Today Sam and I met for what would soon be the most crucial meeting I have had this year. All of my stress instantly melted away as my beloved teammate told me that he had found some amazing sources that would blow my mind. And he was right. While I am very happy about the direction our project was going in I had only come up with one solid lead when it came to research. That all changed today however when my teammate revealed to me that he had just found the holy grail of resources.
Sam found a wonderful book that as an alternative to Marco Polo presents the stories of four travelers from around the world who wrote about their experiences traveling the silk road and interacting with the mongol court. Not only is this resource good for our project as a whole but it also makes me feel a lot more supported because It contains some very good mongol resources. I am really excited to get to go through this book with Sam and I think it could become one of our most useful resources in our project.
As far as research goes, truthfully it is moving very slowly. Being weighed down with classes I haven’t had a lot of time after completing my other homework to do intense research and so I have not delved nearly as deep as I wanted to at this point in planning. However despite this setback I have a plan and a lot of faith in myself that I will be able to accomplish it. I’m planning this fall break to do some catch up internet research and find some books that I will be able to check out when I get back on campus at the Hege Library.
Ideally I will also be able to lay out an outline for the portion of the project that I will be contributing the most too. I am really excited to see what our project will be like when it all comes together. While I think our team has a lot of research skills I believe that our best work will come when making the actual webpage. I think our group has a lot of creative thinkers who in our meetings have already had a lot of great conversations about our end goal. Because of the success of meetings like this I have been feeling really good recently about the direction that Team Earth is headed in.
Monthly Archives: October 2016
The Most Important Cooking Tool
While this is probably extremely basic and obvious, it has taken me this long in my research to come to the realization that the body is a tool of its own in cooking and that there is a history and culture to the body as a tool.
To make noodles, people in Kashgar as well as many other places in China use a very specific technique of stretching, folding and, basically, slapping to thin dough into noodles. This technique is highly unique and the use of the fingers and hands are so integral and specific to the process and end result. How did this technique come to be? I must know! Hopefully more to come on this front.
To make naan and bagels in Kashgar, bakers have to shape the dough in order to get the right shape. Tools such as rolling pins and a chekish might get used, but no tool can replace the hands for certain steps of this process.
Hands molded the pots used, carved wood into certain kinds of utensils, slap naan onto the walls of ovens, knead dough, roll dough into balls, pick vegetables and fruit, pick up bread to dip into tea or dinner. What else? Are other parts of the body important to different steps of cooking or handling of food? What specialized tasks do fingers have in different cooking scenarios? Are feet ever used for kneading dough, making grapes into wine, etc?
I believe this is really where my epiphany came from: I was so focused on tools, utensils and modes/methods of cooking that got created over time that I completely forgot about the one thing that is present in every kind of cooking everywhere: the human body. I am still focused on tools created for cooking, but now I have a whole new avenue of research to go down! This is getting me super jazzed about research (which might also have to do with the time of day -2am- and amount of coffee consumed) and I can’t wait to go through videos, photos, and texts to study how people in Kashgar use their hands, their arms, their feet, and any other part of their body to cook.
Team Earth: Blasting off Again
Alright, Team Earth has a new direction. We are now researching European explorers, their accounts of significant sites on the silk roads, and their interactions with the Mongol Empire. In a recent group meeting we discussed our research roles. Jake’s focus will be on the Mongol Empire side of things, Austin is covering Marco Polo’s journey, possibly with more emphasis on the Western perspective. I have everything in between. Basically, I want to study the lesser known explorers such as Giovanni of Pian de Carpini, William of Rubruck, Friar Odoric, and Rabbi Benjamin. My initial goal is to narrow down the similarities in their journeys. For example, find a city that they all went to and compare their analyses of the culture.
I found a fantastic book called Contemporaries of Marco Polo. It was published in 1928, and it was last checked out from the Guilford College Library in 1981. The book contains primary accounts of the four explorers I mentioned above, edited by Manuel Komroff, who also provides an informative introduction.
I also found a book called the Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation. It is about Carpini’s accounts but also a map of the first depiction of the Americas, not sure yet how they’re related but hopefully I’ll learn about Carpini a bit.
Rolling forward
Towards a More Regular Heartbeat
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been so occupied with our first map test, thesis work, and other assignments that I allowed myself to put blogging and research, with their indefinite deadlines and relatively low pressure, on the back burner for a while. As I mentioned in my initial blog post, time management isn’t a major strength of mine, and I have some work to do before I’ll be able to develop a consistent blogging schedule. That said, I regret going for so long without so much as a single post, so I’ll use this one to explain a bit of what I’ve been doing since my first.
Team Heart has been meeting fairly regularly, and while we all have busy schedules and a multitude of intellectual endeavors demanding our time, we still manage to get together once or twice a week to discuss research and classwork. We’ve all been wonderfully supportive of each other as we embark on this part-journey, part-experiment of a course. Our research topic has changed a few times as we’ve uncovered new information or come up with new ideas for our narrative. At the moment, each of us is pursuing a different aspect of our central focus, music and religion in the Mongolian steppe (or roundabouts). At our last meeting, we decided it might be best to shift our focus from a study of the past up to the present, and seek instead to examine some practices of music and ritual in the present and trace their origins back to the past. Our exact geographic region, and the path taken by our story map, will become more clear as our research progresses.
My own research topic has also changed somewhat. Previously, I was looking into the use of music in shamanic ritual. While I have found some information on that topic, it’s still relatively scarce. There are two different (but by no means mutually exclusive) directions I’m considering taking my research in. Not too long ago, I recalled that I had heard of throat singing, an interesting vocal technique practiced in multiple regions of Central Asia including Mongolia and Tibet. I plan to do some research on throat singing in the Mongolian steppe and see if it’s involved, or has been involved, in any religious rituals or healing practices.
The second avenue of research I’m considering involves choosing a modern music group and examining different aspects of their performance and instrumentation with the hope of uncovering the roots of each. Although I haven’t begun any scholarly inquiry about the subject just yet, I have heard of at least one Mongolian metal band that employs throat singing and traditional instruments to produce their music. I may be able to examine a few of their songs and determine the cultural influences contributing to their style. For now though, I’m mostly just hoping to survive midterm week. With luck, I’ll have some time over Fall break to catch up on the research I’ve missed over the last couple of weeks.
Heart Racing: Finally Getting into the Swing of Things
A common theme in our past few group meetings has been a lack of relevancy: we all feel so caught up in current events that are taking place a mere hour from our school and therefore have been struggling to feel invested in research on something so far away, both geographically and time-wise. Elena, our angelic silkworm, was able to synthesize this uneasy sentiment and proposed a solution in last night’s meeting: what if we worked on the music and ritual of the Karakorum region right now and then worked backwards into history from there? Up until now we have been confusedly sifting out certain chunks of information because we felt like they weren’t relevant or weren’t the right era, but this way we can include any valuable items of interest. I think that this change will allow us to feel more directly connected to our research, and it will make Youtube a more relevant resource for us: we can actually watch current musical rituals online.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words…?
So far photographs and videos have been much richer in information and content than anything I have read, in regards to food and its preparation. For instance, I have found this travel blog site with a section dedicated to Kashgar entitled, “Pictorial Essay and Record of a Historic City Salted for Destruction.” The pictures are incredible and there are small stories written in between some of the photographs that go into the feel of Kashgar as a city that are fascinating. The pictures depict pottery and metal (copper?) pots and naan and bagels; I want to know so much more about the those men and women making and selling those products, where they picked up the trade and the history behind their practices. The pictures can’t tell me all of those details, but those photographs seem to hold more information than most of my database searches. Why is that? Is what I am searching on these databases or in google searches not the right avenue of research? Am I not using the right keywords? I feel as though I have tried going less specific with searches and gotten nothing that pertains to subjects I need, and then getting absolutely no results from more specific searches. And then the middle ground to those searches only get my toes wet in terms of the information I hope to gain or the topics I hope to delve into.
I have tried searching in Mandarin and then google translating websites, but even then my results are few and lacking substance. My most substantial sources of information have been YouTube videos (that I linked in a previous post) in Mandarin.
Now that I have become slightly burnt out on the naan and bread-making front, I have turned to porcelain. Porcelain has been proved a better topic of research so far. I have found a fair amount through databases, but I have not read through all of the possible articles and journals so I cannot say so far whether or not this avenue of research will be successful or not. Pottery in general in Kashgar, however, has been a trickier topic of research than expected. Again… why?????? I see incredible forms of pottery in photographs or wooden utensils used for cooking (such as special rolling pins for rolling out the naan), but can not find those details that look so important in photographs and videos in written form or documentation. These cooking tools and methods are important and should absolutely have an interesting and influential history and significance, which is why I am being so stubborn in my research. There should be way more information available than what I have found!
The articles, blogs, and websites I have found on the making of naan or pottery are all modern, and the vast majority of them are not made by Chinese citizens or citizens of Kashgar. The creators or writers are, instead, Westerners who write about parts of Kashgar that seem to be novel or special. This perspective that keeps coming up in my searches is not necessarily surprising, as modern documentation is significantly easier and more accessible, but it is also important to look critically at these sources, because they do not hold multitudes of valuable information, but rather fairly surface level information. I also am thinking critically about the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much in-depth or non-western sources of information in the searches I have done. Were cooking practices in Uyghur communities or in Kashgar not documented or uncovered? Am I, for the most part, only going to find research on what the West has found important? For instance, I have found significantly more on white porcelain than I have on the history of bakers of naan or potters. I assume this is because white porcelain is world renounced and recognized by the world as an important outcome of trade from China. The documentation and history of naan is probably not as important to the western world, but it is very important to me and my research.
I will continue to dig deeper and try new ways of researching in order to find information from more perspectives (than just western perspectives).
(Kashi)-ing Up to Kashgar: Mapping It Out
Hallo,
Hope you’ve had a great week!
With all my other activities and obligations I neglected to do multiple blog posts this week, so hunker down; this one’ll be lengthy!
First off, research: Thus far I’ve found a myriad of contemporary sources, with historical context, but very few historical accounts themselves. I’ve sifted through accounts of Muslim food customs in the Uyghur region, accounts of Kashgar’s famous Sunday Bazaar, and an article on the significance of travelers on the Silk Road in Kashgar, to name a few. They’ve been helpful in deepening my understanding of contemporary culture, but I’m striving to find more dealing with the roots of the customs and meals.
Some interesting facts I gleaned are:
-If invited to wash your hands (which you will be), wash thrice and don’t shake off the water
-You must drink all the tea in your bowl before you leave the table
-When given a gift of food, always return the container with more food in it
-When serving naan guests must see that it is whole before you split it to serve
I also discovered a little wooden tool with spikes that the Uyghur people use to pierce the naan in cyclic, almost flower-like patterns. Although I’m focusing more on the cultural aspects of the meal, since it is a utensil used in preparation and Billie was enthralled with it, I’m letting her research it. I’m very excited to learn what they’re called, if they’re standardized, if they’re used for foods other than naan, etc.
Researching all of these customs sparked an idea: if the Tongue Team ends up culminating in an oral presentation revolving around food, we should strive to be as true to the customs as possible. We’ll serve all the food with two hands, display the naan from our tandyr before breaking it, and make sure to provide the meal in stages. I’m trying to look deeper into the traditional garb worn to eat or serve, if it even exists. It would be a very interactive way to present to the class (and possibly the Heges), and demonstrate that we understood that customs are more than something to be studied off a sheet of paper. Now the challenge is to portray these customs faithfully.. And the whole appreciation vs appropriation debacle. But we’ll cross that bridge when/if we come to it.
In our Tech Lab today, the culminating instructional one according to Tierney, the main focus was on the framework we’re going to use to erect a final product. The two websites, which can be used exclusively or in conjunction, are StoryMap JS and Timeline JS. StoryMap JS is more of an interactive, not necessarily chronological journey, while Timeline JS can still incorporate media but is restricted to a linear proceeding. While playing around on the StoryMap site, we discovered that the format or focus of the map can be altered according to the delineations of the project. For very specific locations you can switch to Open Street Maps, which you can even drop coordinates into. To highlight topography or physical markers, you can switch to Stamen Maps: Terrain.
More closely related to our project, Tierney mentioned a version that makes the StoryMap less map-based and more image-based, which would work really well with our idea of a “table narrative”, zooming in and out on certain dishes or ingredients, However I’ve played around with the site and have yet to discover how to do it. The Tongue Team will definitely need to inquire about that.
Although we didn’t have ample time to discuss, one of our team’s new ideas after this tech session is to create one large narrative about the food in Kashgar, but embed sub-timelines for each individual “character”. Therefore the Timeline JS application would be useful in formulating those sub-stories. Hopefully we’ll narrow this down in our meeting tomorrow!
Even after all the instruction, my personal confusion, which I believe coincides with the group, relates to how much evidence and research do we actually need. As visual tools we don’t want to weigh StoryMaps and Timelines with too much information or readers will get lost/disinterested. I understand the need for a narrow narrative, but I’m not quite sure how wide we should be casting our nets. Should I go deeper with my current research findings, or continue finding tangent topics?
Eric also brought up the issue of citing sources, finding locations, and identifying purposes in different languages. He suggested that if it’s Chinese we ask Zhihong to help translate, but otherwise we’ll just work through it. I’m not adept at any languages other than English besides Latin, German, and a little Spanish, which are good to know but haven’t popped up often (a.k.a once) in the Kashgar region. I’m just afraid of missing sources or links because I can’t understand what they lead or refer to.
Overall, I’m pleased with the direction our group is heading! Hopefully I’ll have an update on Apple China tomorrow night!
Thanks for sticking through this extensive post!
Regards,
-Delaney
Al-Aziz THE VICTORIOUS ONE
One of our most recent quizzes asked the class to choose a name from a list of the 99 names of Allah. Right away i picked Al-Aziz, The Victorious One. Now, I don’t proclaim to be religious, but I respect religious institutions and that name stood out from all the rest. If you read my blog titled “Minus One” then you’d know we lost a team member. I took this quiz during the time we were rethinking the direction of our project. Our team set up of a meeting with our TA and instructors. We were able to organize our ideas into a cohesive digital research project. So, after consulting with our TA and our instructors we are back in motion! Although we still have research, archiving and mapping to achieve, today I feel victorious. Our instructors provided us with some great advice and direction. We have finalized our location and decided on a cohesive topic that fits our own interests perfectly. We will not be discussing childbirth, education and medicine. While reevaluating our roles and communicating about our sources, we found we were able to take some things out and put some things in. Readjusting was another unforeseen challenge but it provided us with an opportunity to really dig deeper into brainstorming. Because our team was in the beginning stages of our project there was room and time to make the necessary rearrangements. So, we came to a consensus and we’ve decided to that take a closer look at the Uyghur society in the autonomous region of Xinjian China. My teammates have revamped their topics to reflect a more harmonized subject matter. I’m excited to say the least. My research has increased. My level of interest has increased. The correspondence between myself and my team mates has improved tremendously. We have already started to locate some interesting places with the Uyghur region. Again, I feel victorious. For me, it’s important to note the unforeseen challenges when working this a project like this. Losing a team member and rearranging our entire focus definitely threw a curve ball into our plans. Nevertheless, we are making huge strides towards a fantastic, digital, never seen before analysis about women, queer identities, sexuality, femininity, beauty and body images in the autonomous region of the Uyghur society.
The lesson here is all about pushing forward even through adversity. Again, I’m inspired by Xuan Zang’s historic journey. We definitely hit a bump in the road. No pun attended. The team feels more enthusiastic about the overall project. (I think they feel victorious too) I don’t want to start the celebration to soon but it feels wonderful to know we are on the right track. Still, there is so much more work to do but we have proved that we can get past the challenges and move forward. In hindsight, I’m glad that losing a member and changing our topic happened sooner rather than later. I can’t imagine how unbelievably difficult it would have been to rearranged our topic and reconstruct our overall thesis in the middle of research or near the end of the project. So, as we move on in our Silk Road journey, I look forward to encountering some interesting pieces of information and working more closely with my team. We are one dedicated group. We will not give up yes, and we are victorious. Peace family.
Story Map
In our tech lab yesterday, we finally covered the topic of the story map, which was the last general piece of information we are going to learn about. From now on, the tech labs will be focused on group work on the actual project, and the questions addressed will be more specific and geared towards particular worries, rather than on how to do general web stuff, like making a blog post or citing images.
In past blog posts, I have talked a lot about my worries about the story map, and I think this tech lab really helped with these fears. The maps were extremely easy to use, even for someone like me who is not the best at geography. I also had a lot of fun making the map! I mapped out my birthplace, my current home, and some places I had visited this summer. I messed around with a lot of the features to produce a map that was funny to me, such as writing inane descriptions and using ridiculous lines for the “Explore” button. While I will definitely be more serious for the actual project, I still think this helped me because I played around with each of the features, so I will better know how to manipulate the Silk Road story map. Since much of the map was open to editing, we can personalize our story map beyond what I had imagined. Images were painless to add, and the map moved nicely and was greatly accessible to any viewer, whether they had any knowledge on the Silk Road or not.This is especially helpful for our topic, considering it focuses on an ethnic minority that many people may not know about.
Despite the many upsides, there are still some difficulties to deal with. When looking at the maps in our area of interest, we noticed a lot of the street names were in Chinese, which, unfortunately, none of us can read. Hopefully, either Zhihong or Google Translate will come to our rescue. Another problem isn’t a technical difficulty, but rather an issue with narrative. We still haven’t really been able to connect our research to an array of places. I’m hoping with more research we will find a good solution for how to arrange our map.
I’ve noticed that I mention a need for more research in almost every single blog post so far. I personally haven’t been able to do much: I never feel I have enough time for every thing, with other classes, college applications, and life outside of school. I don’t necessarily think this means too much work is being put on us in class: instead, I think I, personally, need to manage my time better. My group has agreed that a majority of our research should be done by fall break, so I really need to put aside the time then. Luckily for us, since our project is on the aesthetics of the Uygher people, a lot of our research will double as an artifact on the story map. For example, if I analyze a style of clothing, and where and why this clothing was worn, the picture I’m using to analyze all this could also be used as the artifact. I think the same would apply to the rest of my group. As we discover the areas where these styles and other types of artifacts are either present or where they originated, these would hopefully line up with points on a map!