The story of knotted rope | Anthropological topics I want to explore (2)

Original link: https://tyingknots.net/2022/08/knotting-proposals-2/

On July 25, 2020, Yushengzhi published its first article , and it has been two years since then. To celebrate Xiao Yu’s 2nd birthday, we will continue the “knotting story painting” that was carried out on the first anniversary: ​​co-creation by sharing stories and ideas with each other.

Last year’s collective creation focused on ropes, knots, and solutions, and three episodes of wonderful content (the first , the second , and the third ) have been launched. This year, we invite you to share with the theme of ” Anthropological topics I want to explore ” (see the link for details), and this issue is the second push on this topic ( the first is here ).

Friends who are interested in participating, please send the content to: [email protected]

Do health products with mom?

Amo

Last week my mother sent me a box of “XX Star” brand face masks and sanitary pads. I was a little helpless when I took it out of the express cabinet. “XX Star” is another beauty and health care brand she is working on recently. She thinks that these products have magical effects as advertised, and strongly recommends me to use them.

When I was in high school, my mother started to work in the health care product industry. She started sweat steaming and converted the first floor of the house into a steaming hall. It started business as soon as it was renovated and there was a clear smell of formaldehyde. Guard the store and get cards for the guests my mother pulls in. It closed within a year. Later, there were Enron Nano, Infinitus, Quantum Energy, Witch Mask, and many other products that I didn’t know about after I left home. When she went home for the Chinese New Year last year, she was making “XX Da” brand drinking water, and recently made “XX Star” beauty and health care products.

My mother worked in a textile factory when she was young. After the state-run factory closed in the 1990s, she opened various small shops. I didn’t have a job for a few years when my brother was born. When my brother grew up, she started to do insurance, and soon she was promoted to manager. After leaving the insurance company, she has been doing health care products. Once I asked her if the insurance is not very good, should I go back? She said, she’s gone, how could she be so embarrassed to look for it again!

So there are so many dazzling health care brands. In fact, it doesn’t last long every time, and many of them have gone bankrupt and ran away. The brand is exposed by TV station as a three-no product, and it will not shake her belief. She said: There are still so many unjust, false and wrong cases in history. Constantly investing money in, calling on relatives and friends to use it, or mutual customers with her friends who also make health care products. My dad and my grandmother had quarreled with her about this, but she never gave up and continued to do it one by one, complaining that we “don’t believe in science” and “look down on her for not having a serious job”. Sometimes I called her and found that she went to Shandong, Shaanxi, Hainan, etc. to inspect new brands.

I used to think she was unreasonable, how could she still believe these things that my grandmother could see flaws, and she had to keep doing it when she lost money and quarreled with her family. After forming the habit of reflection in the past few years, I also began to reflect on my attitude towards my mother’s health care products. Compared with whether the magical effect of health products is true or not, it is more important to understand why my mother believes so much? And why don’t I, my dad, and my grandmother believe it at all? After chatting with my friends of the same age, I found that they also have such a mother who is keen on the health care industry. My questions can also become their questions.

Since realizing the above doubts, I began to put myself into the researcher’s mentality – that is to say, I no longer regard “mother making health care products” as a matter that I want to object to, but a matter of my own. Something to understand; it is no longer regarded as a small story of our family, but a big story with a social dimension. I also began to think more, and began to think about my relationship with my mother and health care products: Do I want to make health care products with my mother? What would my mother’s attitude be, and my father’s? If I go, will I be unable to integrate, unable to agree, or even unbearable? … should be patient, after all, to understand…

Taking this imaginary research as an opportunity, I began to have the idea of ​​”jumping out and understanding” in any situation where I felt uncomfortable. “There are fields everywhere” – has this sentence become a buzzword on the Internet? It feels embarrassing to say it. Whether or not I actually do this research later, I’m already starting to be inspired by it.

Inheritance of Chinese Folktales from the Perspective of Media

Awai

China has a thousand-year history and a huge number of ethnic groups. Each region has different ethnic distributions, and there are also different folk stories in different regions. A large number of folk stories are also one of the excellent traditional cultures of the Chinese nation. Folk tales are also rich in forms, such as myths, fables, epics and legends. Most folktales are expressed in the form of oral narratives, so that the number of text stories that survive is small. However, with the development of science and technology and the times, the media for information dissemination has increased greatly. People in various regions are looking forward to this change to spread the excellent folk tales of their own ethnic groups and make them known to more people. spread has little effect.

For this problem, we can conduct an in-depth field investigation in a certain area. For the area where folk stories are concentrated, there must be some storytellers. We can start with the storytellers and conduct an interview to interview them about the current situation. The view that folk tales are spread in modern media, we can take notes or audio recordings while listening to the storyteller narrate the story, which will help us to analyze the story itself. Then we can observe and access the barriers to the dissemination of folk tales, and analyze where the barriers are encountered when folk tales are disseminated.

The emergence of new forms of media is undoubtedly a double-edged sword, bringing new negative impacts while bringing new opportunities. Take the Xinjiang region where I live as an example. At present, the main channel for disseminating folk stories here is offline oral narration. People drink tea in the tea room, and there will be a senior storyteller on stage fluently narrating Xinjiang folk stories. . It is precisely the word “senior” that indicates that the storytellers are older. The folk storytellers in Xinjiang are mostly middle-aged and elderly, while young people are more affected by the modernization brought by the new media. Cultural attraction, the acceptance of folk cultural stories is also low, when we look closely, we can find that most of the audience of folk stories are middle-aged people. This also means that the inheritance and succession of folk tales may suffer a huge impact.

The update and change of the media can indeed change the dissemination mode of folk tales to a certain extent, and reproduce the excellent classic folk stories through intuitive visual experience and aesthetic experience. It is the important purpose of this anthropology project.

Why do I like to snack?

Hunan Chopped Peppers

The title imitates a foreign paper “Why don’t anthropologists like children” (Hirschfeld 2002). In getting along with people, I found that I like to eat snacks, and because it is always mentioned, it also prompts me to deliberately create the image that I like to eat snacks… Now my snack preference map has become clear. Although I am not addicted, I am worried that I can’t keep my mouth shut. I always take snacks as a comfort or celebration when things go wrong or happy. Several times I deliberately tried to quit snacks and all ended in failure. This made me have a health crisis. sense of crisis and self-discipline. I feel that it is not so simple that I like to eat snacks and that humans eat snacks. In the comparison between people, I left the impression that boys are less fond of snacks than girls, and that snacks are always advertised by adults as unhealthy and “garbage”. Why do I like to snack? Why do people feel a sense of crisis and guilt between eating and not eating?

At the beginning, I recalled what I had experienced in my childhood, which involved issues such as the growth environment, the environment of the times, children’s culture, and school after-school culture. These may be backgrounds. In terms of attractiveness, it may be that the snacks are delicious, or it may be the businessman’s all kinds of routines and promotions (think about those advertisements and card collections), the addiction mechanism of the brain. The total failure of “quitting” snacks is not because I can’t hold on to it, but the occasions when it is really necessary to eat snacks and encourage you to eat snacks. For example, during the Spring Festival and the epidemic lockdown period, it is either a hot commodity or a sedative for a boring life. Talking about quitting not only arouses the rebellious spirit in your brain, but it is also difficult to do in the youth collective life circle, because everyone eats it, unless you want to establish a cold and healthy image. Oh, and the derived culture, because people in suits and leather shoes are exquisite and urban when walking down the street with a cup of coffee in hand, and eating on the road with a pack of spicy chips and chips is sloppy and rustic. Snacks = little kids = unhealthy = junk food and packaged food.

There are so many big problems with small snacks on hand, and I started to wonder what the percentage of people in the world who refuse snacks to those who eat them are. What I want to say is that I gradually realized that liking snacks is not a simple matter of personal preference. There are also factors behind the growth environment, which are related to history, culture, environment, internal attraction, external driving force, and other factors. Physiological mechanisms of addiction. Since the appearance of the word “snacks”, the social and cultural connotations it represents have been quite rich.

Illustrations are created by the author. On the left is the back with a box of snacks, and on the right is a child with a schoolbag saying “snacks, ah no, mom, I’m back”
*Also refer to the author’s personal account of Hunan cuisine chopped peppers: Serious | Why do I like to eat snacks

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