#enthography

From wikipedia:

Catawba (/kəˈtɔːbə/; Katapa [kataːpa]) is one of two Eastern Siouan languages of the eastern US, which together with the Western Siouan languages formed the Siouan language family.

The last native speaker of Catawba died before 1960.[1]Red Thunder Cloud, apparently an impostor born Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West, claimed to speak the language until he died in 1996 (Goddard 2000). The Catawba tribe is now working to revive the Catawba language.

From The Catawba Indian Nation’s website:

The Catawba Indians have lived on their ancestral lands along the banks of the Catawba River dating back at least 6000 years. Before contact with the Europeans it is believed that the Nation inhabited most of the Piedmont area of South Carolina, North Carolina and parts of Virginia. Early colonial estimates of the Catawba population when settlers arrived are between 15,000-25,000.

Early Catawbas lived in villages which were surrounded by a wooden palisade or wall. There was a large council house in the village as well as a sweat lodge, homes, and an open plaza for meetings, games, and dances. The homes were rounded on top and made of bark. The dwellings were small with extended families living in a single structure. Catawbas were farmers. They planted crops like corn and squash along the banks of the river. They also fished and hunted. The Catawbas were a large and powerful group and waged war with neighboring tribes, especially the Cherokee.

First contact with the Catawbas was recorded in 1540 when the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto marched his troops through the Piedmont while headed west looking for gold. There was little contact between the Nation and early settlers because the new colonies were barely surviving. Once the Virginia colony of Jamestown and the Carolina colony of Charles Town became more established this changed.

The tribal people called themselves yeh is-WAH h’reh, meaning “people of the river.” The colonists who came to trade began calling all the tribes along the Catawba River Valley by the name Catawba. By the late 17th century, trade began having a major impact on the Catawba society. The Catawba traded deerskins to the Europeans for goods such as muskets, knives, kettles and cloth. The Catawba villages became a major hub in the trade system between the Virginia traders and the Carolina traders.

Settlers began to move into the Piedmont during the 18th century. The Nation always carried a philosophy of brotherly love and peace when it came to the settlers. This did not serve them well though because the settlers brought disease with them. In 1759, smallpox swept through the Catawba villages for a fourth time in a century bringing the population of the Nation to less than 1,000 by 1760. Colonists believed the Nation was dying out.

Catawba warriors were known as the fiercest in the land. The Nation claimed at least eleven other tribes as enemies. Leaders of the state of South Carolina knew this and kept relations with the Nation friendly. King Hagler was chief from 1750 to 1763. He is remembered as a friend to the English but also a firm defender of the rights of his people. The Nation’s friendship with the English helped both sides. The colonist received protection from other tribes that may try to threaten them and the Nation received supplies that aided in their survival. During the Revolutionary War, the Catawba aligned with the patriots and fought with them against England to help them gain their independence. In 1763 the Catawbas received title to 144,000 acres from the King of England. It was hard for the Nation to protect the land from colonists and eventually they began renting land to settlers. The first tenant was Thomas Spratt who leased several thousand acres of farmland.

Eventually the settlers who had leased land from the Nation wanted the land for themselves. They put pressure on South Carolina to negotiate with the Nation. This was during the Removal Period when many tribes were being moved west. In order to avoid this, the Nation and South Carolina negotiated the Treaty at Nations Ford. The treaty stipulated that the Catawbas relinquish to the State of South Carolina their 144,000 acres of land. In return, South Carolina promised the Nation a new tract of land in a less populated area and to pay the Catawbas money. By 1847, South Carolina Governor David Johnson said, “They are, in effect, dissolved.” However, that was not the end of the Catawbas. References: Merrell, James. The Catawbas. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989.

Again from Wikipedia:

Charis Thompson has been really helpful for some of the concepts that seemed to be coming up in my previous research. Some of the work I have done before was to look at the work of DeSutter et. al. who found upon surveying transgender women about their desire to have children and to preserve genetic material prior to transition was seen by a portion of their sample as an inability to break with an “essentially male” past. So my natural next question is  what can I find out about the construction of genetic material as specifically gendered and what that can tell me about how gender functions to create physiological sex as necessarily fixed and binary. 

Thompson’s chapter on masculinity in the fertility clinic provided some assistance to navigating this. While she doesn’t advance any particular theoretical concepts that I’m unfamiliar with, her ethnographic data on the performance and parodization of masculinity in the ART clinic provides some data with which I can begin to think about masculinity as it is impressed upon bodies, the ways that gender and sex can be seen as chosen or not, and which elements of masculinity are seen as embedded in which physiological processes.

I guess I’m trying to square the poststructuralist theory that I feel connected to and that has the best tools for assessing if truth is even possible, with the very embodied experiences of the structures that theory tries to pull apart. Thompson makes a point of trying to do this, though I feel that she mischaracterized poststructuralism somewhat. She suggests that there is a volunteerism to poststructuralist accounts of gender on page 119 and I think this is missing a really important point about power and the violence of the mechanisms that power is enforced through. Without an account of power and domination, Thompson’s use of poststructural theory seems to imply that we can just choose our categories and that will be the end of the hegemonic taxonomies of personhood. I wonder if this is an attempt by Thompson to be less political than an account of power seems to require. She does seem to be making an effort to take a middle road, even when that middle road limits the potential of her analysis.

           Mostly, all concerns about theoretical decisions aside, I’m finding Thompson to be best for providing me with ethnographic data on fertility clinics from the perspective of someone who has undergone fertility treatment. I was in the beginning stages of that process when I conceived the only one of my children that I have given birth to, and it has been obvious to me from the beginning of this research that I would need some deep analysis of the process of fertility treatment in order to get a handle on the experience of queer and later transgender reproduction. This will provide me with helpful comparison cases, particularly since Thompson is very aware of the deeply heteronormative values that surround fertility medicine.

works referenced:

What Is Homestuck?

Homestuck is a web comic (a comic that instead of being published into a graphic novel, is hosted on an internet site) created and written by Andrew Hussie that he uploads to his website mspaintadventures.com. Though the comic is mostly drawn by Hussie himself, from time to time he will bring in other artists and musicians to help with some of the more complex panels. The panels range from being just simple illustrations with text, to flash videos and fully interactive flash games.

The comic initially follows four 13 year old friends, John, Dave, Rose, and Jade, as they download and play a computer game called SBURB. At first it seems like a silly game, but instead of controlling characters, you can control your friends and their environment. But it soon becomes apparent that this game is not as simple as is seems, and meteors are coming to destroy the earth and the only way to survive is to play the game.

The comic’s first page was uploaded on April 13th, 2009 (a day that has become a sort of holiday for the fans) and, though there have been hiatuses, new pages are almost added daily. At the moment there are over 5000 pages making it comparable in length and word count to War and Peace and Ulysses . Over 130 characters have appeared in the comic, with none of them being insignificant in regards to the plot and most of them tend to appear posthumously. Initially there are only human characters, but the comic spans to include Trolls (an alien species that a majority of the other major characters belong to), imps, sprites, gods, frogs, horses, puppets, fireflies and cherubs, just to name a few. There have even been some real life celebrities to make “cameos” in the comic. Nicholas Cage has appeared the most often, next to Dante Basco, Betty Crocker, Guy Fieri, and Andrew Hussie himself. (http://www.mspaintadventures.com/)

Who is Andrew Hussie?

Though it is easy enough to find his twitter and Tumblr accounts, it is close to impossible to find any personal information on him. He has been very careful about what he puts about himself onto the internet, and what he says in interviews. What we do know is that he is a digital media artist who gains inspiration from Mother, H.P. Lovecraft, Doctor Who, The Sims, and Colossal Cave Adventures (https://sites.google.com/site/finalprojectkatie/the-life-and-times-of-andrew-hussie). He is friends with another comic artist, Ryan North, who Hussie swapped credit cards with and created a Tumblr about it together. Hussie has drawn other comics before Homestuck, most notable are Jail Break, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth.  Beyond that it is known that he is American and loves horses.

Who are the Homestucks?

A Homestuck is a fan of the fore mentioned web comic. Though a Homestuck can individually vary in their devotion to the comic, on a whole they have caused quite a many achievements in the name of the comic.  On October 25th 2011 Hussie uploaded the 14 minute long flash video, [S] Cascade, after a month long hiatus. Since the file was so large, he posted the video to the site Newgrounds along with posting it to mspaintadventures. The update caused so much traffic that Newgrounds crashed, making [s] Cascade one of the few videos to cause the site to do so (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Homestuck). 

Though that does not compared to how the fans came together when Hussie formed a Kickstarter (Kickstarter.com is a website where people can advertise their product ideas and ask for funding to then produce their products for the masses) to fund the making of a Homestuck themed video game. The goal for the game was $700,000. The Kickstarter was launched on September 4th, 2012 and was completely funded two days later on September 6th. When the Kickstarter was closed on October 4th 24,346 people had pledged $2,485,506 to Hussie to create the game, with donations still being accepted through PayPal (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/14293468/homestuck-adventure-game).

The United States has seen a rise of internet-based technology in the past decade. Since the inception of ARPANET (first packet swtich network) designed in the 1970s to link college campuses together the internet has gone from minimal usage to spawning global usage.  Through this rise came societal changes such as the success of online communities. The proliferation of available technology and widespread internet access has given people the ability to connect virtually. According to Toral (2009), online communities should be understood as an exclusive group   that brings people of common interest together.  These virtual groups function similarly to any non-technological “self-organized structure of people” (Toral: 2009). This is to say that technological groups hold the same values and standards as you would see in the communities of the outside world

     What we propose to do is look at the online community surrounding the web-comic Homestuck, created and written by Andrew Hussie This comic has a fan base much like the television show Star Trek had. To explain the phenomenon simply, Homestuck is a complex tale that follows four friends and eventually a multitude of other characters as they play a mysterious, world ending video game. There are alien trolls, earth destroying meteors, strange lands, stranger natives, chess analogies, and many broken fourth walls (homestuckks).  

     The fans of Homestuck are a diverse collective of individuals. Many of the fans come from different countries, backgrounds, and cultures. You can see this on sites such as Tumblr and at different conventions where the fans come together. They create a subculture of their very own, one that has not been looked at before, with routines, specific practices and formal/informal rules. The fans also seem to classify themselves based on their involvement in the series. This classification ranges from the casual reader to a person completely immersed in the content .

     Since the Homestuck community is predominately virtual we will subsequently be studying how the dynamics of a virtual relationship differs from the nature of a physical one. We will mostly look towards similar studies conducted on other internet based groups to draw understanding on this type of phenomenon.  We will be conducting interviews and handing out surveys on our college campus to see what type of people belong to this group, and to try and understand what it means to be ‘A Homestuck.’ The surveys we will be handing out will be asking the questions below and provide us with statistics about who the fans are, while gathering data on who the fans are not. These questionnaires will be randomly distributed amongst the Geneseo student body. The questions will be open ended to avoid influencing the answers of the participants. Our interviewees will mainly involve at least one member of GAGG (Geneseo Area Gaming Group), one outsider to the community, and Geneseo faculty member. This will ensure we continue to view the holistic perspective.