Project : Cultural Artifact

This project widens your scope, and it does so, paradoxically, by starting small. Choose an artifact—an object, preferably, and one that you can transport—and dig deep to explore its significance. You’ll be interrogating the details to discover not only the object’s cultural value, but also why it has such a value. What factors from the outside have endowed the object with meaning? In short, what narrative does the object possess? How does something that is ostensibly inanimate have its own story? Consider moving through three steps, which roughly correspond to important stages of critical thinking—observation, analysis, and argument. What is the artifact? Why is the artifact interesting/significant? And finally, so what? The last step should make up the majority of your project.

You’ll be required to think a lot about culture. But what is culture? There’s a Wikipedia definition: “the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music, and arts.” More than that, culture drives everything that you do—how you live, communicate, feel, dress, etc. The many cultures to which you belong construct your individual identity. Just think about all the cultures that you share with your classmates—Michigan, East Lansing, MSU—and that’s only the beginning. But also think about what you don’t share. Your choices (conscious or unconscious) about identity shape who you are. The way you look—your dress, your mannerisms, your values, your beliefs—are all the result of a confluence of many cultural factors.

But it’s not just people who are affected by culture(s). Everything around us is, too. This project requires you not only to identify and to analyze the cultural factors that compose an object, but also to make an argument about why that matters. For this reason, you need to have a thesis statement! Go through the steps that we outlined in class (What? Why? So?). Be sure you arrive at that final step.

[For example, let’s say I chose a (non-mechanical) pencil as my cultural artifact. What use does it have in society today? Well, it still writes on paper, no? But it seems to be becoming increasingly superfluous in today’s technology-driven society. Yet it can perform operations that computers never can. I could talk about why it’s a #2 pencil—why that type of graphite is most beneficial to writers. I could talk about its orange-ish color. Is it soothing? Academic? I could analyze the performance of pencil sharpening, the benefits and detriments of sharp vs. dull points. I could also talk about its use in drawing, shading, erasing, etc. All of these elements give the pencil cultural impact. It was shaped (quite literally) by culture. But how does it, in turn, shape culture? Will it continue to do so?]

Due Date: 1 June

Length: 3–4 pages (800–1,000 words)

Specific Requirements:

1) Your project must contain a thesis statement that arrives at the argument step. Do not stop short at analysis.

2) Your object must be distinct. For example, You are not writing an essay about pencils, but rather a specific pencil that is in your possession. Again, you are writing about the features of a unique object, which has its own story separate from similar objects.

3) Do not set up your essay as a history lesson.

4) Your essay must feature at least one APA citation. Thus, you must include a reference list.

5) Times New Roman, 12 point, double-spaced.

I want a topic related to ‘long shared memories’