Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Putting on a Face...
I found the topic in class today about Goffman's notion of wearing a face or mask particularly interesting in light of an ethnography I read for another course as well as some of the material from essay. In Bonnie Urcioli's Exposing Prejudice she examines identity in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York and how it is particularly tied to language. English is created as good symbolic capital which can change social and political interactions between community members and white authority figures.
Getting to the point, in our age of globalization in which English and Western (American) cultures are considered to be the dominant hegemony, how is this changing the capacity of people to change their "face" and break with stereotypes (or recreate them perhaps) and instill greater amounts of agency? People can now with increasing ease acquire English and diminish a major marker of one as Other. So while I agree to some extent that your "face" is often assigned to you by society initially, I'd argue that it is quite possible to change your "face" if one desires to do so and that personal agency cannot be easily over looked in issues of stereotype.
Getting to the point, in our age of globalization in which English and Western (American) cultures are considered to be the dominant hegemony, how is this changing the capacity of people to change their "face" and break with stereotypes (or recreate them perhaps) and instill greater amounts of agency? People can now with increasing ease acquire English and diminish a major marker of one as Other. So while I agree to some extent that your "face" is often assigned to you by society initially, I'd argue that it is quite possible to change your "face" if one desires to do so and that personal agency cannot be easily over looked in issues of stereotype.
# posted by Jesse Kapp @ 12:08 AM 
