Topic: Adornment
Unit Objectives:
-Evaluate personal values around body decoration and physical beauty
-Investigate how physical appearance affects definitions of identity and belonging
-Analyze values and belief systems across cultures and generations
Artifact: People Watching
I chose to people watch outside of Caspian’s Mediterranean Café, sitting in their outdoor seating area facing 13th Ave. Being near campus, I was bound to see a lot of students, but I also saw what I believed to be homeless people, as well as simple Eugene citizens. One citizen that specifically stood out was a woman who had her entire face tattooed and pierced. I did my best to glance at her tattoos, which appeared to be some sort of tribal marks, accompanied by multiple facial piercings. As far as students go, there was a large variety that passed by in the hour. Focusing on gender, many women altered their bodies in non-permanent ways, such as makeup, nice clothes, and hairstyles. Many females also had piercings; mostly ear but I saw a few nose rings as well. As far as the men went, they had a larger variety in hairstyles, both facial and head hair. Overall, the majority of men were dressed in casual pants and t-shirts, with a few who were dressed more business casual. In my opinion, the woman with facial tattoos and many piercings is insecure and self-conscious, and she covers herself up to hide it. I feel that because she did not carry herself well, she did not appear well off, nor emotionally stable. My judgments on this woman show that I am uncomfortable with making permanent adjustments to my face like she had. Due to the fact that I am uncomfortable with it, I assume that there is something wrong with her, something that caused her to do that. In reality, she may be the opposite of the conclusions I made about her, and I don’t know the real reason she altered her face in such a way.
Reflection: This assignment allowed me to achieve the unit objectives in a much more direct way than other assignments. By passing private judgments based on people and the way they presented themselves, I made many assumptions regarding their personal values. This made me realize what a stereotypical world we live in . I think this assignment was extremely successful in defining peoples sense of identity based off of appearance. The woman with the facial tattoos obviously wanted to make a statement, and she chose to do so on the part of her body that was never covered; almost the opposite of many people that get tattoos. As Sanders stated in the reading , Customizing the Body, “At the simplest level, clothing and fashions are adopted in order to display symbolically gender, social status, role, life-style, personal interests, and other identity features” (Sanders, 4). This statement connects with the other pedestrians I observed, seeing as most of what I saw were variations in clothing. However, these variations came in bulk, meaning that groups of people were often wearing similar items. For instance, many groups of international students were dressed very similarly, but compared to the woman with the facial tattoos, they couldn’t have looked more different. This allowed me to observed personal identity across both generations and cultures.
Future: This topic is definitely one that I plan to continue observing in my future. As a psychology major, this is one of the most interesting aspects of the subject to me; being able to identify differences in people strictly based on observations. I hope that someday, I am able to identify at least certain values of someone based on the way they present themselves.
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