2 thoughts on “Dummy post

  1. Valeria Borja

    It is really interesting to think about a person’s life as a producer of rubbish. Italo explains 6how our world is surrounded by our own detritus and this has become part of our current world.
    If we focus on how our lives work, whenever we do something, at the same time we are creating garbage.
    I don’t see myself as a collector of things but I was, when I was a child, I used to treasure, the things that created a memory in me, whenever I used to see it. For example if I went with my father to the park and he invited me an ice cream, I stayed with the napkin that said the name of the place and I just wrote the date.
    With time I understood, that this was my way of having with me a part of that important memories. So I used to have too much useless stuff with me, as part of my good times with people who were special.
    Now it’s different, I always try to reuse everything, if I wear a pair of shoes, I’ll have them, until they start to look somber and then I’ll give it to people who need it, maybe not in the United States, but in my country, there are always people who need them.
    If I go shopping I always think that if I really need what I am going to buy and if this is something I not need it no matter if I like it or not, I think it is unnecessary. It’s really hard for me, to see people, they really do not realize what’s going on right now with their old things or with their detritus. They are buying new things and throwing things that are in good shape but are no longer on the “fashion” list.

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  2. alisha collins

    Tom McCarthy made the protagonist in the novel an anthropologist to give the audience a sense of cultural and social reality and to show the world from an anthropological standpoint. The purpose of this technique is to have the reader engage yet differentiate fiction and fact. The novel provides us with imagery, metaphors, and many other idiosyncrasies. The idea of having an anthropologist as the protagonist is to force the reader to put on an anthropological cap and to break down the ambiguities depicted within the novel. As the reader, we are able to interpret the difference between observation and actual analysis.

    The novel uses special meanings vantage points to make readers understand the reason it was written from an anthropological perspective. Terms such as “tribe,” “metamorphosis,” and “idiosyncratic” are thrown in ours faces several times throughout the novel. Most anthropologists use these techniques as a way to deliberately emphasize and reawake the audience to the obvious; but sometimes the obvious is not always so obvious. The novel gives us several examples such as the story about the parachutist who was killed due to a possibly sabotaged parachute. The narrator used the vantage of time in order to tell the audience the story that was broadcasted on the news but also included his own take on what could have happened. Throughout the novel, we are introduced back to this incident with the parachutist. Further into the novel, the narrator describes a bunch of parachutists as a “tribe” opposed to just a bunch of people jumping out of a plane, resting their lives in the hands of instructors and the parachutes.

    The relationship between fiction and fact is that they both play off of each other in this novel. Fact can actually be proven whether it is by analysis or fieldwork itself. When I think of anthropology, I think of the study of interactions, societies, happenings (present or past), human experiences and overall social reality. Fiction is composed of imaginative ideas and assumptions; although creative, fiction is not an actual fact. There are instances where fiction can become fact.

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