ireland.

The impact of German bombing and the overall toll of the Second World War on England gave the separatists a winning advantage (Gale 2007).

Hugo's father, Jack Hamilton, comes from the Southern Ireland city of County Cork (Hamilton 111) and is the product of the culture war between the English and Irish. He retaliates against the growing influence of the English and American culture by forbidding; television, comic books, and, most importantly, the use of the English language, even from American and English music, from the house.

Jack instance on being called Sean Ó hUrmoltaigh and forbidding English from his family is more than a simple preference. Jack is on a mission to make Ireland a strong, unified nation, and, himself, the perfect Irishman, using his children as weapons, “He said we were the new Irish children and soon the whole country would be speaking Irish in the shops” (Hamilton 133).

Jack Hamilton, during most of Hugo’s childhood, was a man who attempted to help Ireland and his family by surrounding his children with German and Irish culture, keeping bees (Hamilton 284), by selling Irish and German based goods (Hamilton 107), and by working as an engineer, providing electricity to rural places in Ireland, including Connemara (Hamilton 288).

Jack’s past, however, which he hides in a wardrobe in the house, holds a different identity for Hugo’s father. Within the wardrobe, Jack keeps the source of his childhood harassed by other children and the feelings of shame, the evidence of his father’s, John Hamilton (Hamilton 12), service in the British Navy during the First World War.

Jack’s rebellion against both his father’s memory and the effects of the English occupation in general, led him to idealize the German culture, make speeches on O’Connell street in Dublin (Hamilton 38), and form a nationalist party and a nationalist newspaper both titled Aiséirí, with a friend named Gearóid.

When Jack is at work, Imgrad goes through the wardrobe and finds a 1946 copy of the Aiséirí newspaper, revealing that Jack’s speeches promised, if brought into power, Aiséirí would restore their nation by ridding Ireland of everyone who was not Irish, including Jewish people (Hamilton 253), similar to the Nazi’s promises in Germany.

His refusal to accept an English name and the greater assimilation process occurring in Ireland reflects his desire and the desires of Irish nationalists in general, to preserve the Gaelic language and culture from becoming extinct (Miller 206).

Germany, the land of Hugo's mother, was also faced with a long battle to discover its own identity. After the First World War, Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, according to which, the nation lost territory, was forced to put limits on its military, forbidden to join Austria, and endure occupation by Allied forces, including military from England and America (Keylor 2006).

The rise of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers' party, or the Nazi’s, was in part, due to many in Germany wanting to feel a sense of pride, safety, and unification in Germany once again (Gale 1988). Hitler took advantage of a hurting country and began writing and making speeches promising success and a strong nation once more.

Scapegoats were made of the Jewish people, homosexuals, the Roma, and numerous other groups who were killed by men such as Adolf Eichmann in the Holocaust, the 'solution' given by the Nazi's to Germany's problems.

During the extreme nationalistic policies of Hitler, the people of Germany were divided between members of the Nazi party, some joining only to survive, and the targets of the Nazis. Those who fought back openly were typically killed or sent to the camps.

Resistance against the controlling Nazi party did occur, including Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who, in 1944, attempted to, but failed, to kill Hitler using a bomb (Gale 1994).

Following the Nazi's defeat in 1945, Germany was faced with the horrifying reality of the crimes of the Holocaust and the stigma placed on all Germans which resulted from the actions of a few. Further, Germany was divided into occupation zones which eventually led to the division between Communist East Germany, controlled by the Soviet Union, and the Democratic West, controlled by American, French, and England, after the war (Gerhard 2006).

Imgrad Kaiser, coming from Kempen, is in a battle to accept her cultural identity which parallels Germany’s desire to enjoy its strong nationalist pride but to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In sharp contrast to Jack’s message of fighting back against assimilation, Imgrad tells her children, “…you can’t be still trying to stop things after they’ve happened” (Hamilton 153). She listens to American music when her husband is at work, including, ‘Roses Are Red, My Love, Violets Are Blue’ (Hamilton 78).

Imgrad also encourages her children to be positive and to use of the ‘silent negative’ of Hugo’s Onkel Gerd against injustice, “Nobody can force you to smile” (Hamilton 145). From seeing and living in the results of extreme nationalism and intolerance to different cultures, Imgrad is far more accepting of the English and American culture as well as more adapted to coping with difficult challenges in life.

Though she is homesick for her home in Germany and proud of her German culture,she still has the painful memories of her time under the Nazi regime. While in Nazi Germany, Imgrad, like many Germans, were controlled by the fear of being killed, however, Imgrad and many of her family members learned to resist.

Imgrad and her sisters were raised by, following the death of her parents,their uncle Gerd and his wife taught her and her four sisters how to fight back by seeming agreeable on the surface but, underneath, be really finding other ways of resisting. Imgrad's uncle resisted by refusing to join the Nazi party (Hamilton 67) and Imgrad's sister, Marianne followed suit, by hiding Jewish people in her guest house (Hamilton 265).

Imgrad resists silently, even after being raped by her employer, Herr Steigler, until she is able to flee Germany to go to Ireland, only to be trapped again by her nationalist husband (Hamilton 289).

Finally, Hugo himself is the center of his own identity crisis, as those with multicultural roots can often experience. Being taught the two different lessons of his German mother and Irish father, Hugo feels torn between the two cultures and isolated.

He is comforted by the caring, gentle ways of her mother, however, he is stigmatized by the crimes of the Nazi's by other people, including other children, “But the boys outside the shops can see us wearing lederhosen, so they call us Nazis” (Hamilton 135).

Hugo sometimes wishes he was Irish to avoid being made fun of yet, he does not want to match the extreme ideal his father wishes to have as this also distances him from his peers, “You couldn't be cowboys in Irish” (Hamilton 190). It is only when Hugo's parents take him two different extremes of his culture, one in An Cheathru Rua, a rural Irish town, and the other in Kempen, his mother's home town, that he is able to feel at peace.

Hugo, however, lives in Dublin, a large city where there is diversity and advancement, and, as a result, must learn to cope with the transforming multicultural changes occurring. To face this conflict of identity and the scorn of his peers, Hugo could be as his father taught, a violent man similar to the Nazi's, “I laughed like the Nazi's in the films and would not let him up...”(Hamilton 281), or he could be a silent resistor as his mother and her Onkel adivsed, “He was doing what my mother always told said we should do, to pretend they didn't exist” (Hamilton 140).

Eventually, Hugo comes to his own method of dealing with both bullies and his identity crisis, “I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me” (Hamilton 295), he resists living up to a cultural ideal. After Jack is killed by his own bees, Hugo and his mother go on a small journey to find themselves, however, in the end, they find that they “were lost” but that, “...it didn't matter” (Hamilton 298).

Works Cited

Keylor, W. R., & Merriman, J. & Winter. J. (Eds.).(2006)."Versailles, Treaty of."Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. (Vol.5.). Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons. Retrieved from Gale World History In Context database. (GALE|CX3447000884).

Gale. (1994). "Leaders of the German Resistance to Hitler."Historic World Leaders. Detroit: Gale. Retrieved from Gale World History In Context. (GALE|K1616000019)

Gale.(1998) ."Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)."Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale.Retrieved from Gale World History In Context database. (GALE|A148463479).

Gale. (2007). “Religious Politics: Northern Ireland and England.” Prejudice in the Modern World Refrence Libarary. (Vol.2). Detroit: UXL. Retrieved from Gale World History In Context. (GALE|CX2831400034).

Hamilton, Hugo. (2004). The Speckled People. New York: HarperCollins.

Horne, J., & Winter, J, Merriman, J. (Eds.). (2006). “World War I."Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. (Vol.5.). Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons. Retrieved from Gale World History In Context database. (GALE|CX3447000917).

Miller, Barbara D. (2010). Cultural Anthropology in a Globalizing World. 2nd Edition. Prentice Hall.

Weinberg, Gerhard L. & Merriman, J. & Winter, J. (Eds.). (2006)."World War II."Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. (Vol. 5.). Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons. Retrieved from Gale World History In Context database. (GALE|CX3447000918).

Wilson, Pam. 2011. Ireland History. [Class Lecture].