Cultural Artifact

Cultural Artifact (5 FULL

pages; (not including work cited page) 12pt, Times New Roman font, 1 margins, double-

spaced)

THE PROJECT:

This project asks you to explain the cultural

meaning of an object. You should choose and object that has some importance to the culture of Rereading Americasome

object that relates to the homelife described in the short essays you read from section 1,

Harmony at Home or the ones you plan to read from Learning Power in section2. It can also be an object that relates to your major, in which case you will need to do research or have personal experience with that object in that field.

This project is about meaning.

It is not about the history of the object, the factual elements are only to support your

ethos as you make your claim about what the object means. Your paper should focus on how the artifact from the field represents the meaning of your field. Think of the farmer, how that Ram commercial is predicated upon the meaning of farmer and how it ties Ram

trucks to that meaning. But you must

be more honest than the commercial and explain explicitly how the artifact that is your focus represents the meaning of the field.

To write this paper you will need to think about and research the object so that you can have

facts to support the ethos of your claims about what it means.

DO NOT fall into the trap of just reporting those facts though.

Your research should allow you to say things that most who at first think about your profession and artifact wouldnt think of. Your paper uses these facts to make yourself sound like an expert about the object.

LEARNING GOALS:

1) to invite you to inquire into cultural values and/or practices of

literacy (what does it mean to know about a thing?) by choosing an artifact as the focus of

your inquiry; and 2) to give you practice in processes of inquiry: forming and asking

questions, revising questions, and seeking answers.

RHETORICAL PURPOSE:

of the project is to demonstrate the significance of an everyday

item for understanding a larger pattern of cultural values or practices. Your reader should

come away from your essay having learned a new way to look at taken-for-granted artifact

through the cultural values/practices you discover in your analysis of the artifact youve chosen.

THE FIRST STEP:

Learn about the object. To learn about its material, literal, concrete properties. It is important here to dig until you go past the surface, the obvious. You should reach

a point where you discover facts about the object in question that you did not know going in.

These facts become your Ethos as you then describe the previous usage and cultural (figurative)

meaning of the object and the changing usage and how that new usage changes its meaning.

THE GOAL:

Take a common object and research it until its literal and figurative strangeness is revealed.

The object is Bow and Arrow.