Hi, I am Logan Bernsten and this is my cultural anthropology blog. Through this blog I will be documenting the story of someone with a different political/ideological identity than my own and try to tell you the reader their story. We will explore how people come to different political opinions and ideals and come to visualize the political divide our our country and where it started.
I will take my first steps by setting aside my own prejudices against certain people of different political ideas and conduct an interview with them. Hochschild engaged on interviews with people she meets like Mike a member of the Tea Party who are a right-wing organization who believe in less government regulations and lower taxes. She tells his story and how from his perspective the problems he faces are the result of large government. She also humanizes him showing his friendly and comedic side. She talks about the empathy walls that build up between people of different political opinions and how political issues can be a source of a lot of political divide and how political parties are becoming the key determining factor in one’s ideals on every issue. She engages in participant observation by living with the cajun people and hearing their stories and opinions without making judgements even when the ask her if she’s a communist because she is from Berkley. She also gives her study a more grounded and scientific approach by citing statistics that tell how the white American population has moved to the political right over the last few years. This shows the real depth of what she’s exploring and trying to find out why this happened. The last key concept she explore was the Keyhole Issue, where she talks about how she herself has associated her subject Mike with Rush Limbaugh and other troubling right-wing demagogues. Because of this she seeks to find a way to look past that and study what is going on with the American right wing.
With these key ideas I will seek to identify the reasoning and the ideals of someone with a different political identity than my own and find out why their political opinions are different from mine.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on The American Right, 2016. New York, The New Press.
Hollow_Archeology 