The Sounds of Silence

Language and Culture

"The Sounds of Silence," article is about nonverbal communication. While reading this article I actually learned that many cultures use different body language for different things/meanings. An interesting quote that my teacher Mrs. Castelli mentioned caught my attention. "There is no such thing as culture without language," she said. Which if you think about it that is really true.
Nonverbal language includes posture, gestures, facial expressions, costume, the way you walk, even the treatment of time and space and material things.
In different cultures or societies people use different ways of communicating that means different things. For instance, in white middle-class American culture they show they are listening to other people by looking right into their eyes. Also, alot of people nod their heads to show their paying attention or make slight noises. But when someone is ready to end a conversation they do alot of body shifting. As in stretching of the legs, crossing and uncrossing them, bobbing the feet, or looking away from the person talking. Then to really give a sign they look at their watches to end the conversation.
Most people will quickly glance at others then look away, but people from other cultures might think that staring at one another for a length of time is ok. To Americans this is unfamiliar and disturbing and they tend to look away.Men in different countries look at women differently. They really look at them: their eyes, hair, nose, lips, breast, hips, legs, thighs ... ect. Then when your in America no men every take more than a second to look at you unless their interested.
The most obvious use of nonverbal communication is eye contact. Some people can actually tell what your thinking by looking at your eyes. One example in the article is when people were looking a jewelry. The merchant kept telling the purchaser to buy a certain bracelet, but this bracelet was not the one they had chosen. By the merchant watching the pupil of the eye he really knew which one the purchaser wanted.
Also, study shows that when someone is really interested into something their pupils tend to dilate. Psychologist also say that the dilated a woman's eyes are the more attractive they are to men.
When someone gives you direct eye contact they want something specific such as a pickup or handout or information of some kind. But in the West alot of people look and greet on another even as strangers.
Another thing is people like their space, more known as a bubble. When others get too close we tend to tense up or back away. Sometimes we put things between us and the person who is invading their space. Also, your attitude affects the size of your bubble. If your angry your bubble expands. There are four main distances: intimate, personal, social, and public.
Then touch comes into communicating. Touching others on their shoulders breaks a sort of barrier between two people. Strangers have a lot of different ways of communicating.

Personally, I know I use alot of eye/hand communication to express how I feel. Especially when I'm explaining something to someone. Also, when I'm talking I feel more comfortable when the the person in which I'm speaking to is looking at me. It makes me feel that their really engaged in what I'm saying, and I find it rude for someone to look away or gaze at someone else when I'm expressing my thoughts. Another thing, in the article it mentions the sparkle in people's eyes. Most everyone had seen it happen with experience to someone else. When I say a nice thing to someone as in, "you look nice today," their eyes light up and they have a sparkle to show you have made their day.
The "bubble" situation can really relate to me, because I despise someone being to close to me. It's upsetting and gets me a little moody. I don't like to be crude but it's how I feel. Especially when I'm in a elevator and it gets overcrowded with people, and your shoulder to shouler with everyone. I'm a very closterfobic person, and feel I can't breathe when in small places with a lot of people.
Futhermore, I tend to glance at people for a second and look away just like most do. Like while walking the halls of the school I will look then look forward, or on a crowded bus many people look then have a tendency to look down at their feet.
Also, I have met many people from different countries. One in particular from Italy. After I got to know her everytime we seen eachother she did the two sided face "kiss/peck." At first it was very ackward for me, but I love how they are very loving to people.
I really enjoyed this article, it made me really look at the difference of the way people act simply by body language.

My Opinion:

Doing Field Work Among the Yanomamo (cont.)

                                  Yanomamo Chief Selling Baskets / Yanomamo female loin cloth

In my last blog I talked about this article, "Doing Fieldwork Among the Yanomamo." I talked about how the Yano would beg Chagnon for food when he was eating, and if he wouldn't give them none they would start to tell him disturbing things and harrassing him basically. The reason I feel they did this was because in their tribe they share with eachother. When someone is eating they are expected to give to everyone, and if they don't it's disrespectful in their culture. Also, when he wouldn't give them what they wanted they would steal from him. Eventually, Chagnon became interested in the Yano's genealogies. When he started asking about people's ancestors it took the Yanos by surprise, and they found it rude for him to ask about the dead. So, they would trick him and tell him fake names, and then laugh because he would believe them. The thing about the Yanos is that they never give one name to mutiple people. Everyone has their own name and nobody else can have it. After so long some began giving him a couple names, but not too many were he could figure out the rest on his own. One day there was a club fight over possession of a woman who was suppose to be getting married to a man named Rerebawa. He had been married into the Yano's and was now engaged with the younger sister of his wife. So, this says that this tribe can have many wifes and it's normal to them. When Chagnon heard Rerebawa call the man he was in a fight with by his dead father's name he took action. Since Rerebawa was angry with the whole group he began giving Chagnon names, and even looked over the names he was given in the past and told him they were fake and that the people in the village laughed at Chagnon about the fake names. When he started saying the names to other people they would get mad and he knew then that they were real names. Some people even started giving real names in exchange for goods or products such as a man named Kaobawa. Kaobawa had 5 to 6 wifes and was having affairs with many other women. His eldest wife, Bahimi, was pregnant when Chagnon started is fieldwork, but she killed the child because she didn't want her nursing son to have to compete against the new baby. Also, Kaobawa would beat his wife once in awhile, and nevery hard but to the Yanos this was typical standards. People from other villages and tribes would raid one another and kill women.

My Opinion:

After reading this article I see now that the Yanomamos have a very different way of living than Americans, but there is also similiarties between us. The Yano people value sharing and exchanging. Also, I feel that the Yanos would get upset when Chagnon would ask about ancestors, because they wouldn't want to remember. One thing in particular I found interesting about the Yanos was that they wouldn't give anybody the same name, that part is very different from Americans. People in our society give their children names from the decieced people in their families or they give them part of their own names. We find this being a good thing because it shows that we're not forgetting our dead, and also we value certain names and pass them down from generation to generation. I was giving the middle name Maxine, and that comes from my grandmother. So, it's very special to me. The Yanos most likely find it disrespectful to name someone after someone else. Also, the Yanos are allowed more than one wife and it's ok to them to do that. For me and in our culture that is wrong and illegal to have multiple wifes. It's even wrong to have affairs with other women/men. Another thing is that it was ok for the Yano to beat their women, and here people would go to jail. When other people would enter their village and do bad things they call it raids, but in our society thats basically like gangs. Furthermore, the Yanos have certain values that they have and follow that are very different from ours, but at the end of the day we have two different cultures and if they were to observe us they would find us weird as we see them.

Using Hallucinogenic Yopo



Doing Fieldwork Among the Yanomamo

This article is of a man name Napoleon A. Chagnon and the Yanomamo Indians, and what he went through living with them for nineteen months. These indians live in southern Venezuela and part of northern Brazil. They have about 125 villages some not even known by outsiders. Their people love to fight wars, because they are fierce for reasons being the blood of "Moon". They are also known as the "fierce people". Chagnon stated that what impressed him the most was the importance of aggression in their culture. The Yanomamo would beat their wifes, pound their chest to dueling and organized raidings to ambush and kill men from enemey villages. Another tribe of indians called the Carib-speaking Makiritare Indians were pleasant and charming compared to the Yano's. They were excited to show Chagnon the courtesies of their system of etiquette.

Chagnon traveled by rowboat two and half days and reached a missionary mission settlement on the third day. James P. Barker, who was the first non-Yanomamo to make a sustained permanent contact with the tribe in 1950, joined Chagnon at the settlement. Barker had lived with this group for about five years. When they got to the village, Bisaasi-teri, Chagnon explains how it felt hot and muggy. They were greeted with a dozen naked men with their arrows drawn.

After just arriving Chagnon questioned himself on why he chose anthroology, and he was ready to quite and leave. He talks about how everything smelled bad and how everyone was filthy and nasty, but within two weeks he was smelly and filthy just he same.

When Chagnon had to prepare a meal, he describes how just plain oatmeal took forever. He goes through the details of preparing it and says when he completed the meal it was almost lunchtime. He would only eat once a day and lasted all day on mainly cafe con leche, a heavily sugared expresso coffee. Also, Chagnon created a water system as so he wouldn't have to walk to the river everyday. He would catch rain water on sheets of zinc roofing and funneled it into a gasoline can then ran a hose from the can to his hut.

The Yano's would always beg for his food so he started eating peanut butter which looked like animal feces. He would tell them it was cow dung so he wouldn't have to share. Furthermore, the indians would give Chagnon plantain seeds that were easy to eat, but in exchange they wanted steel tools. This is the cultural aspect I got out of this article.

My Opinion:

I can relate to the Yanomamo Indians because people (women/girls) in our country get kidnapped or stolen, and we have to fight to find them and get them back. Also, when they give someone something they expect something in return and thats how American are to. If I gave a friend $5 I would expect them to give me something or give the money back later on. Basically you can look at our states as being tribes of ours and in each tribe we have different ways. Not every one state is alike. In class we learned about how we percieve other societies and their way of living being different and strange to us. While I was reading this article they did seem strange. Especially when Chagnon said he would be eating and the Indians wanted some they would sit in his face and beg or they would refer to the food asking him what kind of animal semen was he eating. Also, at the beginning of the article in the subtext it as how would you have felt in Chagnon's place? My answer would be dirty, uncomfortable, irritated, and fed-up because I'm use to my way of life which is being able to take showers and brush my teeth and having meals prepared fast. I would have been uncomfortable living in mud huts and living among people different from myself. Then I would have been irritated and fed-up because of the way they would of acted towards me. Stealing my belonging, destroying things I worked hard on, and being in my face begging.

Eating Your Friends Is the Hardest: The Survivors of the F-227

Andes Mountains

The artice is basically about people who survived a plane crash in the Andes Mountains, and what they had to endure. 27 survived the crash but 70 days later only 16 were left alive. They had no food or fuel to start a fire, and it was very cold considering there was snow on the ground. They were starving and weak, and eventually realized they had to eat the dead. A few said God gave them the bodies to survive. They cut the bodies and dried the pieces on top of the plane. Some, not all started eating the pieces. They got the radio in the plane to work and heard that the Air Force was calling off the search. They had to find their way back on their own. When they realized this most of everyone started to eat the bodies except for a man and his wife. They said God must want them to die. Then they started cooking the meat which made it taste better, but they wouldn't eat the women's bodies. Most of the people were constipated and could not defecate. The people who were going for help used human skin as socks so their feet wouldn't freeze. They eventually grew tired of the same meat and started eating bone marrow, blood clots, and rotting meat for a variety of taste. When the three people left who were selected to go for help, a guy named Parrado told some of them they might run out of food and if so to eat his mother and sister. They were rescued four days before Christmas. When they got back home the Government wanted to keep the Cannabolism a secret. Survivors said that the bodies were from God, and wanted to tell the story. They buried the rest of the dead at the crash site. The survivors were like celebrities and they thought of themselves as special people.

My opinion:
I feel that this article goes along with the perspectives we learned about while watching "Freeks and Geeks", because the men who survived organized what job everyone had to do while trying to survive. They also had the people who were like the leaders. Specifically a man named Canessa, because he was the first to push the issure of eating the bodies and had a few friends follow his lead. Also, I can somewhat relate this to my life, because in the article it was mentioned that the bodies were no longer human, they were dead and had no souls. The meat was that of animals that they ate back home. So to look at it in that perspective all people who eat meat can relate it to their lifes. At the end of the article it said a Chilean paper asked in its headlines, "What would you have done?" I thought about it and tried putting myself in their position. What would I have done if I had no other way to survive but eat the bodies? I couldn't really answer that question because it's still compulsive to me to think about eating someone. I guess I will never know unless I ever get into that position.