#humcore

For activity 5 of the Website project, a passage from “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico.” by Ruth Behar will be annotated to serve as an example on how to read a scholarly work in history. 

The Basics:

The first step in annotating any paper is to simply read it a few times and note down descriptions of the text as well as your own reactions to the text. This helps to locate key information and quotations, and to recall your thought processes more easily and quickly. It is also very important that you mark any words that are unfamiliar to you and write down their definitions somewhere. Having a key is usually really important to distinguish what each marking means. Additionally, highlighting or underlining claims raised in the passage will make understanding the passage a lot simpler at the end.

For a Scholarly Work in History:

For this type of passage, the thing to focus on apart from the claims is the evidence used by the authors and its relevance. For instance: is the evidence a primary or secondary source, what is the significance of the type of evidence, why was that specific evidence used instead of another, does the author agree with the conclusions in the evidence if any were drawn. Then also consider the authors intent in writing this, by examining the context in which the passage was written. 

If you do this combined with the basics, you will have properly annotated a scholarly work in history.

The Sample:

Key:

Pink: claims

Red= comments on the claims

Green: evidence

Lighter green= comments on evidence

Purple: key words

Black: personal opinions

- Excerpt from “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico.”, page 35 and 36

My response to this passage:

In this passage, Behar is arguing that unlike in European culture, witches in the Spanish colonies were less persecuted. In fact, she claims that women often used witchcraft accusations to their advantage. She builds her argument slowly not clearly stating anything drastic at first. She starts off by making an obvious claim that “women of social levels lost their legal autonomy”( Behar). She then proceeds to expand on this claim and makes newer and bolder claims all the while supporting each of the claims with primary and secondary sources as evidence. She continually cites other authors who agree with her individual claims so when all of them come together at the end, she has a very solid basis upon to make the claim that women self reported to being witches to escape marriages they were unsatisfied with and to escape other legal prosecution. While on its own this claim would be very “out there”, with how she slowly built it up over the course of the passage, it becomes a very understandable outlook on what happened. Since she presents her thought process so clearly, it also makes it very easy open up the whole argument for an academic debate. 

I found the whole passage extremely engaging and interesting to read. While I know she expands on this on the following pages of the article, I would like to see more detailed examples of people actually taking advantage of the witch system in the Spanish Colonies. While such an account would be extremely unlikely to be found, as the whole idea is a conclusion based on different pieces of information, it would be an extremely interesting read and would of course prove Behar right without a doubt.

Citation

When was the last time you were told to write a blog post for homework? I don’t know about you, but my answer was never.

To give a little context, I’m a first-year college student who is taking this course, Humanities Core (aka HumCore), because it’s required for my major. Not that I’m complaining, I’m just saying I probably wouldn’t have taken it if it wasn’t required for my major. Golly I hope my professors don’t read this.

So our very first HumCore writing assignment is to start a blog, which will be added to over the course of the academic year. The purpose of this blog is to take what we learn in HumCore  and apply it to our personal thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and experiences; along with current events. The tone of this blog supposed to be intellectual, without sounding too much like a five-paragraph essay. As you can probably tell by now, I’m not a particularly intellectual writer. But grades are important, so I will try my best.

Coming from a high school that used century-old textbooks, I am struck by the modishness of this assignment. I get an overwhelming sense of the attempt to make the curriculum modern and relevant, without completely foregoing the traditional goal of a thorough reading analysis. In fact, one of the most emphasized qualities of the course is that its reading selection disregards what most would consider the classics, and focuses on those literary works that will best lend themselves to interpretation and debate. Not to say that the classics are actively excluded: our first major reading is Virgil’s Aeneid, by no means an obscure piece of literature. But this shift, however slight, away from the canon (yes prof if you’re reading this I got that term from you), gives rise to the question: to what degree should the fields of humanities change in order to adjust to the world’s developments? Based on our curriculum thus far, I can infer that my professors would answer: to a moderately high degree, but not completely. I myself tend to favor the established classics over more contemporary works. In part because, as some have pointed out, there are reasons classics are considered classics. But also in part due to some personal prejudice against modern literature, which I’m sure I will have ample opportunity to work through during this course.

lets take a look at J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and try to interpret it as a dream in Freud’s dynamic theory of dream interpretation. We can easily see how it could represent a sort of wish fulfillment. In the novel, there are many many fears or anxieties present. The Magistrate is an old man, trying to resist the call of death as his bones become brittle and his knees shake. He is ever so lonesome, constantly visiting the local brothel, wishing for a real connection. He has some authority, yet he must yield to the authority of the empire that he works for, always under their thumb. He is surrounded by people who seem to lack morality, a sense of right and wrong, he wants justice. 

Every one of these worries that the magistrate faces are somewhat overcome, or dealt with, in one way or another. The first, old age, is dealt with when The Magistrate challenges the young men of the Third Bureau, he shows them that age does not make him weak, instead it makes him wise. He realizes how naive and blind they are to what is going on around them. Their arrogance is clearly seen as their weakness, giving the magistrate an upper hand and confidence that he does not wish to be them.

The second, loneliness, is overcome when he finds a beautiful young barbarian girl that lives in his quarters and he gets to rub her down every night. He falls asleep next to her and she does not mind his fetishes, he feels a strange connection with this girl that isn’t necessarily sexual.

The third, lack of power or being controlled, and the fourth, lack of justice, are overcome when the magistrate rebels from the empire. He takes the barbarian girl back to her family and is captured on his return. When more prisoners are brought in, he stands up for them and yells at his torturers, pleading for them to stop. This act of defiance is accomplishing a moral goodness for himself and at the same time showing that he does not care what the empire thinks of him any longer.

Everything we read, everything we hear, everything we see is mediated. When you are browsing the internet, looking for things transpiring in the world, often times you stumble upon an article or a video depicting events that took place, so called ‘news’. This, you think, is NEWS, I can absolutely trust this information. I found it on the INTERNET, or on TELEVISION, heck! perhaps even in a BOOK! I am very sorry to hit you over the head with a little bit of truth... this news you are reading may not be exactly how it happened.

Whichever medium you happen to be looking at usually has an author, or at the very least a publisher. This publisher or author has a say in what is being released. We must realize and accept that when we see or read something it is through a lens. A lens that changes the image, this lens is called perspective, and everyone has one. You, me, your teacher, your parents, every single person on this earth has a unique lens, a unique perspective. This might in fact change how certain events are captured, how they are described. I would also like to bring to your attention that this layer of mediation (looking through a lens, AKA perspective) can sometimes be multiplied, just like a game of telephone. You (1) watch the news reporter (2) who hears what happened from a witness (3) who heard what happened from her husband (4) who actually saw the event.

Often times this type of mediation is passive and we do not even realize it is happening. Many of us are very honest in trying to convey the absolute truth when describing things, we don’t want to be liars. Unfortunately, this type of mediation is done without intention. When sensory information comes into our brains, we automatically interpret, we automatically make judgments, we automatically pay attention to different aspects, its our very nature. Usually its not anyone’s fault when information differs from the res gestae or events that took place. But if we take our analogy back to the game of telephone, we can all easily remember that one person who alters the information with a specific goal in mind, intentional mediation.

We again have to keep in mind that not everyone is so honest and not everyone has intentions of telling the entire truth. When information has to go through a publisher or media outlet, often times information is changed to fit certain agendas. Whatever this goal is (political, economical, etc.) plays a big role in how the information is altered. An intentional lens may be added to the already passive lens of perspective. 

Lets us start this post with a question in the school of philosophy. 

What is Real?

It seems to me, reality is what we experience. Within our skulls, billions of neurons are firing at an incredible rate, this firing of neurons in a particular pattern gives us what we call reality. I bring this point to light not to downplay reality, but to emphasize it’s difficulty in recreating the exact feeling one gets from first-hand experience.

Walt Whitman, perhaps the greatest poet in american history, is quoted saying “The real war will never get in the books.” He is not wrong. It is simply impossible to put every single cognitive thought, bodily sensation, and sight into words. Recreating the reality of the Civil War is a feat that he attempted along with other writers and artists of the time. Unfortunately, there is no way to neatly wrap every aspect of experience and share it with someone else. The reality of war will, simply, never make it in the books.

This says something about the attempts to do exactly that. Taking it upon oneself to relay the experience of war to those who are not there to experience it is quite the feat. Although perspective and mediation will always play a role in depiction, artists and writers do their absolute best to share their experience, and merely getting a glimpse of the reality of war is terrifying. 

As the Humanities Core winter quarter shifts from the events of the American Civil War to the ideas of torture, things become harder to swallow. Before there was a wrong and right way of doing things with bad people and good people, but now there appears a grey shade among this black and white comparison. Torture became a common practice legalized by the country to get information from "bad people". Torture dehumanizes the soul as one person inflicts great and cruel pain upon another person under the assumption that this person is ideally the bad people who has the information needed. In this position, a human, believing he is doing the "greater good" by purposely applies pain upon another human who cannot defend himself. The soul becomes shifted as the person believes he is greater than another and therefore is allowed to show his influence through torture. However, there are always two sides of an event, and the people being tortured might not even have information they're looking for. Those who favor torture believe that they are in a "ticking time bomb" situation where they must torture the victim with great time pressure in order to avoid a mass devastation of the deaths of innocent people. No matter the reason, I do not support torture in any way, shape, or form. 

When I was put in different scenarios, my view of the other side changes.

Justice is fair punishment to the person who committed the crime, however true justice does not exist. There is an uneven display of justice that if this person commits a specific crime, then he will receive a specific punishment if caught, but who decides if this is the fair punishment? Who makes the decision that this crime is equivalent to this punishment? In our society, laws are the basis of foundation, but they are not always fair therefore that is not justice. There is an uneven shift of justice. For example, if my dog were to escape my house and run outside without a leash, my punishment will be that of a speeding ticket. The price to pay does not seem equivalent. A speeding car can kill people and severely injure many civilians. A escaped dog can tinkle on the neighbor's lawn. Is the punishment for both cases just? There is no true justice, not under the laws made by people. They try their best to be just but it will never be absolute justice.

If I were a patriot, I must really love my country. I must love it enough to fight for me country and possibly die for it as well. My country will forever support my decisions as I defend it. I would have to hurt others to stand up and fight for my country. However, if I was a terrorist, I would love my commanders that run this secret organization. I must love them, trust them, and risk my life for them. It would almost be as if I was a patriot of a secret organization because I will feel the same way as I believe what I'm doing is right according to those above me in the social hierarchy. These are the two sides of a similar situation.