Class Summary
This week we studied Ideology and discourse, i was about an hour late so that didn’t help, but from what i’ve read i determine that an ideology is a a structured set of ideals one chooses to live by and a discourse appears to mean the specific trends, phrases, actions and language associated with a certain sub culture.
for example “surfer” culture is often associated with phrases like Whoa man, tubular, far out and radical! this i my understanding of discourse, it’s hard to decipher of course because the language used by experts to describe these terms is impossible to read, seriously, why do anthropologist write such disgusting, pretentious English, is it because they’re better than everyone else in the world, is that why one needs a thesaurus to read any given line of their work.. obviously these “intellectuals” have never heard of the radical idea of K.i.s.s.
take this sentence for example:
“Later theorists, responding to the struggles around identity, which focused partly on media representations of oppressed groups, have turned to a model of powerful and sub ordinated ideologies and identities, said to operate through lived cultures and powerful or marginialised discourses”
i mean that is just a disgusting use of English, it’s like these guys have never read a book, sentences that long, with that many twists and turns are impossible to read, a valid sentence should be perfectly understandable upon first glance, it should not have to be broken up and re read just to be understood. This is my big problem with anthropology; it’s a great subject made completely inaccessible by the pretentious drivel that constitutes ” academic writing”.
anyway enough rage…
We had a look at several different aspects of ideology, looked at some of the ideas behind Marxism and socialism, and lovely capitalism. It’s my personal opinion, that whilst capitalism has devolved into an awful awful system, it currently is the only system that even comes close to working, for me communism relies too much on peoples honesty and morality, whereas capitalism is dog eat dog.
I think that no matter what rules people live by, there will always be a significant amount of people who want more than their fair share, sadly my belief is that no one is incorruptible and that a persons corruption is almost parallel to their position of power. i don’t feel this is the result of any particular ideology, i just think it’s human nature, everyone is different, some people are happy with what they have, some want everything they can possibly have… some are just plain jerks, its impossible to have a system that suits everyone at once.
Class Assignment
the assignment for this class was to look through any current form of media and identify any metaphors in use which are attributed to certain ideologies.
To me the most common use of metaphors with regard to a specific ideology are war time metaphors used in political discourse,
for example;
- The taoiseach was bombarded with questions from the press
- Fine Gael’s minister Attacked the new Health Bill
- The minister came under fire from the local papers
Phrases such as these are common place and don’t seem out of place, despite their origins as combat related terms.
