Cabeza de Vaca video day 2

 In class on 4/14 we watched the rest of Cabeza de Vaca. We saw how the man was kept as a slave essentially to the shaman. When he would try and run away the shaman made a spell to make it so he runs right back to where he started. After they venture to a new area when the shaman starts to experience a sensation to start a ritual. When he finishes his ritual there is a shape of a human in the sand and then he stabs the eye of the drawling. Then we see a man experiencing eye trauma in a neighboring village. The shaman is invited to heal the man and is unsuccessful. Then, the slave starts experiencing his first sensation and heals the mans eye. The shaman then realizes the man importance and frees him and returns his cross that he took from him. 

Overall in his movie we see how shamans live out casted from society until they are needed for healing. They perform rituals to protect the communities surrounding them. We see how they start to experience the sensations that encourage them to start a ritual or healing process. I missed the first day of watching the video so I did not get to see all the information presented in the video but this is what I picked up from it. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Walter Ong (Assigned class reading)

 3/15  In Walter Ong's book, he talks about oral cultures and what sound means to them. The oral cultures that we have learned about from the reading and in class show that to them speech is the unifying force in their relationships and in their societies. In the reading, Ong says  "sound is a unifying  sense. " This quote really emphasizes the ability speech has in its ability to unify people.    I think it is interesting that we are able to be unified with people by our phones but also able to be separated and isolated. In the oral cultures, Ong describes it is clear that the use of speech and sound in their primarily oral cultures is an important tool and unifying force.
Read more

Blog 8 Black Robe Video

  Blog 8 Black Robe Video A good example of human-centered religions clashing against primordial nature-centered religions is cinematically depicted in the 1985 film Black Robe. The era of this film has its roots in colonialism set in present-day Canada. The plot consists of two Jesuits who are on a mission to relieve a dying priest in fever-stricken Huron settlements. They are guided by Algonquin natives who have superstitions about the presence of white Christian men. There is a lot of miscommunication, mistrust, and disagreements throughout the journey. The Algonquian had persisted for many years through passed down oral stories. Their practices and beliefs, such as the world of night and the power of dreams, clashed with their Christian counterparts, who believed water baptism through Christ was the only way to relieve suffering. Christianity was not a concept that could be understood through the natives, nor could the Christians accept and understand the natives fully. The way...
Read more

Orality and Literacy - class reading

     “In primary oral cultures, where there is no text, the narrative serves to bond thought more massively and permanently than other genres” (pg. 141). This quote from Walter Ong’s book reopened a topic of interest in my mind. I have always enjoyed reading fiction. When I was younger, I spent hours every night reading novels until I fell asleep - book in hand. I remember having some difficulties remembering what I was learning in school, but I was able to deeply summarize the stories I was reading in my free-time to my mom. Hardly a detail went unmentioned when I summarized the stories I was reading, but the information that I was learning at school that was not presented as a narrative was much more difficult to remember. I am really interested in Ong’s phrasing in this sentence. “Bond thought” is a captivating phrase. That phrase can be understood two ways, and it seems that Ong means it both ways. Narrative works to connect thoughts in each person's head, making them...
Read more