{"id":860,"date":"2024-06-17T13:20:32","date_gmt":"2024-06-17T17:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/?p=860"},"modified":"2024-06-17T13:20:32","modified_gmt":"2024-06-17T17:20:32","slug":"due-by-6-26-final-reflections-and-revelations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/2024\/06\/17\/due-by-6-26-final-reflections-and-revelations\/","title":{"rendered":"Due by 6\/26: Final Reflections and Revelations!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Your experience in the Yucat\u00e1n has been guided by many narrators: tour guides of varying reliability, local students, your professors and guest lecturers (scholars, journalists, artists, performers), the people you’ve met, and, of course, our authors\u2014Indigenous, colonial, and neocolonial. Your final post will summarize these engagements with the Yucat\u00e1n over the last month, referencing the texts we\u2019ve read and the critical lenses we\u2019ve tried on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no required word count. Write as much as you need. The only requirements are that you 1) write honestly about your experience, and 2) reflect on those experiences with reference to three or more things we\u2019ve read (travel writing over the centuries; legend; oral literature; works of scholarship and theory) or watched (films). Click \u201cReadings\u201d and \u201cFilms\u201d to refresh your memory!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below are some approaches you might try. None of these prompts are completely disconnected from the others. So, if you wish to try out more than one approach in your reflections, please do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 One (Or Several) Excursions<\/strong>. Focus on one (or several) of the excursions we\u2019ve gone on together. Which of those excursions corresponded to your expectations of the Yucat\u00e1n, which surprised you, and which disappointed? Where did your expectations derive from? Why, in each instance, did you have the reaction you had? How do the stories we\u2019ve read and the histories we\u2019ve studied impact your understanding of these experiences?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 The \u201cT\u201d Word<\/strong>. Even though you came here as university students asking serious questions about colonialism and history, from the outside you are indistinguishable from the flood of tourists who descend on the Yucat\u00e1n every year. Is travel a right, a responsibility, or a luxury? Some combination of the three? In other words, reflect on the ethics of your experience. What have you learned about being an American or European (perceived or actual) abroad? How have your attitudes about America\u2019s or Europe’s relationship to the rest of this hemisphere changed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Colonialism and Tourism<\/strong>. Our discussion of Cannibal Tours<\/em> was pivotal in shaping how we interrogated our experiences here, and the experiences we have observed others having. We all agreed, as filmmaker Dennis O\u2019Rourke makes clear in his film, that there is some continuity between the colonial experience and the touristic experience. Where have you seen this overlap between colonialism and tourism in your experiences? Can you read the touristic experience as harkening back to colonialism, and the colonial experience as pointing towards new, postcolonial modes of consumption and exploitation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 The World in an Artifact<\/strong>. As we have learned, archaeologists must reconstruct distant times from objects and structures that do not easily give up their secrets to the naked eye. Use photographs of three objects that you have seen, bought, or even made yourself during this experience. An object can be any artifact of this trip: a photograph you took, a souvenir you\u2019re taking away, a drawing you made, a poem you wrote, or something you encountered in a museum. How do your artifacts tell a story about your time in the Yucat\u00e1n? How do the histories and theories we have discussed help explicate the artifacts you chose? (You might think about the distinctions between handicraft, souvenir, and ethno-commodity that Francisco Javier Fern\u00e1ndez Repetto drew in our final lecture, and the values\u2014pertaining, for example, to tradition, modernity, and gender\u2013that cultural products can convey.) What story are you taking away from the Yucat\u00e1n\u2013and what meanings are you producing\u2013in your selection of artifacts? What smart, super-academic things would you say to somebody back home about the three objects?\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Submit your final post by Wednesday, June 26.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":750,"featured_media":861,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-passport","has-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/750"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=860"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":863,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions\/863"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/mxpassport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}