Essay questions and pedagogical frameworks

¶ … Mediterranean Hospitality

The purpose of "hospitality" in Mediterranean households, according to the author of "In the Rustic Kitchen: Real Talk and Reciprocity?" is to affirm group associations of commonly shared ethnic identities. Unfortunately, according to the author, the groups discussed in the article receive a barrage of negative visual and representation of local identities, which are often presented in T.V., newscasts, and newspaper stories to the larger world in a seemingly never-ending drumbeat of doom and gloom.

This saturation of negative representations creates a dynamic of 'us against them,' within the community. In this community, there is little sense of a striving for true sense of integration in a larger so-called 'common American' community culture that extends beyond the kitchen and the Mediterranean community. However, Tracey Heatherington states that the discourse of the larger media of television and newspapers is subverted through the maintenance of a community subculture of shared language, heritage, and yes, of course, of food and hospitality.

For the community chronicled by Heatherington, hospitality means that wherever one goes in the community, one is at home in the house of a member of one's community. Within these communities, there are far fewer social barrier of privacy, and the family is an extended rather than a nuclear family. The closeness of neighborhoods and living spaces can create a sense of social strain; of course, when money is tight, and when younger members of the community gain different senses of personal space and boundaries in schools and other common sites of cultural sharing. But because of the negativity of neighborhoods and cultural associations, there is less of a sense of integration than might occur with other ethnic groups.

Work Cited

Heatherington. Tracey "In the rustic kitchen: real talk and reciprocity." Ethnology, Fall 2001. V. 40 (4), p329 (17). Retrieved 25 Feb 2005 at http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/126/528/35630064w4/purl=rc1_EAIM_0_A85107870&dyn=7!xrn_26_0_A85107870?sw_

Question

Pan-ethnic identities

Some of the most important or 'hot' buzzwords in the modern media discourse o are those words that pertain to group identity. But although one's group identity is often discussed as if it were a fixed and unchanging notion, in fact identities such as 'Native American (Indian)' and 'Asian' and 'Latino' are not pre-existing categories, but categories created by community needs and society. All of these various identities include a variety of individuals who, when they or their ancestors were members of different nations, often engaged in frequent warfare, and defined themselves against one another.

For example, as the Chinese often fought vs. The Japanese, the Iroquois tribes often fought vs. The Pequot tribes in the Americas, and Latin America has posted a host of external conflicts between nations and internal class and ethnic conflicts (between European and Indian groups). Yet common construction of Asian-ness, Latin-ness, and 'otherness' in the case of Native peoples in North America, created, through a commonality of oppression, if not a perfectly seamless identity for these groups, than a kind of pan-ethnic identity or new historical link of an evolving, and now commonly shared history in America.