Midterm Assignment: Cultural Reflection

Midterm Assignment: Cultural Reflection

In this course, we have explored how we do not see the world as it is, but rather through lenses shaped by our environment and history. This assignment asks you to apply two core concepts from this course to your own life:

1. Kulturbrille (Culture-Glasses): A term from Franz Boas. It refers to the cultural glasses we wear that make our own way of life or knowledge systems seem natural, while making different ways of life seem strange, wrong, or even invisible.

2. Coloniality: A concept from decolonial theory describing how the power structures, hierarchies, and ways of knowing developed during the early modern period still shape our world today. Unlike colonialism, which refers to the era of direct political rule, coloniality is the ongoing mindset and structural reality that survives the end of colonial administrations.

Requirements

Choose one of the prompts below and write a 1,500-word analytical essay. Your goal is to identify a specific aspect of your life or a system you interact with and analyze it through the lens of Kulturbrille and Coloniality. Your reflection should not be longer than your analysis. Submit your work as a .doc or .docx

All essays must be within 15% of this wordcount (between 1275 and 1725), exclusive of the works cited section. Students must have no fewer than 4 academic works cited (in-text with a bibliography/sources section) and properly formatted, using the form of academic citation that you are most comfortable with. The primary text and supplemental articles used in the teaching of this course may not be used. Your research is expected to extend beyond the course materials.

It is important to be concise in your work, and to work within prescribed boundaries. Failure to comply with one of those rules will result in a loss of 50% of the overall grade. Failure to comply with both rules will result in an automatic zero (0).

The use of AI in the generation of your work is prohibited, any use detected by your professor will result in an automatic zero (0) for the grade.

(Late submissions are not permitted)

Prompt 1: The Standards of Professionalism

Reflect: Identify a professional or formal setting you have participated in. What specific traits (speech, dress, grooming, or etiquette) were categorized as professional in that space? How does your own background influence your comfort with or distance from those standards?

Analyze: Examine how certain aesthetic or linguistic norms became globalized. How do these standards reflect coloniality by prioritizing specific cultural traits as “universal” while marginalizing others as “particular” or “unprofessional”?

Prompt 2: The Ideal Body

Reflect: Examine a specific health or beauty standard present in your community or industry. How do you personally relate to this standard? Do you perceive it as a neutral, biological fact, or a cultural preference?

Analyze: Research the historical development of these standards. How does coloniality continue to rank human bodies based on proximity to a specific ideal? Discuss how these hierarchies are maintained in modern healthcare or media.

Prompt 3: Formal Education

Reflect: Consider a specific method of learning or assessment you have encountered (e.g., standardized testing, the physical layout of a classroom, or the hierarchy between teacher and student). How does your background shape your perspective on whether this is an effective or “correct” way to learn?

Analyze: Research the origins of modern institutional schooling. Discuss how these systems were exported or imposed during the early modern era to create a specific type of citizen or worker. How does the dominance of this model marginalize alternative ways of sharing and producing knowledge?

Prompt 4: Healing

Reflect: When you encounter a health crisis, how do you determine which forms of knowledge (e.g., clinical, traditional, holistic, or spiritual) are trustworthy? What leads you to categorize a practice as “science” versus “alternative”?

Analyze: Examine how, through colonial hierarchies of knowledge, Western biomedicine was positioned as the sole rational science during the early modern period. How did this positioning lead to the delegitimization of indigenous or non-Western healing systems? Discuss the power dynamics involved in how medical knowledge is validated today.

Prompt 5: Family

Reflect: Analyze a definition of family or household used by a government or social institution (e.g., for taxes, immigration, or housing). How does this definition align or conflict with your lived experience of kinship?

Analyze: Research how the Western nuclear family model was exported and enforced globally. How does the continued legal and social prioritization of this unit reflect coloniality by rendering communal or extended kinship networks “invisible” or “abnormal” in the eyes of the law?

Prompt 6: The Standardized Clock

Reflect: Look at your daily or yearly schedule. Which cultural or religious markers are integrated into the “default” calendar of your society, and which require special permission to observe? How does this impact your sense of belonging?

Analyze: Explore how the universalization of the Gregorian calendar and the industrial work week functions as a mechanism of coloniality. How does this system force diverse populations to synchronize with a specific cultural and economic rhythm?

Prompt 7: The Cartography of Power

Reflect: Think about a map or GPS tool you use. How does it influence your sense of which places are “central” or “close” and which are “remote” or “peripheral”?

Analyze: Research the role of cartography in establishing global hierarchies. How does the continued use of specific map projections or naming conventions reflect coloniality by reinforcing a worldview created in the early modern period?

Prompt 8: Nature

Reflect: Consider a piece of land you are familiar with. Do you view it primarily as a resource to be managed, a property to be owned, or a living entity with its own rights? Where did those views come from?

Analyze: Examine the shift from relational land systems to the modern model of private property. How does the persistence of this model today reflect coloniality in environmental conservation or urban planning?