Blog 5

The concept this week was to grasp how stories are told. I did not realize that myth, urban legend, folktales, and personal narratives were so different from each other. Personal narrative was by far the easiest to separate from the others because it is a story told from the personal perspective of a person. Myth, urban legend, and folktale all meshed together in my perspective before this week. I though myth was known to be untrue to everyone, but really, it is the explanation of something to be true when no other explanation is provided. Urban legend is more untrue and we as a group synthesized that it usually has to do with a great person or real event that was once true but because a popular story for the meaning behind it. Folktale was a little easier as well because all of us as a group thought about the childhood stories and Disney movies as fairy tales. Also, poplar children's books were the representation of fairy tales for us. Folktales always have a moral meaning behind it like snow white's meaning was that good, honest people always prevail and little red riding hood's moral was to not talk to strangers. I thought the Noah's Ark interview was very interesting because it ties into our anthropology class very well. The author looked at the Noah's Ark story from the perspective of all the people that were condemned and that God was killing. She told the story from an insider's perspective which is similar to what anthropologists try to do when doing research in understanding humanity and how other cultures work. They try to see the culture through a different lens. Similarly, that is what I am doing in my research project fro the class because I have to really get in touch with the Latino culture to see why they would think some jokes are funny over others. I have to look at the reasoning for this not as an American cultured person, but a Latino cultured person.